David, CEO of the International Association of Fairs and Expositions (IAFE), joined 18 months ago, stepping in after the previous CEO retired. IAFE was founded in 1884. It's the trade association for agricultural fairs across the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and a handful of other countries, providing continuing education and networking for members ranging from major metro fair operators to tiny rural communities.
His board mandate was direct: make the organization more operationally efficient and help build out a real advocacy program. The organization was already under contract with their previous AMS provider when he arrived, and rather than push for immediate change, he spent his early months learning the system and the challenges his staff were already living with.
The Challenge: A System That Couldn't Handle Who Their Members Actually Are
IAFE's membership structure isn't simple. A single person, say, someone running a county fair in Iowa, might also sit on the board of the Iowa Association of Fairs, making them a member in two different capacities at once. About 98% of IAFE's members are organizational, with individual benefits flowing down from the org level. That requires a genuine one-to-many relationship: one person, linked to multiple member organizations.
Their previous system couldn't do it. It only supported one-to-one relationships, which meant the same person often needed two separate email addresses and two separate profiles, one tied to their local fair, one tied to the association. The workaround created real damage: it inflated IAFE's actual membership counts, and staff frequently couldn't tell which of a person's two records was the one anyone else had last touched. Committee history, event registrations, and communication logs could all be split across profiles depending on which one a staffer happened to open.
"My numbers were off because I had an order of magnitude more individuals in the system than I had souls behind the individuals in the system."
Financial reporting carried its own version of the same trust problem. Charges would sometimes appear in reports that never showed up on the actual account, what David and his team came to call “ghost charges”, creating a lingering trust issue with the numbers themselves.
Trying to Make It Work First
David didn't come in looking to rip out the system. He spent real time trying to learn the previous system well enough to help his team use it better, on the theory that if he could master it, he could pass that knowledge down. It became clear fairly quickly that mastering the system wouldn't solve what was actually wrong with it. The deeper issue, in David's view, was support as much as functionality.
"We had serious support issues there. The phrase you didn't want to hear was, we've sent it to engineering. You'll never hear from it again was our feeling."
The Decision to Move
As the contract's end approached, David put the question directly to his team: what's more painful, staying or switching? He's candid that changing an AMS is never painless, comparing it to moving into an objectively better house: the house is great, but moving is still moving. The team's answer was unanimous anyway: they'd rather move.
IAFE attended ASAE's AMS Demo Days together as a full team, and David steered them away from platforms that were clearly out of reach for their budget, no matter how impressive the demo.
"They are brilliant systems, and the reason they're brilliant is because they cost what our annual budget is. If you like shopping for a Porsche, go shop for it, but we're not buying one."
Finding the Right Fit From the Start
GrowthZone caught David's attention initially on budget fit. The relationship deepened through an unusually attentive conversation with GrowthZone's sales rep, Timothy, who worked through a full RFP IAFE had built and used it to pinpoint exactly which GrowthZone platform matched what IAFE actually needed.
The deciding factor was integration depth. IAFE needed several outside systems to pull data from their AMS, and Timothy recognized MemberSuite's integration capabilities as the right fit for that kind of depth, even within IAFE's budget. He guided them directly to the platform built for exactly what they needed.
David made sure the decision wasn't made on his judgment alone. He had Timothy sit through repeated demos with the full staff before committing to anything.
"I made him sit through so many demos. He trotted that dog and pony out for all of my staff. I kept saying to them, if this is not worth it, we're not going down this path. I'm not jumping from something that we're miserable in into something new that we're miserable in."
The Implementation: A Compressed Timeline, and He Doesn't Recommend It
IAFE was working against a compressed runway, driven by their existing contract's end date. David is candid that the timeline was too tight, made tighter by his own uncertainty about whether their previous provider would cut off access early, given how vocal he'd been about their support failures. He wouldn't recommend moving that fast to anyone else who has the choice to avoid it.
