Reggie Henry, CAE, who recently announced his moving on from Chief Information and Performance Excellence Officer at ASAE, said something in a recent Associations Now piece that I keep coming back to: “The number of associations that haven’t changed their website in eight years is staggering. That’s technology debt, and it costs you, because you’re forcing members to interact with experiences that no longer match what they expect.”
The more I sit with that observation, the more I think technology debt in associations is less a technology problem than an organizational honesty problem. The platform is old because a lot of folks have feared how big or what kind of a conversation, plan, and action it would take to fix it.
The harder question underneath technology debt is this: what is the organization’s actual tolerance for member friction? Because every outdated system produces friction somewhere.
What Technology Debt Actually Is
Technology debt is what accumulates when you keep using systems built for a previous version of your organization’s needs.
It’s not just old software. It’s the manual workarounds that developed because the software can’t do what you actually need. It’s the institutional knowledge locked in one person’s head about how to make a system behave. It’s the data that lives in three places and doesn’t match across any of them.
Too many associations have some version of all three.
The AMS implemented in 2014 that’s been patched rather than replaced. The email platform the current staff didn’t choose and doesn’t fully understand. The website that requires a vendor ticket to update a page that should take thirty seconds. None of that is catastrophic on its own. However, the accumulation of those things is what becomes expensive.
Why It Persists
Technology debt persists in associations for reasons that are completely understandable – usually circling short-term big costs, “we just got this and figured out how to use it,” and/or human capacity related, i.e., too busy for that background shadow layer of work needed to get a new system up and running while also keeping the current day-to-day running as well.
And even those reasons don’t account for the cost of addressing it being visible (which can lead to uncomfortable public criticism), while the cost of ignoring it is not and therefore feels … better? Nicer, perhaps?
A platform migration has a price tag that shows up in a budget conversation. On the other side, the hours spent on manual workarounds, the member experiences that quietly degraded, and the staff turnover that came partly from working in systems that made the job harder than it needed to be — those costs are real but they don’t show up on a line item. Usually, they’re conveniently explained away in individual vacuums rather than allowed to illuminate the larger issue.
In that light, technology decisions in small associations are also often made under tolerable conditions that don’t favor good long-term thinking. A platform gets chosen because it’s what the previous ED used with just enough success to make it seem like a great fit (even when it might not have been). A vendor relationship continues because switching is complicated and the current situation seems reasonable enough.
Tolerable is the enemy of good in these spots, and in organizations running lean, tolerable tends to win a lot of budget conversations.
And this is the one I find most worth being honest about: a lot of association leaders, especially those who came up through program or governance tracks rather than operations or technology, aren’t entirely sure what good looks like. They confuse “it seems to work fine?” with true high-level quality.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s a gap the sector hasn’t done enough to address at the professional development level.
What I’ve Learned From Being Inside It
I don’t come at any of this from a technology background. I come at it from marketing and communications, which means I’ve spent a lot of time working around systems that weren’t built for what I needed them to do. What that experience has taught me is that the technology conversation in most associations needs to happen at the level of member experience before it happens at the level of platform selection.
The question isn’t “should we replace our AMS” — it’s “what are members trying to do when they interact with us digitally, and what is the current technology making harder than it should be?” That question surfaces the debt faster than any audit, because it starts with the member needs ask rather than the system. It also tends to produce a clearer case for investment, because it’s in language that boards and leadership teams can actually engage with.
Past that, I don’t have a clean answer for how associations with limited budgets and limited technical staff all can and should close that gap. I don’t think anyone does. What I do think is that the first step is categorizing the debt correctly — not as a technology problem to be solved but as an organizational choice that has been made, implicitly, every year the conversation didn’t happen.
The Harder Question
The harder question underneath technology debt is this: what is the organization’s actual tolerance for member friction? Because every outdated system produces friction somewhere.
A website that hasn’t been updated in eight years is producing friction every time a member tries to navigate it and can’t. A renewal process that requires a phone call vs. quick self-management with a couple of clicks is producing friction every time a member decides the renewal isn’t worth the effort.
That friction has a cost that most staff would be able to identify. It’s just a cost that’s easier to defer than to measure.
Knowing what you’re choosing to defer and what it’s costing — honestly, not optimistically — seems like the minimum honest position. What you do with that knowledge is an organizational decision, and I think most associations would make different choices if the deferred cost were more visible or tangible than it usually tends to be.
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