If your members are filling out the same form for the third time, receiving emails about events they already attended, or speaking to staff who can’t see their full history, the problem isn’t your team. It’s your data.
In our recent webinar, Zentso’s Co-Founder and CRO, Jyoti Hull-Jurkovic, and Head of Consulting in AP, Andrew Newnham explored why data silos are one of the most damaging (and most overlooked) challenges facing associations today, and what to do about them.
How data silos form
Silos tend to form over time. You added an events platform because your AMS didn’t quite do events well enough. You brought in an email marketing tool because you needed more sophisticated campaigns. Each choice made sense at the time.
The problem is that over time, none of these systems are talking to each other properly. Data then ends up being spread across platforms.
The real cost: members and staff both feel it
Data silos show up in two places: in the member experience and in your team’s daily workload.
For members, fragmented data results in them feeling like your association doesn’t quite understand who they are. They re-enter their details. They receive irrelevant communications. They speak to a staff member who has a different record to the one in the AMS. Over time, this can slowly chip away at a member’s trust and leads to members who choose not to renew.
For staff, the cost is time and confidence. Teams spend hours reconciling data between systems, exporting from one platform and importing into another, and second-guessing which figure is actually correct. When leadership can’t trust the numbers, it becomes harder to make good decisions. In addition, when your data doesn’t give you early warning signals, you only find out a member is disengaging when it’s already too late!
What a Single Source of Truth actually means
A Single Source of Truth means one authoritative member record that every tool in your ecosystem reads from and writes back to.
When your email platform sends a message, it reads from that record. When your events platform processes a registration, it updates that record. When your finance system processes a renewal, it reflects in that record – in real time, or as close to it as possible.
It’s also worth being clear about what a Single Source of Truth isn’t. It’s not a one-time data migration. It’s not just buying a new AMS and it’s not only for large associations. In fact, lean teams benefit most, because every hour saved on manual reconciliation is felt immediately.
Maintaining a Single Source of Truth is as much a cultural challenge as a technical one. New staff, shifting priorities, and political pressures within organisations can quickly erode progress if data governance isn’t built into how the organisation operates day to day.
Check out our post ‘What is a single source of truth?’
The three components every association needs
Getting to a Single Source of Truth in practice requires three things working together.
1. AMS system
Your AMS should be the system your whole team trusts above all others. It’s the place every member record lives, and where every other tool points back to.
2. Integration layer
This is what most associations are either missing or have executed poorly. Rather than weekly exports or manual data entry, your integration layer keeps your specialist tools (email marketing, events, finance, learning management) in sync with your AMS automatically. Cloudtoolz is built specifically for this, connecting your AMS to third-party platforms without custom code and without charging per transaction.
3. Analytics and insights
Once your data is unified, you can actually use it. For example, with engagement scoring, retention risk signals, renewal dashboards, and reporting. However, these all depend on having one clean, trusted data set to work from.
Extend your system without customisation
One of the most common traps associations fall into is customising their AMS to fill gaps rather than connecting the right specialist tools. Every customisation adds technical debt and upgrades can become risky. You become dependent on whoever wrote the code and you end up paying for complexity you didn’t need.
The smarter approach is to use your AMS as it was designed to be used and connect specialist tools via an integration layer for everything else (like Cloudtoolz). This keeps your system upgradeable, supportable, and maintainable by your own team.
Your four-step action plan for minimising data silos
1. Audit your systems
List every tool your team uses and ask, for each one: does this data make it back to the AMS? If the answer is no, or only manually, that’s a gap worth noting.
2. Find your biggest pain points
Talk to staff about what they do manually that should be automatic. Listen to members at events. Friction in the member experience is often a data silo in disguise.
3. Prioritise one integration
Pick the gap that would have the biggest impact on your team or your members, and fix that one first.
4. Evaluate with intention
The next time any new tool comes up for consideration, make integration and data ownership non-negotiable questions from day one.
Final thoughts
The associations making the most progress aren’t the ones that solved everything at once. They started with one pain point, fixed it, and built from there – not treating eliminating data silos as a project, but as part of how the organisation runs.
If you’d like to understand where your association currently stands, our digital maturity assessment gives you a clear picture of your current maturity level. It covers areas including data silos, integration, and AI readiness, and gives you a clear picture of where your organisation currently stands and where to focus next.
Take the digital maturity assessment
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