Part of the work wasn't just migrating data, it was deciding what data structure actually made sense going forward, rather than recreating old workarounds. Their previous system, for instance, had required a separate custom field for every single year (start-of-25, start-of-26, start-of-27...) instead of one simple editable date field. Untangling habits like that while simultaneously learning MemberSuite's own setup meant constantly checking themselves against repeating the same mistakes in a new system.
There were a few adjustments to make right after go-live, mostly settings that needed fine-tuning once staff were actually working in the system day to day. But the core system worked immediately, handling the basic financial operations IAFE needed from day one. David tracked early adoption through an unplanned but telling signal: the volume of automatic password-reset emails going out compared to the trickle of actual help-me calls coming in.
"If you're a true Star Wars nerd, go to Phantom Menace when Anakin is screaming, it's working, it's working, in the Podracer. It's kind of how I felt the day we went live."
Discovering MemberSuite Was Built Financial-First
One thing David didn't fully appreciate until implementation: MemberSuite was built with finance as a first-class citizen, not bolted on. GrowthZone's Marny, herself an accountant, walked IAFE's outside accounting team through the system directly, accountant to accountant, then translated the details back into plain language for David whenever the conversation got too technical.
That financial depth surfaced a win IAFE hadn't gone looking for. The organization operates as a 501(c)(6) with an affiliated 501(c)(3), meaning two genuinely separate business units processing transactions differently. Their previous system had no way to handle that structure at all, so it had simply never come up as something to ask for. MemberSuite could, without any special workaround.
Rolling Out Faster Than Planned
IAFE had planned a staged rollout, launching core functionality first and assigning staff members as “gurus” of individual modules over time, expecting the full build-out to take a year or more. Instead, the team moved through major portions of the system within the first six months, well ahead of David's own expectations.
The API Comparison
David didn't need to speculate about the difference in integration reliability, he'd lived both sides of it directly. With their previous system, engineers on both sides of an integration would agree a given field should pass data through, only for it not to work when tested. With MemberSuite, a read-write integration with PropFuel was live within a single afternoon. A separate integration with IAFE's event platform, E-show, is currently in progress, with both technical teams collaborating directly, an experience David described as entirely positive, with the MemberSuite and E-show engineers actively finding ways to simplify the connection as they built it.
Small Moments That Added Up
Several smaller interactions stood out to David as evidence of a genuinely configurable, responsive platform, more than any single feature.
During one support conversation, David wanted a way to see actual event registration numbers tracked live against revenue and attendance goals, something the system didn't yet surface natively. Working with GrowthZone's Chad, a working version existed by the end of the call, along with an offer to make the underlying report structure available to other MemberSuite clients (without exposing IAFE's own data) through a feature Chad called “global author.”
IAFE's membership also includes both large fair operations and much smaller, informal vendor-style members, each needing to see different information on their record. Rearranging that layout turned out to be a drag-and-drop change any staff member could make themselves, with no support ticket required.
"When you're a small association working in IT, customizable comes with a bill, configurable comes with a click and drag. And we love configurable."
Staff visiting member fairs can now log visit notes directly on a member's record, visible to colleagues but not to the member, replacing a process that used to involve four separate spreadsheets manually merged into one shared calendar. And when David flagged a minor field-permission inconsistency between two member types, the fix came back within five minutes.
The Relationship
David also points to meeting the GrowthZone team in person at ASAE as a real turning point in how the relationship felt, moving past knowing colleagues only “in the two dimensions of a screen.” What stood out most wasn't that the product was flawless, it's that constructive feedback from clients clearly gets embraced rather than deflected, which David says changes how it feels to push the system to do more.
The Bottom Line
Asked to sum up the experience, David doesn't oversell it, and that restraint is exactly why it lands.
"It was certainly a less painful experience than we had prepared ourselves for. If you're an association professional who's ever changed AMSs, you kind of gear yourself up for a death march through the desert. And it was not that way."
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