Advanced Solutions International sells the other 364 days

A baseball coach may join an association for its annual convention. The harder question arrives after the convention: what, exactly, has the coach joined for the rest of the year? At the American Baseball Coaches Association, separate systems for membership, event registration and educational videos had made the answer unnecessarily difficult. Benefits existed. Getting to them could feel like visiting several clubs that happened to share a name.

In ASI’s account, retention stood at 45%. ABCA brought member records, registration and benefits together in iMIS, introduced automated renewals and used consolidated logins. Its published case study reports retention rising to more than 70%. That result came alongside a change in the association’s approach to engagement. Software helped deliver the change; it did not manufacture a reason to belong.

The season after the season

Advanced Solutions International has built a business around the unglamorous machinery of belonging. Its buyers are associations, unions, regulatory bodies and nonprofits. These organizations need to know who a person is, what they have paid, which benefits they may access and what might persuade them to return. A customer record becomes useful when it can answer those questions without sending a staff member on a spreadsheet expedition.

ABCA’s mobile app, My ABCA, adds another entrance. Powered by Clowder, it puts videos, notifications, educational resources and member services on a phone, with membership data connected to iMIS. The organization’s strategy shifted toward usefulness throughout the year. That is the interesting part of the story: technology supported a more frequent relationship with coaches, beyond the familiar rhythm of the convention.

“Our membership renewals were a manual, cumbersome process before iMIS.”

ABCA Deputy Executive Director, in ASI’s customer case study

One person, several lives

The same member can attend a conference, take a course, apply for an award and read a magazine. Inside an association, those activities may belong to different departments. From the member’s perspective, they belong to Tuesday. ASI’s proposition rests on making the departments’ systems cooperate.

iMIS is the central membership platform. Built on Microsoft Azure, it combines member management with financials, events, fundraising, commerce, dashboards and reporting. Website and portal capabilities provide a route from a stored record to something a member can actually do. ASI calls it an Engagement Management System. Behind the terminology is a practical ambition: connect the administrative record with the experience that record enables.

TopClass handles learning and certification programs. OpenWater collects applications and submissions, then manages review processes for awards, grants, scholarships and conference abstracts. Clowder supplies mobile engagement throughout the year. SpaceMaster addresses advertising, sponsorship and exhibit sales. Each product meets a recognizable piece of association work. Together, they give ASI a broader role than selling a membership database.

The telephone was the warning light

The Oklahoma State Medical Association offers a different example. Its previous learning system could not distinguish members from nonmembers properly for pricing, required a separate password and burdened attendees with complicated instructions. During the pandemic, a free continuing medical education program attracted national attention. More traffic exposed the awkwardness. Staff sometimes needed extra people on the phones after large events.

OSMA moved to TopClass. In ASI’s 2022 conference account, creating an event in iMIS also created its corresponding course in TopClass and a webinar through Zoom integration. The association reported 50% less staff time entering courses and 90% fewer learner support calls in its first year. Those are customer-reported figures, but the mechanism is understandable: fewer repeated tasks and fewer occasions for a learner to get stuck.

Clubs Queensland encountered a related problem. Its website required IT help for updates, and cumbersome registration and payment processes sent members back to staff for assistance. Its iMIS website upgrade introduced self-service and automated event registrations and sponsor invoicing. The case study describes hundreds of manual hours saved. Sometimes a technology success looks like a telephone that rings less often.

Buy the company you already know

ASI began in Alexandria in 1991, founded by Bob Alves, Don Robertson and Larry Testa. Its 25th-anniversary announcement described a journey from floppy disks to cloud software and reported more than 4,000 clients served on three continents. That is a historical measure of reach, rather than today’s active subscription count. The continuity matters: ASI has spent decades learning the habits of a particular kind of organization.

Its more recent acquisitions follow a revealing pattern. ASI acquired WBT Systems, maker of TopClass, in August 2021. OpenWater followed in January 2022 after years as an iMIS product partner. Clowder, another longtime partner, joined in December 2023. These were familiar connections becoming part of the same corporate portfolio.

In June 2025, ASI acquired CSI’s iMIS-specific software products and their product-development and sales-support team. The tools included data imports, updates, scheduling, workflow, communications and integrations. CSI’s services business continued separately as an authorized solution provider. The distinction matters: ASI bought the products and the people developing them, while preserving a consulting relationship around them.

This approach gives ASI expertise at two levels: the recurring needs of associations and the smaller technical jobs that make their systems work. A member app is visible. Reliable data transfer is usually noticed only when it goes wrong.

The subscription is the first column

ASI’s business combines cloud subscriptions with services and a partner channel. Its 2020 investment announcement dates the strategic SaaS transition to 2014. Today's buying decision includes users, selected capabilities, implementation and continuing support. A neat monthly number is only part of that decision.

G2’s public iMIS pricing listing shows $200 per user per month. It also lists iMIS Professional from $7,200 USD/CAD annually, with a two-user minimum, and a one-time installation fee starting at $20,000 USD/CAD. Treat those as published starting figures that need a current, scoped quote. They describe different entries on a listing, rather than a complete budget for the portfolio.

The work continues after launch. ASI publishes support bundles for data cleanup, dashboards, reporting, membership renewal and process automation. Its services document specifies time-and-materials work rather than fixed pricing for those bundles. For a buyer, that puts an ordinary managerial question back on the table: how much internal attention will this system need, and who will provide it?

Take a member to the demonstration

ASI competes in a market with several plausible architectures. Fonteva builds its association software on Salesforce. Novi AMS emphasizes associations using QuickBooks. ASI puts iMIS on Azure and surrounds its membership system with specialist products and integrations. The choice should reflect the systems an organization already depends on, along with the work it wants to improve.

A useful evaluation would follow one real member: join, pay, register, take a course, receive a certificate and renew. Ask which records update automatically, where a second login appears and who fixes an exception. Repeat the exercise with a lapsed member or an unpaid invoice. These are practical buying suggestions, not promises about every ASI configuration.

That exercise also reveals the conditions for a good fit. An organization with substantial education, events and review programs may have several connections worth improving. A small group needing a directory and occasional emails may find much less to justify. Neither a connected portfolio nor a new interface will resolve contradictory membership rules, neglected data or benefits members do not value.

“For life” meets another chapter

ASI’s public ambition is “Clients for Life.” Brookside Equity Partners made a minority investment in 2020. In October 2025, ASI announced a growth investment from Incline Equity Partners, aimed at product innovation, client services and global expansion. Alves said the company had spent 18 months looking for a partner aligned with its values and long-term vision.

The community around the products remains part of the proposition. ASI and the independent iMIS Users Group have announced Emergence for November 2-5, 2026, combining their conferences in Arlington. Independence is a useful detail: the people comparing implementation notes do not all work for the vendor. In September, ASI also launched its twelfth annual membership benchmark survey, gathering responses for a report planned for early 2027.

For an association executive, the most persuasive ASI demonstration may be a member who finishes the task without calling anyone. The convention gets the applause. The ordinary successful interaction, repeated throughout the year, earns the renewal.