Episode summary

Most organizations shopping for a new system go looking for a CRM. That is the word everyone uses. Jeremy Jalie has sold into that search from both sides, first with iMIS at ASI, then for seven years with a partner building membership systems on a general CRM platform, and now back at ASI Europe in London.

His read is simple. There is a gap between what membership organizations want and what they need. The wants are real: better data tools, easy filtering, integrations, automation, and AI features that demo beautifully. The needs are less exciting and far more important. Membership. Subscription finance. Renewals. Events, education, CPD and compliance. A general CRM ships with almost none of the second list, so somebody has to build it. On a purpose-built platform it is already there, and the partner’s job is the part that is genuinely unique to you.

That difference follows the organization for years. It changes who pays for product development, how much flexibility you actually have, and what it costs to switch partners later. Jeremy’s version of that last point is the one that stings: people assume changing partners means moving the support fees, then find out the membership structure, renewals and finance were all built by the partner they want to leave.

The conversation also covers the UK market, where big national bodies run complicated projects, and where AI adoption looks a lot like it does here: plenty of experiments, real caution, and the best results in organizations that trained their people first. Jeremy closes on Datascout, IQA, and the ASI products he has been most excited to get his hands on since coming back.

In this episode

• Want versus need is where system decisions go sideways. Organizations ask for data tools, automation and AI. What keeps them running is membership, renewals, subscription finance, events and education.
• Jeremy’s 80 / 15 / 85 picture. On a general CRM, most of the code you buy is the general part. The slice that runs most of your business comes from a partner. With iMIS it is the other way round.
• Who pays for product development. When the platform is built for membership, license fees fund features every client gets. When a partner builds it, enhancements tend to be shaped around whoever paid for them.
• The flexibility that turns out not to be there. Organizations pick a general platform expecting an easy exit. Switching partners can mean rewiring membership, renewals and finance from scratch.
• UK bodies are big, national, and complicated. One large organization doing many jobs, with exams, community and app platforms all needing to connect.
• AI in UK associations: caution, small wins, and training. The organizations getting value are the ones putting good tools in front of staff, with guardrails and real support.
• Why Jeremy came back to ASI. Plus the products he is most excited about: Clowder for mobile engagement, TopClass for learning, and OpenWater for applications, awards and abstracts.

Hosts & Guests

Riley Miller – Co-Host

Host of The Modern Membership Org and part of the Client Success team at Bursting Silver. Riley opens and closes the episode.

James Harrison – Co- Host

Director of Client Success at Bursting Silver and the interviewer on this one. James leads delivery for associations, unions, and regulatory bodies modernizing on iMIS.

Jeremy Jalie – Guest

Performance improvement leader at ASI Europe in London, working with professional bodies, unions, and trade associations on their systems, data management, digital transformation and marketing, with a focus on using technology to improve how they run and how they engage their stakeholders. Jeremy started his career as a charity fundraiser, became an ASI client when ASI acquired the fundraising system he used, and joined ASI in 2015. After seven years at a Microsoft Dynamics 365 partner serving membership organizations, he came back to ASI in 2026.

Resources

• Datascout — Bursting Silver’s AI member communication platform for iMIS, built on IQA segmentation with your team approving what goes out and your member data staying under your control
• The Personalization Paradox: Neil Gray’s Datascout webinar, which Jeremy calls out by name.
• Ep 17 — Neil Gray on personalization at scale: the full conversation behind the idea Jeremy quotes.
• Smart Start: BSI’s AI governance and policy package James mentions at 31:10
• Talk to Jeremy about IQA: his own invitation to UK listeners. Reach him on LinkedIn.
• Come on the show — [email protected], or Riley directly at [email protected]

About Bursting Silver

Bursting Silver is a fully remote consultancy specializing in modern CRM, iMIS, and AI solutions for membership organizations across North America. We’re a 3-time Great Place to Work Certified company that helps associations, unions, and regulatory bodies modernize legacy systems, improve data quality, and deliver better experiences for staff, members, and registrants.

Our unique ability is finding the simplicity in the complex.

Learn more about Bursting Silver

The Modern Membership Org Podcast

Full Transcript

Jeremy Jalie (00:00): what tends to happen is that when you buy a generalist CRM platform, what you’re buying, 80% of the code you’re buying comes from the generalist CRM platform part. But the 15 % you really need, the 15 % you need to run 85 % of your business requirements from somewhere else. It comes from a partner. So what you’re buying when you buy a generous platform, normally in the UK market is your most important stuff from that partner.

Riley Miller (01:01)
Welcome back to another episode of the Modern Membership Org podcast. My name’s Riley here with Bursting Silver, and we have an extra special guest, another overseas individual here. And I’ve entrusted James Harrison, our director of client success, to sit in the host chair to help drive today’s discussion. So this guest, Jeremy Jalie is a performance improvement leader at ASI Europe, where he works with a variety of professional bodies, unions, trade associations, etc., in helping develop their systems, their data management, digital transformation, marketing, and a particular focus on the strategic use of technology to improve business processes and stakeholder engagement. It’s a mouthful and he’s a seasoned vet. I’m really excited to have him on and for James to lead the discussion. So without further ado, James, take her away.

James Harrison (01:47)
Excellent. Thanks, Riley. Jeremy, it’s great to have you on. And thanks so much for for joining us today. I think we’re gonna have really good conversation. Appreciate it.

