Buying vs. Building Your Association Management Software
You think you’re ready to build your own AMS?
You’ve scoured the marketplace.Your team looked all over the web, attended trade shows, and maybe even went through the whole RFP process with potential vendors. But as you may have found, there isn’t one perfect association management software (AMS) solution out there that can do it all. Your executive team won’t discover one software tool that can do everything you need for your association.
However, what you will be able to find is the one tool that can serve as a core, centralized database of record. There are software solutions “off the shelf” or “out of the box” that can work for 90% of the functionality your association needs. Then you have to make a choice: does it make sense to customize the last 10% of functionality you need for your existing processes, or do you tailor your processes around the software? Your association will need to analyze the value and associated costs
Either way, it will be easier than trying to make the investment in building your own custom system. There are other, rather expensive, items to consider. Does it have features and functionality that can scale with your organization? Do you have the ability to maintain the AMS internally from a staff, hardware and software perspective, not to mention all the PCI and security issues? What about the cost of upgrades? No one knows initially but it will be a huge cost for you to take these on internally.
Thinking about these questions, are you really setting yourself up for success? In MemberSuite’s new whitepaper – Buying vs. Building Your AMS – we discuss why an “out of the box” solution is the best option for your association’s management system. We also discover how the shift to cloud, where AMS systems exist as SaaS technology, presents extensive opportunities to associations.
Your staff should focus on its core values, and building software is not one of them. If you’re willing to buy software “out of the box” instead of trying to build your own, your association’s technology will receive regular updates and at a lower total cost of ownership. That’s the power of SaaS.