The five-subscription problemThe five-subscription problem

Draw the systems your association runs on. Almost every one produces the same picture: a website, an AMS (the association management system that holds the member database), an email tool, a directory or community tool, and an events system. Five boxes, and a tangle of lines between them.

Each box was a sensible decision at the time. The tangle is what nobody decided, and it is where the money goes.

How it happens

The AMS came first, chosen for dues and reporting. Its website builder was poor, so a web agency built a proper site. Its email was clumsy, so someone signed up for a real email tool. Members wanted to find each other, so a directory plugin was bolted on. Events outgrew the AMS module, so a ticketing tool arrived. Each step solved a problem. Each step added a subscription, a login, and a line to the tangle.

What the tangle costs

Count it properly, in three columns.

Subscriptions. Five tools, each priced per member or per user, each rising every year. This is the number the board sees.

The glue. The integrator's retainer or the consultant's hourly rate for keeping the connectors alive. Connectors break when any vendor changes anything, so this is permanent, not a one-off.

Staff hours. The Monday export to fix the directory. Re-entering event registrations into the AMS. Answering members who renewed and still see a lapsed status. This is almost always the largest column and the one nobody has counted, because it is spread across everyone's week.

Most association teams feel short-staffed. Part of that shortfall is staff time spent being the integration.

What members experience

Five systems means five logins, or one login that only sometimes works. It means a directory that is out of date, because it is a copy. It means renewing in one place and registering in another. Members do not see the tangle. They just stop logging in.

Counting it, with numbers

A fictional regional association with 900 members runs the standard five. The subscriptions come to about $2,100 a month. The consultant who keeps them talking bills about $700 a month. Two staff spend, between them, six hours a week on the workarounds: the Monday directory export, re-typing event registrations, chasing members who renewed and still show as lapsed. At a loaded cost of $40 an hour that is another $1,000 a month.

The tangle costs roughly $3,800 a month, or $46,000 a year, and the board only ever sees the first $2,100 of it. Put that number on one page and the conversation about a single platform becomes a cost conversation rather than a technology one.

The number also has a direction. Subscriptions rise, the consultant's rate rises, and the hours grow with membership. A platform's running cost after launch is usually flat and lower than the subscriptions alone. Counting properly is the first step because it changes who in the room is on the defensive.

The two ways out

The first is a better tangle: a more capable AMS with more modules, so that fewer boxes are needed. This helps at the edges. The AMS's directory and events modules are usually the weakest parts of the product, because they are not why anyone buys it, so the extra tools tend to creep back in.

The second is one system. A member platform built for the association, where the website, the portal, the directory, renewals and events are faces of one record in one database. No connectors, because nothing is connected; it is all the same thing. Email and accounting can stay as the tools staff prefer, linked to the platform rather than fighting it.

The sixth subscription

Most associations also have a sixth box they forget to draw: the spreadsheet. It is where the real member list lives, because it is the only place someone has reconciled the other five. It has no backup, one owner and no permissions, and it is the most important system in the building. When the audit finds it, and it always does, it goes on the diagram with the others, because a platform that does not replace the spreadsheet has not replaced anything. Ask who owns yours, and what happens to renewals the week that person is on holiday.

How to start

Not with a vendor demo. Start with an inventory: every tool, what it costs, who logs in, what it is connected to, and what someone does by hand when the connection fails. Interview the staff who do the workarounds and the members who gave up on the portal. Put a yearly number on the whole picture.

That inventory is the first deliverable of a platform audit, and it is useful whatever the board decides. Some associations look at it and stay put. Most look at it and wonder why they waited.