Jeremy Jalie (01:55)
you’re very welcome, James. Thank you very much. As you know, I’m relatively new back to the ASI world and as I’ve been engaging with things, really, the Modern Membership Organization podcast really stood out. I absolutely love it. You know, I started listening to it pretty much from day one of being back at ASI, maybe even a little earlier. And I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here, right? You’ve had some real legends like Doug Morris, Jeff Spring, Al Povoledo on. I’m… Yeah, I’m very, pleased to be here. Thank you for having me.

James Harrison (02:25)
Well, that’s great. Thanks. Yeah, I know we were talking about it a month ago and you mentioned how you’d listen to the podcast and and I thought, you what? It’d be great to have you on. You have such a good perspective working out of London and the UK and I’m so I’m glad we made this happen. Yeah, thank you. So I do want to actually dig into your career a bit. And I was reading through your bio and and actually a a few things popped up there I didn’t I didn’t know which we hadn’t talked about before and I think are very, very interesting. But what stands out a lot is your background where you had started off working in iMIS. You moved out to work with Dynamics for a good period of time. and then you came back and to work with iMIS again. Yeah, would you like to share a little bit about that journey and how that came about? Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (03:04)
Yeah, by all means, James, I mean, actually, let me let me take you back a step further. When I started my career, I was working for a charity as a fundraiser. And back in 2006, and it’s hilarious. I remember this date 16th of November 2006, because we had a load of data in our system that was backdated to that date. We implemented a system called progress CRM, which was a fundraising database. And it was system built by Robin Fisk and Ben Brett. And about six years into being a client of Progress, ASI bought Fisk Brett So I actually started my relationship with ASI as a client of ASIs. In 2015, I moved to ASI working with Neeru Rad and Paul Beverly over here at ASI Europe, as well working with quite a few of the folks who I knew from the Progress world, lady called Tracy Barrett, who’s a client in client account manager over here in the UK. She was my account manager of Progress. knew her well. Chaps,

James Harrison (04:04)
Yeah, I’m Tracy.

Jeremy Jalie (04:05)
who’s now a principal architect of iMIS He was the guy that you would go to if you had really technical issues. And so, you know, suddenly these guys were colleagues and I had four really happy years working at ASI, selling iMIS started selling it into smaller medium sized organizations and that was sort of graduating into larger organizations.

And then, you what happened was I got tapped on the shoulder by a chap I knew from the membership world, from a Microsoft Dynamics partner that was selling into membership organizations and made the move from iMIS over to Dynamics. I really actually agonized over whether I should do it. And I

James Harrison (04:46)
yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (04:47)
spent seven years working in that Dynamics 365 partner world. I learned a lot. I had a good time. doing it of course, but earlier this year really the opportunity presented itself to come back to ASI and I have to say I grabbed it with both hands. I’ve actually spent seven years telling folks that ASI was the best place I ever worked and the best culture I ever worked in. That might sound like I’m being a bit disingenuous, but it’s not at all. I used to tell people that and the welcome back I have had has been absolutely…wonderful. It really does feel like a family. It’s great working with people from around the world again. I’m really excited to be working with partners like Bursting Silver and some of the guys

James Harrison (05:31)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (05:32)
we have over here in the UK. think the technology is really exciting, know, not just the developments in iMIS, but also the other tools in the suite. And yeah, I’m really loving it. So, I’ve a varied career, but I’m delighted to be here at ASI

James Harrison (05:48)
that’s excellent. And that’s so nice to hear about the welcoming you had back. And I’ve actually heard too of of happening with other employees where they they had some experience somewhere else. Sometimes it’s even they work on the client side and and that iMIS knowledge really is respected across the whole industry and and and the ASI really appreciates the the staff that both work with them and with the partners and and that that that’s really nice to hear.

I do have a question specifically with that background that you had where you’re working with dynamics for I think you said seven years there. And I and I find that really interesting, the perspective, because of course dynamics certainly is a system that a lot of membership organizations use and working yourself in that area and now coming back to iMIS and and just sort sort of to sort of compare those two. now Dynamics is more of a general CRM and iMIS of course is a purpose built system. so what would you say would be or what does a membership organization get from iMIS on day one that they might not get from dynamics and maybe would have to have the vendor build out or or build themselves. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (06:49)
Yeah, so, you know, James, in a way, I’m sure this is not exclusive. I know there are other folks at ASI with a lot of experience around this, but I’m a bit of an expert on this topic, if you like, an expert for a day,

James Harrison (06:59)
Yeah, great.

Jeremy Jalie (07:01)
particular topic. And look, I suppose there’s a few things that I really have to speak to the experience that I’ve had selling dynamics in the the in the UK market, if you like,

James Harrison (07:13)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (07:13)
happen is when when UK associations come market looking for a new system of records, so looking for a new system like iMISS, know that kind of category of software. What they tend to be looking for is a CRM system, that’s just the common parlance that we sort of have over here. So people come to market looking for a membership CRM. I think for that reason, know, the generalist CRM platforms, it’s not just Dynamics, it’s Salesforce, it’s HubSpot, there’s a few of them, know, sort of get blended into that world. And then, you know, there’s quite a lot of other jargon, isn’t there? There’s, you know, membership management system, membership related

James Harrison (07:53)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (07:54)
management systems, so that’s sort of just changing the C in CRM to an There’s an association management system, there’s an engagement management system in terms of what we call iMIS. membership CRM is the thing people are looking for and I think the generalist CRM sort of fit in around that kind of category. But interestingly, and to go to your question around what are the differences, I think there’s a divergence when people are going through that process around what the organizations want and what the organizations need. So let’s start with need. What does an organization need from their CRM platform in the membership

James Harrison (08:36)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (08:36)
world? They need the ability to manage membership. They need the ability to manage subscription finance. They need the ability to manage renewal processes and all the communications that come with that. They need to be able to manage events because associations and unions are by their very nature people-orientated organizations. And so they need to get people together through events.

