The Modern Membership Org

Stop Paying to Solve the Same Problem: Lessons From 45+ Union System Implementations

Chris Walton is back. More than 45 unions have replaced their systems through the ACTU's Union Innovation Hub, and he has watched every one of them. Riley Miller asks him

Built for the Work: Membership Platform vs. General CRM | Jeremy Jalie

Jeremy Jalie spent seven years selling a general CRM platform into UK membership organizations before coming back to ASI. James Harrison asks him what he saw from the oth

Small But Mighty: The Two-Person Team Behind 600 Member Organizations

Michele Morgan runs the iMIS Users Group on a staff she describes as "maybe two whole people." That team serves more than 600 member organizations and somewhere between f

Speaking to Your Member's Interests: Personalization at Scale When Nobody Has the Time

Members hand their organizations a lot of information about themselves. Career profile, specialization, event history, courses taken, years of service. Then they get an e

Your Best Analyst Is Already on Staff

Nobody sat down and decided to build a twenty year member history. It happened one interaction at a time. Event registrations, session attendance, course completions, com

Getting Your Arms Around the Elephant: What Association Leaders Look For in a New System

Moira is the President of Ellipsis Partners, which works exclusively with associations and nonprofits on digital and technology strategy. She has over 30 years in associa

Leading by Example: Empowering Our Team with an AI Adoption Strategy

A year ago, Bursting Silver gave everyone in the company access to ChatGPT and started running hackathons, lunch-and-learns, and working groups. It worked, until it becam

No New Principles, Just New Tools: How Unions Modernize

Chris Walton spent forty years inside the union movement and built the ACTU's Union Innovation Hub — a movement-owned platform now shared by 30+ unions. His throughline:

The System Is the Smallest Part of the Change

Ellen Turner has been on both sides of a system change. Years before she became a senior consultant at Bursting Silver, she was staff at a trade association when leadersh

People First: What It Actually Takes to Be a Great Place to Work

Most companies treat "great place to work" as a line on the careers page. Will Cooper treats it as a practice. He's the Senior Manager of People & Culture at Bursting Sil

Data Migration Without the Nightmares: Dirty Data, Shadow Spreadsheets & SOPs

Most leaders picture a system migration as a simple hand-off: pick up the data, drop it in the shiny new tool, done. Des Hymers has spent almost twenty years watching wha

How Unions Actually Modernize: Data, People & the Work Behind It

Most union leaders brace for the worst going into a modernization project; bad data, broken systems, a painful slog. Kevin VanderKley keeps finding the opposite. The Chie

Quick Win AI Use Cases Nonprofits Can Start Using Today | Keith Stoute (BSI)

Most leaders don't get stuck on AI because they're short on ideas, they get stuck because they have too many and no obvious place to start. Keith Stoute, Chief Product Of

The 5 Hidden Mistakes Quietly Killing Your Member Retention | Doug Morris (ASI)

Most membership organizations don't lose members in one dramatic moment, they lose them quietly. Doug Morris, VP of Sales, Support & Engineering at ASI and a decades-long

Community User Groups: Getting More from Your Solution Through Peer Learning

When Ellen Turner started her first iMIS database job, she didn't have a manual. She had a community. Two weeks into the role, she was sent to her first iUG conference,

AI for Non-Profits: Practical Use Cases That Deliver Results

This episode features James Schwartz, CTO of Bursting Silver, discussing how AI can be practically adopted by non-profit organizations. In this episode: Why so much AI

The Union Difference: AI, Trust, and Why the Organizer Isn't Going Anywhere

Ask most technology vendors what makes a union different from an association and you'll get a blank stare. The answer isn't just regulatory complexity or collective barga

Change Management for Non-Profits: The Work Behind the Work

Everyone thinks they know what change management means. Usually they picture a training session or a few all-staff emails. James Harrison has spent 25 years in technology

Why The Modern Membership Org Exists and Who It's For

"We've been on the system for years, are we actually getting the most out of it?" Executive directors and operations leads ask Bursting Silver this question all the time.

Association Leadership in 2026: Relevance, AI, and the 4-Step Playbook

Most association leaders know the word. Relevance. They know they need to earn it, that the old default position is gone. The real question is whether they can execute on