Live from Emergence 2026: What Membership Orgs Got Right This Year

Riley Miller (0:54) All right, good morning and welcome back to another episode of the Modern Membership Org podcast. My name’s Riley, your host from Bursting Silver, and I’m really excited to introduce this episode. We had a special live edition of the Modern Membership Org podcast down at the Emergence Conference 2026 in Arlington, Virginia. It was fantastic. It was great to see people come out live and to be able to interact with the audience during the discussion. And I had two incredible guests on the podcast. Ellen Turner from Bursting Silver joined us again for her insights, and for the first time, Melissa Mack from Intuitive Business Concepts joined us as well. From a leadership standpoint, she’s been in the industry for quite some time and has extreme knowledge of how we got to where we are, and her insights on where we’re going were very insightful, to say the least.

It was awesome having everybody on board, but I do have to say, unfortunately, the hotel lost internet. So this is just a quick snapshot of an episode. It runs for 25 minutes and then it cuts off abruptly. That’s not because we’re staying in format. It was because the internet dropped, sadly. But hopefully we’ll have more of these live panels in the future, and if there’s an opportunity, I highly encourage you to come. It was great to have the audience there asking questions while we were doing the podcast panel, and we’re always learning, always growing here. So I hope you enjoy this episode.

Thank you again to Melissa Mack and Ellen Turner for making the time to jump on the podcast. It was a really good discussion. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Riley Miller (2:20) I appreciate everybody taking the time to come to my humble panel here. For those that don’t know me yet, I am Riley Miller, Marketing Manager at Bursting Silver and host of the Modern Membership Org podcast. The podcast came from an idea: we had so many stories with our clients and staff that we wanted to share, and we just didn’t have an avenue to tell them. But it’s still valuable to get them out there. So we launched the podcast as a way to shine a light on the improvements happening every day in associations, regulatory bodies and even unions, and to give them a platform. Now we’re about six months in. It feels like yesterday, but I think this is going to be episode twenty-one, and I’m quite stoked on it. I really love the feedback. I appreciate seeing some people in the room who have heard it before, have been on before, or were interested because they heard me mention it yesterday. So thank you for coming and giving this a shot.

I’m very excited to have these two panelists on. They are fundamental in the iMIS community, and they each have a font of knowledge and experience in their own right. For those that don’t know, Melissa Mack co-founded IBC with Jodi Sawyer more than 25 years ago. She has more than 20 years implementing and supporting associations and nonprofits, and leads IBC’s team of 15. Her focus now is on business development, strategy and fit, for iMIS and for any kind of group. She’s taught many iMIS training classes and presented at the iMIS Users Group and at ASI. And she’s teaching another session tomorrow, the half day: Understanding iMIS Dues and Billing. So for those on the dues side of things, definitely check that out. Lots of tips and tricks. Her philosophy is that the best technology sale is the one that’s actually the right fit. And off the clock, she has two grown sons, a Ragdoll cat, and she’s a lover of wine.

My other special guest is Ellen Turner. She’s a senior consultant and lead at Bursting Silver. She sat on the client side first, as a database manager, the one person making the system work for the whole organization. I’m sure plenty of people here are familiar with that role. Ellen knows what it’s like to be the one person who knows how the system works, and she now leads others through it, helping them understand the system and the new updates. She collects certifications in the iMIS learning path like the infinity stones. Catch them all. She’s still an active member of the iMIS user community, and on the partner side as well. I’ve had Ellen on the podcast before, and that is one of the top three most listened to episodes we’ve had, on member community and what makes the iMIS Users Group so special for everybody involved. It’s really a community of sharing. That’s what I really enjoy about it: like-minded people coming together to solve the problems we’re all having.

So that’s the lay of the land. Even though we’re still only halfway through the year from the podcast’s perspective, I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on how far we’ve come in 2026 in innovation and advancement, both in iMIS and in the technology that supports associations every day.

Riley Miller (6:19) So going over to my panelists here, in no particular order. This is going to be an open format, so we may say something silly as well. Don’t hold us to it. This is just a conversation, as the podcast goes. Melissa, I’m going to ask you first. Based on this year, what do you think membership organizations are looking at? 2026 is the year of what?

Melissa Mack (6:47) So I think moving beyond the migrations to the cloud and actually starting to implement the functionality they have in the newer technology is a big win. TCJ, the Texas Center for the Judiciary, won a big member engagement award yesterday, and Gail was also honored by the user group. So I think the big win here is learning this new technology and then taking it to the next level with automation, and just maximizing the use of their newest platform, iMIS EMS. I think that’s the biggest win. As the solution provider partner for TCJ, we couldn’t be prouder. Before any of the awards, Jake was coming into my virtual office saying how proud he was of Gail for learning and embracing it, and for doing a lot of the work completely on their own, with just a little bit of support from us. So that’s a big win, I think.