They need to be able to manage education. They need to manage CPD and compliance management. So that’s what they, what they need and to sort of cut a long story short, generally CRM platforms don’t actually have any of that in them, right? They’re all things that you have to configure or customize in the platform to do that. So, so, so there’s the need, but what are they, what do they want? Well, quite often they’re already using a membership management system. So I think there’s a little bit of a kind of, you know, forget what you already have kind of thing going on. And they start thinking about what they want. And quite often what they want are CRM capabilities or traditional

James Harrison (09:37)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (09:38)
capabilities, stuff around data tools, ease of filtering and querying their data, ability to import and export data out of the system in a sensible way, the ability to integrate with different platforms, the ability to integrate with their email systems, etc. And they’re looking for tools that help them automate their processes, free up staff time. They’re looking for tools that make it easier for them to do segmentation and personalization. They’re looking often these days for AI tools. And a lot of these generalist platforms have quite a few sort of, you know, candy style AI tools around what, what,

James Harrison (10:11)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (10:11)
what they’re doing, which, know, great demoing and very, very exciting. But again, they kind of all sit in that want category for, for organizations, perhaps more so than the than the need category. And then some organizations certainly need some of the generalist capabilities that CRM platforms are good like. If you’re a big trade association, you need a sales platform. Quite a lot of larger associations need case management. They have customer service teams, so they want to pass

James Harrison (10:37)
Yes, we were glad with that. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (10:40)
things around. But as I say, those want requirements are often subsidiary to the need requirements. And when you invest in a generalist CRM platform, you’re often overlooking those need requirements. So what tends to happen

James Harrison (10:57)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (10:58)
is that when you buy a generalist CRM platform, and I’m going to sort of talk about this in sort of code terms, because, really

James Harrison (11:04)
Okay.

Jeremy Jalie (11:06)
what you’re buying, 80

James Harrison (11:07)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (11:08)
% of the code you’re buying comes from the generalist CRM platform part. But the 15 % you really need, the 15 % you need to run 85 % of your business requirements

James Harrison (11:22)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (11:22)
comes from somewhere else. It comes from a partner. So often a partner layer, sometimes a partner that comes in and builds that on top of the platform bespoke. And so actually what you’re buying when you buy a generous platform, normally in the UK market is your most important stuff from that, from that partner. Now, look, as you know, I worked very happily in this space for seven years, but I got a lot of exposure to the realities, if you like, of what that actually means

James Harrison (11:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (11:59)
from a partner’s perspective. And the economic reality of that is that you’re effectively investing in a systems integrator, a professional services partner, to do the most important part of your system. And if you compare that with what happens in the iMIS world, let me draw a bit of

James Harrison (12:19)
Yeah, this is very good.

Jeremy Jalie (12:21)
it’s helpful to do that. With bursting silver, when you work with you guys on an iMIS product, you

James Harrison (12:26)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (12:27)
buy iMIS to do that 85 % and you guys come in and you do the 15 % that’s very tailored to the organization. But it’s exactly the opposite way round when you work

James Harrison (12:36)
No.

Jeremy Jalie (12:37)
with a partner on a CRM. system. To boot, the membership sector over here is very competitive. There’s lots and lots of supply. So there’s

James Harrison (12:44)
All right. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (12:46)
quite a bit of competitive pressure. Membership organizations are good at driving hard bargains with these suppliers, because they’re prestigious and you really want to get that logo, you really want to work with that organization. And often, because the way these organizations run necessarily with committees and volunteers and boards and finance committees and the like, there isn’t huge budgets or certainly not everlasting pots of money that you can spend. So what happens is the implementations tend to be quite tight. You’re trying to build business requirements on

James Harrison (13:18)
So they’re working on a short budget. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (13:23)
pretty slim budget. And to compound that further, the ARR revenue for the licenses is… in the vast majority flowing to the platform partners. It’s flowing to HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft, other than to the partner. next.

James Harrison (13:38)
Mm. The vendor that actually s built your system. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (13:44)
Exactly, so necessarily the license revenue that they get is pretty small and therefore what they’re really interested in is the professional services. So professional services for the implementation, professional services for support, professional services for changes and enhancements. And therefore necessarily to run those businesses efficiently, securing your day rate and securing

James Harrison (14:07)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (14:08)
hours becomes the business priority and so for the client, you’re funding that really important 85 % through professional services bills rather than through a license fee. And again,

James Harrison (14:22)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (14:23)
differentiator with iMIS because when you’re buying iMIS and you’re doing that 85 % in an already built platform, the money you spend on license fees is really flowing towards the development, maintenance and innovation of those core areas, not the… the innovation of specialist areas on top of core areas.

James Harrison (14:43)
That’s a great way to put it. And certainly that vendor is gonna want to keep having more billable work when really when it’s the other way around. for example, we’ll do an implementation and and we love to continue working with our client afterwards, and there’s lots that we can help them with. But in general, that big expense is only the implementation and now their system’s up and running and they’re and they wanna make changes, there’s courses they can take, they can do it themselves. And that that starting point also.

