How we run a platform audit in three weeksHow we run a platform audit in three weeks

Every MemberWright platform starts with an audit, priced roughly $5,000 to $15,000 and finished in three weeks. It is deliberately the smallest decision a board can make: a fixed fee for a blueprint and a fixed quote. Here is what happens inside it, in enough detail to run one yourself if you would rather.

Before we start

We ask for three things: access to the current systems, including the AMS (the association management system that holds members), the website and whatever else is in use; a list of staff and a handful of members who will talk to us; and the last year of technology invoices. The invoices are usually the most revealing document in the building.

Week one: inventory

We list every tool, plugin and subscription, what it costs, who logs in, what it connects to, and what data lives in it. Then we look for the workarounds: the spreadsheets, the exports, the re-typing, the thing one person knows how to do. Each one is written down with the hours it takes, because the workarounds are where the real cost hides.

Alongside, we read the data. How many member records, how clean, how many duplicates, which fields are used and which were never filled in. A migration is only as hard as the data is messy, and it is better to know in week one.

Week two: interviews

Staff first: the membership lead, whoever runs events, whoever answers the inbox, the finance person. We ask what they do on a Monday, what they dread, and what they would stop doing if they could. Then members: a few who use the portal, a few who gave up on it, a chapter chair or two. We ask what they log in for and what they do by email instead.

The interviews usually surface the same three or four jobs that everything else hangs on. Find a member. Renew and register. See one record with everything on it. The platform is designed around those, not around a feature list.

Week three: the blueprint

We write it up. The blueprint describes the platform in plain words: what members can do, what staff can do, what the data model looks like, what connects to what, and what stays outside (the email tool, the accounting system) and how. It includes a migration plan for the data and a phased launch, usually website and portal together.

It ends with a fixed quote for the build, a monthly figure for running it, and a comparison with what the association pays today across all five columns: subscriptions, integrator, staff hours, and what it cannot do. Sometimes the comparison says stay put. We say so.

What the inventory usually finds

A few things turn up in almost every audit, whatever the association. Subscriptions nobody remembers signing up for, still billing. Two or three member lists that disagree with each other, and staff who know which one to trust for which purpose. A directory that is a copy of a copy. An events tool with its own idea of who is a member. And one person, often not senior, who knows how the whole thing is held together and has not taken a full holiday in two years.

The data read finds its own regulars: members with two records, organizations with contacts who left years ago, a membership category that exists in the AMS and nowhere else, and fields that were added for a project in 2019 and never filled in again. None of this is a criticism of the staff. It is what five systems and an integrator produce over time, and the audit's job is to write it down without blame and price what it costs.

The interviews find the thing the inventory cannot: which of the workarounds people are proud of. Those are the ones to design around, because they are usually the best description of how the association actually works.

What the board receives

• The inventory: every tool, cost and workaround, with hours.
• A data health report.
• The blueprint: what the platform is, in words an executive director can present.
• A fixed quote for the build and a monthly figure for running it.
• A five-year comparison with the current stack.

All of it belongs to the association, whoever builds the platform. Taking the blueprint elsewhere is allowed and occasionally happens.

Who needs to be involved

An audit works when three people give it time. The executive director, for about four hours across the three weeks, to set the questions and hear the answers. The person who does the workarounds, for a morning, because they know where the bodies are. And one board member, for the final presentation, so the blueprint arrives at the board with an ally rather than as a surprise. Everyone else is interviewed once, for half an hour, and gets on with their week.

What the audit is not

It is not a demo, a sales deck or a discount on a build. Nothing is built during it. The point is to replace a guess with a number and a plan, so that the next decision, to build or not, is made on evidence.