The Modern Membership Org

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...

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 da...

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-facin...

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 experienc...

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...

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, an...

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 Silv...

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 require...

"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 modernizin...

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...

Super excited about our Bursting Silver podcast upcoming launch, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on the amazing conversations we have on the way.