Is a lot further along. So you mentioned some clients on a budget. So would I miss be a better option for an association or or any membership organization that is on a budget because they’re starting a little bit further ahead, would you say, with all these pre configured pieces, events, case management, et cetera, that are in the system, dues, whatnot, that have to be built by hand on the on another CRM like Dynamics? Would that be a fair thing to say? Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (15:31)
I think it would be entirely fair. So upfront, it doesn’t cost you as much to get to where you need to be to be able to use the system, be that as an entity or as a fully fledged system, because there’s so much more of that need functionality that you can rely on. But it extends beyond just that initial implementation. Without that ARR revenue flowing to the partner, there’s not much money on the table for product development. And so you have to fund that product development through professional services. And therefore, when there are enhancements to the platform layer, and there are enhancements, a lot of enhancements to the platform layer, but they tend to be speced towards the organization that funds them, rather than speced for all clients, because obviously someone is paying for a particular way of working. And another sort of associated area that they’re often a lot of space for investment in flexibility and configurability in the functionality that delivered. you know, again, with, with, with, They are having to develop the platform to work for all membership organizations. They can’t just go down a cul-de-sac of making it work for one.

James Harrison (16:49)
No.

Jeremy Jalie (16:50)
But if you’re actually being paid by a client to build particular functionality. necessarily you do. So often the functionality works in a particular way and slightly in a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you actually want to take that functionality and make it exactly right for you, you have to fund even more, more coding, have

James Harrison (17:08)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (17:11)
to get down to the sort of, know, quite, quite sort of tricky level. And, you know, again, what comes from the generalist CRM platform is not membership events, education functionality. So whilst they might be rolling out new features, new enhancements, AI tools, et cetera, none of those actually hit the, the, the, the, the, the key things membership organizations need. So it’s very difficult.

James Harrison (17:37)
That’s great point. I’ve seen that too on the recent sprint reviews. So I I love how iMIS has our sprint reviews every month or month and a half and they’re showing new features that are coming down the pipe. And these are all features that membership based organizations need. And they’re I could see what you’re saying with the CRM, it’s going to be more widespread. So the new features aren’t necessarily gonna apply to you, whereas all these features are gonna apply to you. They had some new features with their Pay Central and QuickPay and also with their form builder that everyone is gonna benefit from. And they’re not paying extra for that. That’s just part of the platform. And these new features keep coming out every month and a half, two months. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (18:14)
And it goes back to that simple point that the functionality you absolutely need is the functionality

James Harrison (18:20)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (18:21)
that iMIS provides.

James Harrison (18:23)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (18:25)
The stuff the generalist platform provides is often functionality you want, but it’s not absolutely core to your operations. There’s one other thing, and I think

James Harrison (18:34)
Yeah I think that’s yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (18:36)
this is quite ironic. again, I think a big differentiator, which

James Harrison (18:41)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (18:41)
is that

organizations invest in generalist CRM platforms because they have this notion that it’s going to give them greater flexibility, that if they decide they want a new partner or that they want

James Harrison (18:51)
And

Jeremy Jalie (18:51)
to change how things work, they can just find another partner and move to them. But actually, it couldn’t be further from the case because that 85 % bit, the bit that you absolutely need

James Harrison (19:06)
Yeah no.

Jeremy Jalie (19:07)
is basically customized to you or customized to the partner.

James Harrison (19:12)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (19:12)
Facing that is really, really difficult because every single flavor of these general platforms has a slightly different way of managing that, that core functionality. And, you know,

James Harrison (19:23)
That’s a really good point actually. And and clients now they don’t move very often, but if an iMIS client did want to move to a different service provider, it’s the same iMIS system that they’re using. And it’s actually something that they can do because everyone’s building along the same lines w following the guidelines from ASI. The other way around though, if you have a system built on a CRM like Dynamics, you’re really buying software from that specific company that built it for you. And the next company might say, Hey, we don’t do it like that at all. And actually

We have to rebuild what they’ve built or it’s not done right if you’re trying to move from one to the other. And you’re you’re really you’re tied to that vendor. Yeah. I absolutely see what you’re saying.

Jeremy Jalie (20:01)
You knew and

it becomes pretty stark for people pretty soon. Right. They

James Harrison (20:07)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (20:07)
have been in situations where folks have turned up saying we want to change our CRM partner, you know,

James Harrison (20:16)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (20:17)
a thousand different reasons why that might be the case, but we want to change our CRM partner. And they kind of assume that it’s going to be, you know, just switching out the support fees from one partner to another. And then you. explain even a little bit what

James Harrison (20:30)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (20:31)
actually the sort technical implications of what they’re talking about, rewiring how the membership structure works, rewiring how renewals work, rewiring how

James Harrison (20:40)
Yeah it’s

Jeremy Jalie (20:41)
the finance around those things works, which as you say, James, you don’t need to do in IMES because IMES takes care of that stuff.

James Harrison (20:46)
Yep. Exactly. W every vendor

does it the same way when you’re setting up dues, for example. Yep. Using the same tools. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (20:53)
All of their seats when you start talking about, you know, the level of effort that is required. And, know, that’s actually really quite difficult for organizations. And so what I’ve seen is that big organizations actually sort of eschew that, start bringing in their own teams. So if you’re enough to be a large association working on a general CRM platform, they’re bringing in their own teams to manage it because they want to sort of…

create their own ability to develop it. Little organizations end up struggling on with the same system, getting frustrated with this. It’s quite difficult.