Riley Miller (7:55) Yeah, taking advantage of the system. We’ve had a couple of conversations too where clients have just moved to iMIS EMS and they want to take more advantage of the functionality they have at their fingertips. It’s just learning it, adopting it and putting it into their regular processes.

Melissa Mack (8:04) Yeah, it’s like once they get there, not just stopping and doing what they’ve always done, right? Now what more can we do with it?

Riley Miller (8:12) Absolutely. Ellen, how about yourself?

Ellen Turner (8:14) I’d have to agree with what Melissa has observed. We definitely have clients who have upgraded to or implemented iMIS EMS and have been on it for two years, and they’re at the point where, okay, we made some decisions about pieces we weren’t going to move forward with as part of the initial implementation or upgrade. But now we understand the system, we have our new process, and we really want to make this update or this enhancement, because we feel it’s going to improve this process flow now that we’ve lived it in the new environment. So let’s bring this back in and see how we can adopt it and further improve our systems.

And we have clients taking more ownership and leading most of that enhancement work themselves. I have one client who had never been on iMIS before two, maybe three years ago now. They’re completely changing their membership structure and their process for managing education. Basically we helped them with the requirements and outlined everything that needed to be created and updated, and they’re doing all the work themselves. I’m basically acting as a project manager and as a check to make sure everything gets caught, and helping them test it before it gets deployed to production. They’re even doing the deployment to production themselves, because they’ve really bought into “we can do this,” which is fantastic to see.

And then I think the other thing is going to be rather obvious once I say it. It’s the year of AI still. But the one change I’ve noticed is that it’s more of a “how can we specifically use AI.” In previous years, it was more like, oh my gosh, there’s AI, we need to use it, let’s just pitch it out there and see what happens. It was kind of a smorgasbord, an almost erratic approach: this is the tool, we have to use it, but we don’t really know how or where or when. Now people are coming forward and using it a lot more strategically. They’re developing a plan to incorporate it instead of just trying to shoehorn it into something where it may not be appropriate to use it. So it’s really exciting to work with our clients and with other partners to help clients understand how it can benefit them, either behind the scenes or with their members and member engagement.

Riley Miller (10:45) Yeah, I think we’re all working in AI. 2025, I think, was where we got to see the regular use cases being adopted, with people dipping a toe in, trying ChatGPT, understanding privacy, but really just using this insane technology to rewrite an email to make it sound friendlier. I think 2026 is where we’ve actually been unpacking what the opportunities are with AI, being able to work faster and streamline while still keeping the guardrails up.

The other point you made, about teams really accelerating and almost becoming their own IT team, sticking with the platform: that’s change management. We’ve gone through that on the podcast, and you’ve got some strong opinions on change management. But really it’s about including your team and empowering them to do that. You can see monumental changes in the uptake of the actual platform.

So with all that being said, those are all great points. What is something that surprised you this year that you weren’t expecting, for better or worse? Maybe I’ll start and we’ll move back. What surprised me was the technology and the opportunity with AI: what we’ve seen from other teams, how they’ve responded to it, and what their platforms are rolling out. And then for anybody on the Canadian front, a big change we had to help a lot of our clients adopt was persisted cash dues. I think that was a buzzword at last year’s conference, and then it was about managing our clients’ expectations and what it actually means for their dues process. You don’t want that to rock the boat too much when it comes to collecting dues, because that’s the lifeblood of an organization. Ellen, I know you worked quite closely with some organizations that had to navigate those waters.

Ellen Turner (12:40) Yeah, managing the switch to persisted cash dues, and the impact on the invoice shortcuts and on being able to access only the most recent dues. All those links where we had access to the invoices: all of a sudden they were showing all five invoices. Well, we just need the current invoice, not all the rest. And then the impact on the behind-the-scenes reports the accounting teams use for the daily journal entry, because that’s changed. Once you bill your invoices, they now appear in the general ledger summary, but with no GL account until they’re paid. It was a big change.

I remember when it launched in Canada, I got contacted by five different clients all within five minutes. “What just happened?” I was like, I don’t know, but let me find out. So that was a fun day. It was a big change, but we all got through it. I told them it’s okay, it’s going to be fine, and this is a good thing overall, because it’s actually something you’ve been asking for: to see the historical dues invoices on someone’s record. And they were like, yeah, we did want that. So we got through it and it was fine.

