Learn how data orchestration helps associations avoid costly website rebuilds by decoupling content sources from the CMS — so switching tools doesn't mean starting over.
Communities are complex. They are made of people, and people cannot be broken into yes/no statements. They cannot be forced into singular categories, and they cannot help changing, constantly, at all times.
It’s these reasons — and dozens more we don’t have time to talk about! — that makes the work of association management so difficult, especially when building digital tools and communication models. Associations don’t create sites to simply publish a blog post and link to a value proposition — they provide value through content, collaboration, and — yes — community.
Headless and orchestration can help. Here’s how.
What Makes Association Websites Complex
This complexity shows up in three key areas:
- Content access and membership value — If all the content is free, what makes membership worth paying for? Associations need rules around who can see what content, balancing free content (to attract members) with members-only content (to keep them).
- Identity and membership tiers — Beyond simple member/non-member distinctions, associations often have multiple membership levels with different access rights. This information typically lives in an Association Management System (AMS) or Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), which needs to connect to content delivery systems.
- Member-generated content and data — Members aren't just consuming content, but creating it as well. This means pulling together data from discussion forums, learning management, event registrations, research databases, and other sources into one cohesive experience. This content isn’t just limited to the CMS, and it isn’t even limited to “content” in the traditional sense.
The "New Website" Trap
All of those moving parts lead to a lot of complexity for an association’s digital presence, and combining them into a smooth, consistent experience can become a big, complex project.
Because the web experience is the most visible victim of all of this complexity, and the thing that both the association and its members are unhappy with, most projects start with a loaded request: “We need a new website.” This leads to approaching the project as the “new website” project, which means you start talking to web firms. These firms focus on the web experience (great), implement a new design (cool!), and build it on a brand new shiny content management system (neat!). Then they integrate all of those other tools and data sources through the CMS, usually at great expense and complexity. You end up with daily scheduled jobs pulling data from other systems in order to turn them into web pages.
And there’s nothing wrong with that… to start with. But now you’ve got your whole enterprise content stack jammed into a content management system with a bunch of bespoke code.
This brings us into conflict with another fact of associations: they’re constantly changing. Budgets shift, markets evolve, and member demands require new tools. Whenever I talk with association IT folks about their software, there’s always at least one instance (and usually more) of someone saying, “We’re using X, but we’re in the process of switching to Y”. X and Y might be the AMS, the LMS, the search system, the payment processor — take your pick! But now all of that integration code becomes a liability. Switching any one of these systems means new content models, new templates, new import scripts — basically starting from zero with the integration work for that system.
A Better Approach: Orchestration First
To get around this headache, we need to take a step back; our “new website” shouldn’t be the center of the universe. To deliver a great and consistent digital experience to our members, we need a great and consistent representation of our data — one that’s not tied to a specific platform, but instead represents how our association thinks and organizes information. We can then use that representation to power all of our digital platforms.
This is where data orchestration platforms come in. These tools sit between your data sources and your digital platforms, providing a consistent representation of your data and content that can handle production-level traffic and making it easier to switch to different back-end systems. Tools like Enterspeed, Umbraco Compose, or Optimizely Content Graph consume data from all of these sources and represent it as one big API that you control — not your technology vendors.
How It Works: An Event Management Example
Let’s look at an example of how this works with something like event management. Suppose we’re currently managing our events with Eventbrite, and want to provide a custom experience on our website to list them.
The CMS-First Approach
Under a CMS-first approach, a developer looks at what we need to show for an event and creates a content model in the CMS. This might include:
- Event title
- Speaker name
- Venue name
- Date
- Time
- Registration link
- Description
- Tags
The developer then builds an event page template in the CMS to match the design, and creates a daily scheduled task that pulls from Eventbrite’s API, lists all events, and creates a corresponding event page in the CMS for each one.
Everything works, but the whole process — from import to display — is built around Eventbrite. We’ve created a tightly coupled system.