James Harrison (21:29)
Yeah, yeah, it’s too expensive. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (21:34)
Medium sized organizations reinvest huge amounts of money by re-platforming because they’re big enough, just enough to have that money

James Harrison (21:41)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (21:41)
do that. They do it really unhappily. They sort of have to swallow that

James Harrison (21:44)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (21:46)
change with great difficulty and a lot of explaining to the powers that be in the organization why they have to do it, but they don’t have a choice because they can’t afford to bring in their own teams and they want to make the improvements. And so it just leads to a lot of friction eventually.

James Harrison (22:01)
Yeah, it sounds like money wasted too, certainly, and and that could be better spent if if they had were on a different platform from the start and and not come up with that problem. And certainly the the landscape changes regularly. And what I find also very interesting, you being from London, here we’re in Canada, there’s some similarities, but but also there’s some differences. So in Canada we have a lot of regulatory bodies, you do as well. And I’d love to chat about some of those differences, just just at the beginning here because

What I find interesting is now the model that if I understand right, in the UK, you’ll have regulatory bodies, but they’re national, whereas in Canada, and I and I think it’s the same in the states, they tend to be more province or state focused. So in Ontario, here we’ll have Ontario regulatory bodies, say the architects, they’ll also be one in Alberta and there’ll be one in BC and so forth. But you’re you is that right that the UK tends to have more national bodies and and how does that affect the way do you think that that they work and the decisions they make and even the software choices they have. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (22:59)
Yeah, so yes,

I would say the nice thing about the United Kingdom in general, James, and if you’ve been there, you’ll know this, we’ve got a lot of exceptions that prove rules, right? So actually, the UK is fairly complicated, because obviously, we’re actually four countries that make up one

James Harrison (23:15)
Anyway

Jeremy Jalie (23:17)
nation state, the United Kingdom. But a lot of the kind of political and economic and professional power, I guess, is centered around London. So what tends to happen is you have national bodies. There are loads of exceptions, particularly in Scotland, for instance, you know, the legal system in Scotland is different. So there are are organizations for lawyers in and

James Harrison (23:41)
Mm, sure.

Jeremy Jalie (23:42)
are necessarily different because the jurisdiction is different. There’s lots of historical organizations. There’s some wonderful medical bodies in Scotland, like the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh or the Royal of surgeons and physicians in Glasgow that are 500 years old and so they’re not going anywhere because they’re 500 years old. But

James Harrison (24:00)
Yeah. Exactly.

Jeremy Jalie (24:02)
broadly, yes, the sort of London is the centre. And I know that’s different in Canada and the US. It’s also different in some of our close neighbours. Germany is also federal and so what you tend to find in Germany is that the associations are primarily clustered around the states or the land. again, You know, they then have peak bodies in Berlin, but there’s, you know, important associations out in the regional cities, etc. And then, of course, we’re big country, 70 million people in the UK.

James Harrison (24:33)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (24:34)
So what tends to happen is these London orientated big professional bodies tend to be quite, quite big, you know, they’ve got a lot of members from all over the UK. And therefore they’re, you know, they’re doing a lot of different things. They tend to have their fingers in all the different pies that you can possibly involve from an

James Harrison (24:54)
Uh-huh. Okay.

Jeremy Jalie (24:57)
association perspective. So what I would say is in terms of how that impacts kind of how they’re buying, there’s fewer opportunities overall, and they’re often high rates because it’s dealing with those peak bodies.

James Harrison (25:08)
that’s good. Okay. Yeah, that’s true.

Jeremy Jalie (25:12)
Organizations are complicated because they’re doing lots of different things, wearing lots of different hats and therefore they need from their system of record, particularly in terms of integration with systems of engagement that are doing critical things for them. So their

James Harrison (25:26)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (25:26)
management system, their exams platform, often their community platform, mobile apps, if they’re using them, there’s a lot of things to integrate, which means they’re often quite complicated projects that you’re involved in. But that doesn’t really change, again, the fact that the core things that they need, know, fundamentally to manage membership and get events, education, et cetera, are things, you know, that, that, that iMIS does really, really well. So I think from, from, my perspective in working with those organizations, iMIS comes, you know, as a, as a really, really great out of the box fit for a lot of it. You know, I, the, other thing I’d say about the, UK association space, and bear in mind, I’ve worked in it for 11 years now, I absolutely…

Love it. We say

James Harrison (26:10)
Right.

Jeremy Jalie (26:10)
bodies are often held up worldwide as exemplars of how professional membership organisations should be run, right? know, things like chartered status, royal colleges, the robustness of our qualifications, the separation of representation and regulatory functions, which often happens. You know, you have different bodies for representation

James Harrison (26:28)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (26:29)
and awarding and regulators doing a different job. It’s a really exciting place to work in.

And often these organisations are very representative of their professions as well, which is something I like because it makes it interesting. The conversations I have

James Harrison (26:44)
absolutely.

Jeremy Jalie (26:45)
with are really interesting. The bigger ones often have these wonderful premises in London that look and feel

James Harrison (26:51)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (26:52)
like the institutions of the engineers or of the doctors or of the lawyers.

James Harrison (26:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (26:57)
It’s great.

James Harrison (26:58)
I agree and I enjoy that too here in Canada. And again, I mentioned architects earlier because they have a beautiful building that they work from, which would make you know make sense, of course.

Jeremy Jalie (27:05)
Yeah, they set up a really important place in London. amazing.