And then I think for me, I am admittedly a worst case scenario AI adopter. I’m a child of the 80s. I grew up watching Terminator. So it’s been a very interesting learning journey working with AI myself, and finally drinking the Kool-Aid while still actively trying to prevent Skynet.

Melissa Mack (14:17) Yeah. So it’s funny, because when you asked what surprised us, for sure persisted cash dues surprised a lot of people. Very similarly, the night after it was turned on in Canada, we received a call: “None of my dues bills are showing, my members can’t renew, and I just generated a renewal.” And Jake was on the call saying, well, you have to post the batch so that it actually saves that dues renewal. So that was a little bit of a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been, to be quite honest. ASI had been communicating to the community for 12 months that this was coming, and I don’t know that anybody really embraced or understood the communication. So what we do at IBC, when I’m getting some of those and I’m not sure our clients are going to understand what it means, is try to get ahead of it and communicate: this is what it means for you, and we need to plan if we can. They had definitely been communicating for 12 months that this was coming. Beta testers were invited to join the beta testing program. And still the whole community was surprised by it.

It’s just like other things happening with older technology, where people are surprised by issues coming up that had been communicated for some time. Is anybody here still on 2017? I guess we can’t poll the panel, but can we ask the room? Okay. It’s been six years we’ve been communicating that we need to move to the cloud. Hopefully you’re already engaged. Yay! Because then we get these calls: “It’s an emergency, I’m so surprised this issue is happening with my old tech,” or with something new that came out last night in a new release. But we have to pay attention to the communications we get through the channel, through the tech alerts, through the newsletters, and not ignore them, with the technology that is running your business, running your association. So I would just encourage people to read the newsletters and the alerts and see what’s new and what’s coming, and really try to digest what that means for your organization, so you won’t be taken by surprise like some of us were. The work still has to be done, whether you’re reactive or proactive. I’d rather plan and be proactive and not be surprised the day after the new release comes out.

Ellen Turner (16:55) Yeah, and just to tag onto that really quickly: if you don’t get the tech alerts, it is possible to subscribe and get notified whenever a tech alert is posted. It’s hard for me to describe how to get there to sign up for those email notifications, but if you want to stop by the Bursting Silver booth later, I’m happy to show you how to sign up for that alert and a couple of other alerts I find particularly useful. Granted, I don’t always understand the tech alerts. I have to forward them to a developer and say, can you explain this, please? But usually I understand enough to get the gist of it.

Riley Miller (17:30) Yeah, I think those tech alerts are interesting, because when we talk about AI and being able to draft a good email, run a good report or get some analytics, I’ve been dipping a toe in this as well, training my AI on my processes and the things I do daily. And we’ve been working with our clients to build ecosystems that understand who they are and work for them. I can see this next year probably being a big adaptation we’ll do with our clients. We can take those tech alerts now and see not just “here’s a tech update, this is what you have,” but how does this impact me? What does this change for my processes, and what is this going to mean further down the line? What can I do now, with specific context about our own processes? It’s nice to be able to read a tech update. I know Ellen loves seeing those updates too, because she’s still waiting to see if they’re going to release new certifications.

Ellen Turner (18:28) More infinity stones.

Riley Miller (18:29) More infinity stones. It’s just one of the responsibilities, I think, of an AiSP: to make sure we’re looking out for your best interests and working with your provider to see those new opportunities. It’s a big thing.

Let me check my sheet here. So, just a straw poll again. I know you didn’t really sign up for an interactive room, maybe, but how many teams here are a staff of under five? Okay. And then over five? Okay, cool. So heck yeah, rocking it for the five and under. I’m curious, looking over there, how many hats you wear. I find with small teams you have to be agile, you have to be able to adapt to many positions. But even for larger teams, there are different needs in working with your team across these different areas. So maybe I can address the panel: for some of your clients in that over-five camp, what have been the biggest-impact technology decisions this year that support their teams? If you had to point out just one that has made the most significant impact for a large team, what would it be?

