The Modern Membership Org

Members hand their organizations a lot of information about themselves. Career profile, specialization, event history, courses taken, years of service. Then they get an email back that reads as though the relationship started this morning. Neil Gray used to write those emails, and he never forgot how it felt to receive one.

Neil is the CRO at Datascout. He came at this from two directions: 25 years in B2B sales and marketing, mostly...

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, committee service, volunteer hours, dues payments, emails, certifications. Jeff Spring says that pile is one of the most valuable assets a membership organization owns, and that most organizations have a hard time doing anything with it.Jeff has spent his career in th...

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 association technology, 15 of them as a senior association staffer before she started advising them, and she has no platform to defend.

In this episode she and Riley Miller walk the whole arc. What actually breaks before a leader starts a search, and why trust is the thing...

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 became obvious the informal approach couldn't keep up with how fast AI moves. So the team formalized it: a 12-month AI adoption program called Project Navigate, named at a company retreat in St. John's, Newfoundland.

In this episode, BSI CEO Al Povoledo joins Riley Mille...

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: there's no new principle of organizing, but there are powerful new tools.

In this episode, Chris and Riley Miller get practical about what those tools do — engagement scoring to spot at-risk members and hidden workplace leaders, member journeys that lift...

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 leadership announced a new system out of nowhere. The whole team's reaction: "Wait, what?" On her return visit to the show, Ellen and Riley dig into why the software you're moving to is usually the smallest part of the change. It's everything underneath that actually moves...

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 Silver, and his take is clear: his job isn't to own the culture or hand everyone a rulebook, it's to observe what the team has already built over 15 years, protect what works, and help it grow. That's how Bursting Silver landed its fourth straight Great Place to W...

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 what actually happens. He's a Solution Architect at Bursting Silver, and his take is blunt: a migration is never just technical. Your business drives your technology, not the other way around. Treat an upgrade as a chance to look at how your organization really runs, ...

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 Chief Consulting Officer at Bursting Silver joins Riley Miller to explain why the surface chaos is misleading and most unions are in far better shape than they think.

The real problem usually isn't bad data, it's fragmented data. The answers exist; they're just scattere...

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 Officer at Bursting Silver and the firm's in-house AI lead, joins Riley Miller to fix that with a tour of quick-win AI use cases a membership organization can actually start on today.

Keith covers iMind, the member-facing assistant BSI built for the iMIS Users Group o...

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 veteran of the iMIS community, joins Riley Miller to name the five hidden mistakes behind it: email noise, the ignored once-a-year member, not helping members grow, one voice doing all the talking, and a digital experience that isn't worth coming back to.

Doug'...

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, where seasoned members took her under their wing, answered her "I'm brand new and have no idea what this means" questions, and sent her home with pages of notes. That experience didn't just get her up to speed, it set the course for everything that followed.

Whether ...

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 "demos well but doesn't deliver", and how to tell the difference before you buy
• The practical, unglamorous use cases that actually move the needle: member inquiry triage, data cleanup, auto-tagging and segmentation, and predictive analytics
• How Data Scout took membe...

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 bargaining agreements, it's the nature of membership itself. When someone joins a union, they don't sign up for a service. They join a movement. And that changes everything about what technology has to do.Bursting Silver CEO Al Povoledo returns to talk specifically abou...

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, 15 of those deep in iMIS implementations, and he'll tell you that's barely scratching the surface.

Bursting Silver's Director of Client Success joins Riley Miller to talk about what change management actually requires: it's the project management of the human side...

"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. The honest answer is usually no, not fully, and that's the gap this show was built to close.

Welcome to The Modern Membership Org with Bursting Silver, a podcast about the real work behind running and modernizing associations, regulatory bodies, and unions.In this ...

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 it.

Bursting Silver CEO Al Povoledo joins Riley Miller to break down the pressures shaping association leadership in 2026: the relevance gap, rising member expectations, and why technology doesn't fix a broken foundation, it exposes one.

Al also shares the four-ste...