James Harrison (27:09)
Exactly. Well, AI is kind of the topic of the day and and certainly there’s a lot going on here in North America, but but really I don’t know much about what’s happening in in the UK and and even in Europe too. We but What would you say is the adoption now with with artificial intelligence in the UK and with the associations and membership bodies that you work with or no? So for example, are they are they upskilling their staff? Are they are they putting in policies and guardrails and and doing AI governance type exercises? Are are they jumping in and using tools? Some some are jumping in the pool, others are kinda waiting back. Or yeah. So what’s the the overall feel there with AI adoption? Do you find?

Jeremy Jalie (27:50)
So look, there’s a lot of kind of AI excitement and AI hype, and you can’t avoid talking about it when you’re talking to folks about almost anything, but particularly when you’re talking to folks about technology. And I think I would say that this is probably a topic that we could spend hours on

James Harrison (28:09)
Nice.

Jeremy Jalie (28:10)
in its own right, but my personal sense before I… talk specifically about what I’ve seen in associations is that there’s a lot of caution because people are very aware that there’s kind of external factors that might impact on how people use and adopt AI. I’m not really planning to speculate too much on that, but

James Harrison (28:29)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (28:30)
over the last few weeks, right, we’ve seen all this media activity and frenzy around some of the things Anthropic and ChatGPT and OpenAI, et cetera, are saying about things.

Therefore, if I’m honest, what I’ve seen, I think, is that most membership organizations are still trying to work out precisely what they’re going to do with AI. That’s not to say that they’re not doing anything. There’s lots and lots of experiments and lots and lots of relatively small scale things that in isolation can be quite exciting. I see people putting out chatbots and transforming how members can interact with organizations around the clock for doing that. I see a little bit but quite powerful case studies of people doing stuff around marketing and personalization and using AI to make that better. I’ve seen some things around automation, is quite exciting and the AI platforms are enabling that. But by and by… There’s not like one single thing that all associations are trying to do with AI that is kind of at the sort of zeitgeist level. So I think consequence

James Harrison (29:41)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (29:42)
bearing in mind what you said about, know, what people are doing with their staff, et cetera, there is a big focus or in a lot of organizations, there is a big focus on upskilling people to do the basics.

I think there’s still some conservatism and some folks that are quite nervous about it. do sometimes hear organizations saying, we don’t use that yet and we don’t know if we even will kind of thing. I’m not sure that will last much longer, but

James Harrison (30:05)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (30:05)
the organizations that are doing more with AI seem to be doing things through the platforms we’re all familiar with, the Clauds and the chat GPTs, but enabling their staff to use them well. So making sure that people are trained, making sure that they do have enterprise environments so they’re not just putting…to un-guardrailed models, if you like. And where I’ve seen that work best is where they have taken support for training and support for staff development really seriously. Actually,

James Harrison (30:34)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (30:35)
the last place I worked in was doing a bit of that and it was pretty good work. They had some case studies of just training people how to use the AI tools. And then…

making sure that policies are in place that are safe and sort of, I suppose, support best practices rather than, you know, not even thinking about it and letting it all go kind of black market AI. I don’t think that’s sensible. So yes, a lot of hype. Yes, a lot of people doing small scale things, but no great Zeitgeist movement. And a lot of focus on making sure that staff can use it is what I’m seeing.

James Harrison (31:10)
Well, that’s great. That’s great to hear. Yeah, and it does feel like that over here too, where they’re all at different stages, but nobody’s at zero. No one’s ignoring it. And actually some are being a little bit more cautious than others or taking their time. And being at the some of the roadshows recently and and demoing our data scope tool, it’s really, really great to get feedback from all the guests that are there. And and I do see that happening where some are glued to the screen and they love all the new features, and others are sort of sitting there a little bit cautious or their questions show their caution.

Right. And we’re happy to always answer those questions. And a lot of vendors do offer some packages around AI to help with governance and to help with policies. I know we have our smart start, for example, and and and really any iMIS client should go to their vendor to find out, hey, can you help us with AI rather than going outside? Because there’s actually a lot of a lot of skills inside a lot of our vendors and and BSI especially. Our Data Scout tool, we’re really proud of, of course, which is our AI tool for iMIS, and it’s both an email marketing tool and also an engagement tool for segmentation and and you mentioned chatbots and I love the features it has there with building your own chatbots. When you and I

Jeremy Jalie (32:16)
Yeah.

James Harrison (32:16)
talked a little while back, you you mentioned how you really liked how DataScout understands the member and data in the organization and and other tools would take longer to configure, I think if I got if I took that right. Yeah, did you

Jeremy Jalie (32:27)
Yay.

James Harrison (32:28)
want to expand on that a little bit? Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (32:30)
Yeah, know, I really do. Notwithstanding, you know, sort of like what I’ve just said about governance and policy and making things, you know, safe, which I completely obviously get. I’m a technologist at heart, I think. And so, you know, when I see cool applications of technology, I get pretty excited about them. And I do think that Data Scout has stood out for me in terms of membership specific applications of AI that really, really work. You know, I think, I iMIS is also playing quite a big part of that. You know, the fact that when you deploy data scouting in an iMIS environment, you’ve got all of that membership data there in a consistent format. So the way the tool interprets it and there and interacts with, with, with the LLMs to sort of make it really, really useful is, is really great. And so. think as membership specialists, bursting silver, working with iMIS, working with Data Scout have really been able to sort of make that very, very slick and really, really nice. There’s a few features in it that I really love. I I like the profile enrichment. I think that’s very, very smart. That would be quite a difficult thing to build easily with generic platform tools. Not impossible, but it would be quite difficult to do that. particularly to link it back to all of that sort of rich membership information that you’ve got. I’m gonna sort of display a real interest here. I love the segmentation ability working with IQAs. I’m sorry to be a geek, I’m relatively new back to ASI, right?

