Software selection usually happens in a small group. Often two people, sometimes one. Then the whole staff has to live with the result.
A slightly bigger room early saves a great deal of friction later. Five roles belong there.
Membership. They know the renewal cycle, the exceptions, and every place the current process breaks. They will use the system most.
Finance. Dues, invoicing, reconciliation, and reporting all touch their work. Bringing finance in late is how you discover the new system does not match your accounting workflow.
Events. If registration, payment, and attendance need to connect to member records, the person running events should be evaluating how well that actually works.
Technology. Whoever handles IT, whether that is a staff role or an outside contractor. They ask the integration and security questions nobody else thinks to ask.
The person who enters the data. This is the one that gets left out. It is often an administrative or coordinator role, and they are the daily user.
They know exactly where the current system fails, because they work around it every day. They will also spot a clunky interface in a demo that everyone else finds acceptable.
Leaving them out has a second cost. Adoption. A person who helped choose a system champions it. A person who had it handed to them resists it, quietly and for a long time.
Keep the group workable. Five people can evaluate. Nine cannot. Name one decision-maker so the process does not stall in consensus.
Give everyone the same short list of scenarios to evaluate against. Otherwise each person judges on different criteria and the debate goes nowhere.
At GrowthZone, we ask who is in the room during early conversations, because the answer usually predicts how implementation will go.
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