Melissa Mack (19:55) I mean, it’s the migration to iMIS EMS. For those three people in the room: hopefully you’ll see that change isn’t always easy, but you have to get to the modernized platform to take you through the next five years, and then figure out what’s next, whether it’s integrations or just a technology decision to make sure you keep investing in keeping your technology modern and safe. And the best way to do that, especially with a small team, especially five and under, is to put the security, the maintenance of the software and the updates in the hands of ASI, and stop worrying about it on-prem and on servers. And even if you have iMIS 2017 and you’re thinking, it’s not on-prem: if it’s hosted with somebody or anything like that, it’s still considered on-prem, not on that cloud platform. In the cloud, it’s ASI’s responsibility and their dedication to you to keep it up to date, keep it secure and keep it modern, so you can start using other things like the MCP they’re talking about and the AI it will be able to use. I loved seeing that in this session: IQAs with natural language, being able to just type what you want and have it write the IQA for you. So, that decision to get to iMIS EMS, and then to keep informed of what’s new when it comes out and whether or not you can use it.

Riley Miller (21:15) Thank you. Ellen?

Ellen Turner (21:21) If you’ve listened to the previous episodes of the podcast, Riley and I have discussed this before, but one decision that gets made that I don’t really agree with is to cut down on training when you make that upgrade or that switch, or to lock out a lot of the staff so they don’t have access to self-serve within the database. I think that does a great disservice to your staff, if you don’t give them the chance to learn and to be hands-on and take care of their own queries. I see the person who said her staff is less than five nodding her head: yes, please let other people help themselves, take it away from me.

One of the great things about iMIS is that you can assign different levels of security and different levels of access. Not everybody has to be a system admin to go in and write their own queries, manage events and so on. So help spread out the responsibilities so that people feel like they can take a vacation and they’re not going to come back to a complete database mess. And give them the training they need to understand the system, because iMIS is very powerful. But if you try to turn people loose in it after you’ve cut the training budget as part of the change management process, it’s going to hurt.

Riley Miller (22:43) I think training also goes hand in hand with testing. If you don’t have those opportunities to see what the system is doing and learn… I’m a very tactile learner, and I also do better on a test the second time, because I test myself and learn from the things I messed up. It’s the same with training and testing: you’re getting familiar with the system. Take that away, and picture it like this: you give somebody access to remodel your house, and then you’re expected to walk in the day after it’s done and find your car keys. They have a completely different way of setting things up, and if you have no idea where things were put, it’s like walking into a funhouse. Training and testing are two very low-risk ways of finding out where those things are now and how to use them, in a sandbox environment essentially, where you’re not worried about member data. Then you can actually field those questions when your members ask them back to you: where do I find this, or where do I find X? I think that’s very important.

Melissa Mack (23:40) It’s very important. Riley, I don’t know if everybody knows they can have a sandbox. They can have a staging site. There were some misconceptions that when you moved from iMIS 2017, you couldn’t have a test site. And you can. It just needs to be included in your monthly subscription. You just need to ask for it.

Ellen Turner (24:09) I fully support having a dev site so you can see what happens if you make a change. If you’re trying to build a new IQA, or a new table or panel, or you want to try something brand new, build it in dev. Make sure it doesn’t break something else. And then once you figure it out, move it over to production.

Melissa Mack (24:25) Absolutely. And there was something about the test sites: you don’t have to keep them on the whole time. So if you’re small and have a smaller budget, and you’ve got a little mini project you want to test out, you can have it turned on and off to save a little bit of money.

Ellen Turner (24:51) Yeah, it’s a lot easier to have an oops on a test site than it is on a live site.

Riley Miller (24:55) Okay, so shifting gears here. I do want to lean on the fact that I have two very prevalent iMIS Users Group members here who know this community, and I’m sure you’ve had experience with other community user groups too. What do you think is a fundamental piece of a healthy user group, or a supportive community? What does that look like?

Ellen Turner (25:20) Members helping members. I think that’s more useful than just the organization, the association, helping the members. When members start helping members, I think that’s true engagement and a true community, right? Not just the organization feeding information to their members or helping them, but when the members start helping each other…

Riley Miller (25:44) And just like that, as I said, it unfortunately got cut off because of the internet. So that’s a wrap on today’s episode. Thank you to Melissa Mack and Ellen for jumping on board. If you want to find out more about Intuitive Business Concepts, by all means jump into the show notes. That’s Melissa Mack’s firm. She’s a font of knowledge, as you can see, and she had so much more to share. Unfortunately, you couldn’t catch it here.

If you liked today’s episode or want to hear more like it, go to burstingsilver.com/podcast. We’re on all podcast platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, all that jazz. And if there are any topics you’d like to contribute, or if you’d like to be a guest on the podcast, we have a full roster for the fall, but we’re planning into 2027 and looking forward to that as well. Hit me up at [email protected]. I’d be excited to have you on, or just to talk; there’s plenty to talk about in membership management and technology. So I’m very excited for what the future holds, and thanks again for listening. Have a good one.