James Harrison (34:00)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (34:02)
I love IQA. I think IQA is a platform level differentiator for iMIS, the way that it works, the way that…

our partners and ASIers and the system uses IQAs across the whole system is a real, real clever part of the whole concept of iMIS. I suspect that’s a Don Robertson brainchild. I don’t know that actually. Could be 100 percent correct. And if that’s wrong, please.

James Harrison (34:30)
He’s he’s still around and yeah, has a lot of influence, absolutely. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (34:34)
Really missed it when I when I was working with the platform tools because I absolutely love it. So the fact that you’ve made your segmentation engine work alongside IQA so I can write an IQA and that can become something that you know that the tool uses AI to determine whether or not someone’s appropriate for a segment or appropriate for personalization or appropriate for a campaign is

James Harrison (34:55)
Yep. You can write the IQA essentially with plain English. All you have to do is give me all the teachers that are in Wales, for example. in

Jeremy Jalie (35:03)
it’s

James Harrison (35:03)
high school only, and it’ll put all that together for you. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (35:06)
absolutely brilliant. But you know what, I’m very conscious. I’m sort of geeking out on IQA.

James Harrison (35:10)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (35:11)
Folks in the UK are listening to this. And I really, really hope they will be. And you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about because of the very Imus jargon that I’m using in terms of talking about that. Please reach out so I can share my love of IQA with you. And it will probably give me an opportunity, James, to show them how cool Data Scout is as well. And then one look on, sorry,

James Harrison (35:31)
That’d be great.

Jeremy Jalie (35:32)
but one final thing I love about it, the potential of

James Harrison (35:34)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (35:35)
Unication Suite is absolutely massive. You introduced me to Neil Gray from your Data Scout team who

James Harrison (35:41)
Yes.

Jeremy Jalie (35:42)
showed me his personalization paradox presentation. And I loved it. It really rung a chord for me because I think, you know, his message kind of resonated for me, someone who works in technology sales. They often say you’re only as good as your last sale. Well, his point

James Harrison (35:58)
Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (35:59)
on that personalization paradox is

You’re only really as good as your last personalized message. But for Data Scout to be able to do that heavy lifting for you and actually make that personalization just part of how the system works, really, really smart. I do love it. It’s definitely worth having a

James Harrison (36:17)
Thanks, thanks, Jeremy. I really appreciate that.

Yeah, and I love the new features they’ve added recently, like the template gallery. So now you can have your gallery of templates that you’re choosing from. You’ve pre configured them, but the message is slightly different for each person and it’s personalized and and yeah, it really has a big impact. And you can and you can measure their engagement with it as well. But I’d love to talk about some of other products that are out there too, and just to to sort of broaden the landscape. Now I know that the flywheel products, AK, the flywheel products with open water, cloud or top class, that’s rated made a really big impact on iMIS in the last five years because now

If you need an LMS, you don’t have to go outside of the ASI ecosystem. And they’re already configured and integrated. And they’ve actually added a lot to those integrations in the last few years. So they’re even further integrated than they originally were. Are there any of those products that that kind of pop out at you that are well received or fix a certain problem? And have you found that that’s really helped when you’re presenting iMIS? You’re showing all these features as well as the products.

that they of course partners like us ourselves have like Davisca, which also that that network is quite large too. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (37:21)
100%. And I think, you know, ASI have been very smart in the way they have specifically chosen products that, one, are great products, but two, really match the needs that associations and unions, regulators really, really need. So it’s a really, really smart strategy. One, that when I was on the outside looking in, I envied, but now I’m getting the opportunity to sort of roll my sleeves up and get to know these tools really well.

I’m absolutely loving it. I’m going to do it in reverse order. going go through the ones that

James Harrison (37:55)
Sure.

Jeremy Jalie (37:56)
I suppose I’m going to crescendo to the one that I’m most excited about.

James Harrison (37:59)
absolutely. That’s a good order. I like that.

Jeremy Jalie (38:02)
Back when I left ASI, we did have Clowdr on the horizon. I don’t think we’d quite bought it. We might have just bought it, but I was very,

James Harrison (38:11)
Okay. Okay.

Jeremy Jalie (38:12)
very aware of Clowdr. And Clowdr absolutely changed in an instant what you were able to say. ASI as a business could do for organizations because you know, the world is going mobile. I talk to people that are old time.

James Harrison (38:25)
Mm mm, absolutely.

Jeremy Jalie (38:27)
When was the last time you actually went on Facebook or LinkedIn or X or whatever on your, on your desktop computer, people just don’t do it anymore. So if you want people to really be involved in communities, to be engaging with your content, you know, meaningfully and, and understand that busy professionals probably are going to be interacting with their associations content. on a sofa in the evening, know, it’s not very healthy to double screen, I know, but it’s what we do, you know, so Cloud had transformed that over then. I mean, in the time I’ve been away, it’s just come on leaps and bounds. So it’s a really, really cool tool.

James Harrison (39:03)
I absolutely agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.

