Nobody Trusts the Data

There is a meeting that happens in almost every association, and it is always the same meeting.

The membership team quotes a number from the AMS. Marketing quotes a different number from an export they took a fortnight ago. The executive director wants a dashboard, and producing it turns out to need three people and most of a week. Everyone leaves believing the data is bad.

The data is usually fine. What is missing is an agreement about which system is allowed to be right about what.

The architecture that resolves it

There is a correct answer here and it is not a compromise between the two systems.

• The AMS is the source of truth for status. Membership status, dues, eligibility, tenure, chapter. Nothing else gets to have an opinion on whether someone is a member.
• The CRM is the engagement layer. Communications, events, campaigns, interest, attendance. It reads status from the AMS and never writes it.
• The direction of sync is one-way for status and only status. Every bidirectional membership sync we have looked at eventually produces two systems that disagree and no way to adjudicate.

Two systems can both be right about different things. They cannot both be right about the same thing, and deciding which one wins is an afternoon of governance, not a software project.

The duplicates

Every association of any age has duplicate records, and they accumulate from a specific cause: years of inconsistent imports. A conference list here, a chapter roster there, a spreadsheet from a committee chair who left in 2019.

Deduplication is worth doing, but it is worth doing after the source-of-truth question is settled. Otherwise you clean the records and the next import puts them back.

The order of work

1. Agree which system owns membership status. Write it down. Circulate it.
2. Make the sync one-way for those fields.
3. Deduplicate, using the AMS as the arbiter.
4. Only then build the dashboard, which is now a query rather than an archaeology project.