Every renewal cycle now carries an unspoken question. Every compliance exam, every board update, every member complaint about a clunky portal asks the same thing in a different voice: Is our organization keeping pace with the tools our members already use everywhere else, especially generative AI?

Before joining Momentive, I ran an enterprise software and payments company in an industry that learned the hard way about what happens when infrastructure lags behind expectations. What strikes me most in conversations with association executives is how familiar the questions sound. Where does our data actually live? Why does this system only talk to that one through a spreadsheet someone updates by hand? Why do we own three products to do one job? How can we relieve staff that are stretched and struggling to cope with an ever-increasing portfolio of IT systems?

Our team’s research into association trends revealed some interesting truths. AI adoption among association professionals doubled year over year, to 39%. The share of organizations with a formal AI policy rose from 23% to 40%. Associations are moving and moving fast. But most of that new capability gets layered on top of a technology stack assembled one purchase at a time, over a decade or more, increasing the fragmentation instead of decreasing. Digital transformation isn’t the act of adding an AI feature to that stack. It’s the harder work of closing the gaps between systems that were never built to talk to each other in the first place.

One of the most familiar versions of that gap shows up in the distance between a basic knowledge check and a real exam. 

If your association runs compliance training or professional development programs, you will likely know this pattern well. A quiz at the end of a course can confirm someone sat through the material. It can’t support the security, question bank depth, or reporting that a serious assessment requires. So that piece gets outsourced to a separate testing vendor. Proctoring is another add-on, another contract, another login. Someone on your team reconciles the results back into learner records by hand, usually in a spreadsheet nobody else can open. Every one of those gaps is a place where something can break and a place where your learners feel the friction. They don’t see your org chart or your vendor list. They just see a program that feels harder to trust than it should and trust is the entire asset a serious assessment program is built on.

Digital transformation, for most associations, isn’t going to look like a single dramatic overhaul. It’s going to look like this: one fewer login, one fewer reconciliation, one less place where a learner’s trust in your organization can quietly erode.

That’s a fundamentally different way to evaluate a technology purchase than most organizations are used to. The instinct, understandably, is to ask what a new tool adds: what feature, what dashboard, what capability. The better question is what it removes. Does this reduce the number of systems my team reconciles by hand every week? Does the data land somewhere my staff is already looking, or does it create a new place they have to remember to check? Does it remove a step for the member or learner, or just move the friction somewhere else? And a year from now, will my team be more capable, or just more dependent on one more vendor? Michael Hammer’s article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate”, written 36 years ago, is more relevant now than ever before. 

Those questions matter well beyond assessment programs. Our research also found that events remain the top priority for 88% of associations this year, even as budgets tighten and staff stay lean. It found a real gap between what members say they want, which is career advancement and job opportunities and what many association leaders believe their members value most. Closing that gap takes the same discipline as closing a technology gap: fewer disconnected efforts, better information flowing to the people who need it, less time spent reconciling and more time spent serving the mission.

This isn’t only a large association problem. Small-staff associations feel these gaps the hardest, because there’s no one whose job it is to be the human integration layer between systems. For them, closing a gap between platforms isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between staff spending their week on member service and staff spending their week on data entry.

None of this requires a bigger technology budget. It requires a different question at the beginning. Before your next renewal or purchase, I’d ask your team to name every system that a piece of member data must pass through before it reaches someone who can act on it. If the answer is more than two, you’ve found your next project, regardless of what vendor is involved.

I took this job because I believe associations and nonprofits do work that matters more than most of the industries I’ve spent my career in. That work deserves infrastructure that gets out of the way. The organizations that will be strongest a decade from now won’t necessarily be the ones that bought the most technology. They’ll be the ones that used it to remove friction between their mission and the people it serves, one gap at a time. 
 

This sponsored content was created by Momentive Software, the leading technology partner accelerating innovation for associations and nonprofits. The CEO Update editorial staff had no role in its research, reporting or writing. Email info@ceoupdate.com to learn more.