The most underused asset in your AMS selection process
When Alison Grundle began building the Global Network of Irish Studies (GNIS), she faced a platform selection challenge unlike almost any other. The network had no existing members, no inherited processes, no accumulated workarounds — every decision about what the platform needed to do had to be reasoned from scratch. What are members here to do? What does this community need to enable? What will only become clear once the network starts to form? Without a decade of process history to model from, Grundle had to approach the selection differently, and what she found was that one of the most valuable things ReadyMembership brought to the table wasn’t in the feature list at all.
It’s very difficult to envisage things that don’t already exist. One of the most attractive features of ReadyMembership is the ability to create and launch a platform that meets our needs right now, knowing we have the ability to grow functionality as our organization develops and we have a better understanding of how we will work.
What made that possible was a vendor willing to suggest requirements GNIS hadn’t yet articulated, drawing on patterns seen across hundreds of comparable organizations. As Grundle put it, the upgrade path for the platform brings forward functionality she wouldn’t have thought of on her own, but could take advantage of as the network developed. She was equally direct about what that relationship amounted to.
I think Pixl8 know more about membership organisations than I do.
Coming from someone with a substantial membership background, that’s not a concession of defeat. It’s a description of what a genuine partnership makes available. GNIS is an unusual case, but the underlying point applies to any organization approaching a platform selection. Most AMS procurement processes are designed to evaluate capability, not to access expertise, and that gap is where a lot of the disappointment comes from.
What most briefs don’t ask for
A platform built specifically for membership organizations over many years carries with it something that rarely features in procurement documents: accumulated sector knowledge. The vendor has seen hundreds of implementations across professional associations, trade bodies, learned societies, and not-for-profits, watched organizations make the same mistakes, and built those learnings into how the product works and how implementations are run.
That accumulated knowledge is one of the most valuable things an AMS selection process can access, and yet most processes treat vendors as respondents rather than as a source of it, asking them to confirm that they can do X, rather than inviting them to reflect on whether X is actually the right approach. The consequence is that organizations finish procurement having evaluated platforms against their own assumptions without ever really testing those assumptions, and only find out during implementation which of their requirements were well-formed and which were quietly carrying the constraints of the old system along with them.
What openness to vendor knowledge actually looks like
The practical version of this isn’t complicated, though it does require a shift in how procurement conversations are structured: asking vendors not just what they can do, but what they’ve seen work and what they’ve seen fail, sharing operational challenges rather than just a feature list, and being genuinely curious about how a platform built specifically for your sector has shaped its product around the problems it keeps encountering.
Andrea Spencer, Director of Communications at the American Association of Professional Landmen (AAPL), described what that looks like from the inside. AAPL came into the evaluation with a decade of accumulated processes on their previous platform, workflows that had been adapted to work around system limitations until they felt normal.
We came in saying we’re not married to our processes. If we can make things better, that’s great. And there were a lot of places where they said, what if you did it this way? And it was like, yes, let’s do that.
The result of that openness was an implementation that didn’t just replicate what AAPL had before. It transformed a certification program that had become an administrative burden, consolidated six separate platforms into one, and saved over $200,000 in annual technology costs, none of which was in the original brief. It became possible because the vendor was treated as a participant in the problem-solving rather than a respondent to a specification.
The procurement neutrality trap
There’s a reason this doesn’t happen more often. Procurement processes are designed to protect against bias, to ensure vendors are evaluated on equal terms, without any one of them having undue influence over the brief. That’s a reasonable principle, but it can tip into a kind of defensiveness that treats vendor input as a threat rather than a resource. When vendors are kept at arm’s length during scoping, the organization’s assumptions go untested, and the brief that results reflects what the internal team believes is needed (shaped by the system they already have) rather than drawing on the accumulated knowledge the vendor could bring to bear on the actual problem.
The organizations that get platform selection right tend to make a distinction between influence over the brief and input into it. Hearing from vendors about what has worked for comparable organizations, what the common failure modes are in a migration of this kind, or what questions most associations forget to ask: none of that compromises the integrity of the evaluation. It makes the evaluation better informed.
A more useful relationship from the start
None of this is an argument for dispensing with structured procurement. Comparing platforms systematically, checking references, and understanding contractual terms and support arrangements all matter, but those steps are most valuable when the organization has already had a more honest conversation about what it actually needs, one that draws on the vendor’s knowledge of the sector rather than treating that knowledge as something to be held at a safe distance.
The platform selection that produces an outcome the organization is still satisfied with three years later tends to be the one that was approached as a genuine conversation, not a one-way evaluation. That starts with being willing to ask vendors not just what they can do, but what they think you should be asking that you’re not.
ReadyMembership is built on more than 25 years of membership sector experience, and we bring that knowledge into every conversation. If you’re beginning a platform selection and want to think through the right questions, talk to our team.