Jeremy Jalie (39:07)
class, think is the great opportunity product because

You know, lots of big organizations have a learning management system over here. Quite often they built it in the generic LMS platform in the same way that they built generic CRM platform. So there’s maybe a little bit of fragility in the way that they have gone about it, but they tend to have the biggest variations LMS is and that’s moving. That’s moving into the medium association space, but there’s a lot of medium associations that are still doing things in person or via live webinars and

giving people on demand content and back to that concept of sofa surfing in the evening, you know, that is when people probably do want to start thinking about engaging with some of that content. So I think there’s a big opportunity for top class in the market and the fact that it’s association specific, the fact that it integrates really closely with iMIS, so it can be part of that holistic engagement journey, very, very…

Yeah, lots of opportunity and a great team based in Dublin, you know top class is here in in

James Harrison (40:07)
Yes, yes. That’s right. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (40:10)
you right so it extends the the footprint of ASI over here But I’m gonna be honest the one that I’m most excited about was probably the platform that I didn’t know the best when I was

James Harrison (40:24)
No.

Jeremy Jalie (40:25)
outside the ASI family, which is open water and

James Harrison (40:28)
Interesting.

Jeremy Jalie (40:29)
open water really jumps out at me at fixing a serious pain that I’ve seen lots of organisations have, which is that your application processes, be those applications for membership or fellowship or mentorship, or your abstracts for scientific conferences, or your awards programmes, require a lot of data from the applicants. They require multi-stage review processes where you’ve got staff reviewing, you’ve got external folks reviewing, be they assessors or your conference organizers or your grant trustees board, et cetera. And trying to build that between a CRM over here and a content system over here and getting all of that to work in a way, absolutely technically possible, but really complicated, really heavy lifting, takes a hell of a long time to do it. they have been some of the most complex, difficult. gnarly projects that I’ve been involved in outside of the, the iMIS world. And then whenever you want to change anything, it’s back to that

James Harrison (41:39)
Mm.

Jeremy Jalie (41:40)
challenge of having to bring in people to do code changes because you’ve built it in a very codey API

James Harrison (41:45)
Yes. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (41:46)
way. So there’s no way for the staff to make a simple change often to their, to their, to their application process, be that, know, adding something

James Harrison (41:53)
And that’s critical. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (41:56)
simple that you want to do. and so.

Open water, I think, is really, really exciting. And when people, it certainly happened for me, but I’ve seen others, realize how easy it is to do and manage that and the wide variety of different sort of applications that you can use it with. It’s really, really exciting. So I’m really enjoying getting to know open water. I’m really loving it, Jenji, you tell.

James Harrison (42:22)
That’s great. No, that’s so great to hear. Yeah, and I do think it adds certainly a lot to to the product. So again, not just the flywheel products, but even the whole marketplace and and all the vendors that are out there and the different products they have. And it you know what, I could have a coffee or go ahead. Nope.

Jeremy Jalie (42:35)
I’m not sure I love

it as as IQA yet, but it’s getting close.

James Harrison (42:44)
That’s that IQA hooked you years ago. That’s great. That’s great to hear. Well, that’s another nice feature too with iMIS. Once you learn how the IQAs work, you’re using it throughout the system and and all the different modules follow that format too. And

And again, I I could have a beer with you and a coffee and I think we could have an hour go by like that, Jeremy. And I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. And I want to make sure though that if there’s something we want to highlight from our conversation point out that if somebody was for example, a leader at their membership organization, they were they were looking for something particular. Is there one thing to pinpoint to them that was the most important or something we didn’t bring up that you’d like them to know? Yeah.

Jeremy Jalie (43:20)
You know, James, look, I have also really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you ever so much for having me on. And I think my key takeaway reflecting on all the things that we’ve talked about, and I hope we do get a coffee and a beer in, by the way, to do that.

James Harrison (43:33)
Excellent. I’ll take care of that. Great.

Jeremy Jalie (43:35)
Membership organizations are special. I think they’re brilliant. I’ve had a career now working for and with them. But because they’re special and because they’re brilliant, they need brilliant specialist tools to be run well.

And I would, you know, take a long, hard look at what the realities of investing in a non specialist system are,

James Harrison (43:57)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Jalie (43:59)
to be your membership organizations system of record. You’re a special type of organization. need a special type of tool to run what you, what you do. And, you know, there’s a few out there, James, think we both know that and, you know, they certainly are, but iMIS is the best one. So I’d look at iMIS.

James Harrison (44:18)
I agree with you on that. Yeah, a hundred percent. And you coming back time is also reinforces that too. And I and I’ve seen a few others do that and absolutely agree with you on that. Jeremy, thank you so much for your time today. And I know you’re a few hours behind, so for us it’s kind of crisping on lunch there, but for you probably dinner. So I’ll let you go and you can you can have some dinner and so forth. But definitely we should do it again and in person I’m up for that as well too. Thanks again.

Jeremy Jalie (44:44)
Thank you very much, James. Thank you.

Riley Miller (44:46)
And that is a wrap mega episode. And a huge thank you to Jeremy tuning in from the UK and James for running that episode as well. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing. We’re on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, you name it. anything they talked about is going to be in the show notes down below. And if there’s a topic that you’d like to explore or you wanna also jump on this podcast here, reach out rmiller at burstingsilver.com or burstingsilver.com slash podcast. Happy to put up some new information and work with the community here to help modernize together.

We release bi weekly, so we’ll see you in two weeks here for the next Modern Membership Org podcast. Thank you.