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The 10-Minute Rule: A Better Way to Evaluate an AMS Demo
The 10-Minute Rule: A Better Way to Evaluate an AMS Demo
AMS demonstrations have to cover a lot of territory. Your team probably has a long list of requirements, the vendor has features they want to highlight, and everyone is trying to determine whether the platform can support the association for years to come.
That makes the demo an important part of the AMS selection process. It can also make it difficult to tell how the system will actually perform once your staff starts using it every day.
One way to get a better sense of that is what we call the 10-Minute Rule.
Set aside ten minutes during each AMS demonstration. Give every vendor the same ordinary, real-world situation from your association and ask them to show you how their system handles it from beginning to end.
Start With Something Your Association Actually Does
The scenario does not need to be complicated. In fact, fairly routine situations can be more useful because they involve work your staff and members encounter regularly.
Consider this example:
A member registers for your annual conference. A few days later, she contacts your staff because her employer should have paid for the registration. While she is contacting you, she also needs to change her email address and would like another copy of her receipt.
Ask the vendor to show you what happens.
Can the member make any of those changes herself? What does staff need to do? Where does the updated information appear? Does someone need to enter the same information somewhere else? Can the receipt be generated easily? Does the process involve another application or a manual workaround?
You are seeing the system deal with the type of work that will occur after implementation.
Why Ten Minutes Can Tell You So Much
Traditional requirements are still important. You need to know whether an AMS supports your membership structure, events, financial processes, reporting requirements, integrations, and other organizational needs.
The problem is that a requirements list can tell you whether a capability exists without necessarily telling you how well it works for your association.
Two AMS platforms may both receive a checkmark next to “event registration management,” for example. The staff experience of handling a registration change could be very different in each system.
That difference is important.
A process that requires a few extra steps may not seem significant during a demonstration. Multiply those steps across hundreds or thousands of transactions over several years and they become part of your staff workload.
Use the Same Scenario With Every Vendor
The 10-Minute Rule becomes especially useful when every vendor is asked to demonstrate the same scenario.
This gives your selection team a more consistent basis for comparison. Rather than relying entirely on each vendor’s preferred demonstration, you can see how different platforms respond to the same situation.
Your team should pay attention to the number of steps involved, which staff roles participate in the process, what the member experiences, and where manual intervention is required.
You may also discover questions you did not know to ask when you created your original requirements.
Create Scenarios From Your Current Pain Points
You do not have to limit this exercise to one scenario. Build several from situations your staff currently handles.
Talk with membership, events, finance, communications, and other teams that regularly work in your AMS. Ask them for examples of processes that take too long, require workarounds, or generate frequent member questions.
Those situations can become useful demo scenarios because they connect the AMS evaluation directly to the problems you are trying to solve.
An AMS demonstration should help your team understand more than whether a platform has the required features. You also need a reasonable picture of what working in that platform will be like.
Ten minutes of an ordinary day at your association can tell you quite a bit.
Beacon helps associations evaluate the AMS market based on their specific requirements, workflows, and organizational needs. If you are beginning an AMS search, we can help you build a selection process that gives your team the information it needs to make a better decision.Making a Smarter Decision
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