As a parent, has the room ever gone so quiet that you wonder what is happening? When this happens you ask yourself what your child has gotten into or up to and you are required to go investigate. When my daughter was a toddler, she was so quiet we had to put bells on her shoes to know where she was motoring off to, while my son was the opposite. By the third banging noise, you’d better be right next to him because he would have broken past the child safety locks and into his objective. My daughter would have just quietly navigated the safety locks, and the bells were a necessary precaution.
Our marketing/member engagement, publications, and accounting teams have been like my daughter lately and it’s time to check on what they have been doing.
Website
Earlier this year, the marketing team launched a new website. This was a refreshing breath of fresh air. The user experience is now crisp and easy to navigate. Additionally, they added a “chat now” feature that directly connects you with a live human during U.S. business hours. If you have a challenge accessing information, the team is right there to resolve your concerns. Our customer response times used to average more than a week. It now is in the 24-hour range and would likely be shorter if we were not navigating the world’s time zones. Additionally, we are collecting customer satisfaction scores from these live chat experiences, and our scores are in the “exceptional” range. The customer experience team has embraced this new technology and has been remarkable. We thank them.
But what you might not know is that, behind the website, the marketing team has been changing out the engine of the new website. Historically, the AAPG’s website was built on a DotNetNuke (DNN) platform. This platform has not aged well and required a dedicated programmer to make content changes. We have just replaced this platform with WordPress and now the marketing team can make adjustments to the website without involving a programmer. Our content will now be even more nimble and timely. Additionally, we are able to drop some required technology add-ons to make our DNN platform integrate with other systems. WordPress does this more natively without the mid-five-figures cost of the add-ons. This is a huge win and our project team deserves a gold star for making this change ahead of schedule and without interruption to our members’ experience.
Association Management Software
At the same time the marketing team was changing out the website engine, the member experience portion of the team was doing a great job of changing out our association management software. The AMS houses all our member data and facilitates the membership renewal process. For years, AAPG has utilized an AMS solution called iMIS. We had a highly customized, antiquated version of this software installed on premises. To embrace new modern cloud-based solutions, we either had to spend six figures per year to renew, upgrade, and support a new iMIS instance, or we could consider alternative solutions. We elected to bring on a new solution called GrowthZone by MemberSuite. This solution will save us material software subscription fees while also bringing us some amazing new benefits.
This new solution had one very important feature that we needed: an ability for members to automatically renew their membership. This renewal season, members will now be able to sign up to have their membership automatically renew each June if they store their credit card information on the secure platform. Gone are the days of forgetting to renew your membership. We have also linked the platform to a new credit card processor, which will accept international forms of credit card payments. This will help our members in the regions more easily renew their memberships. Lastly, the new solution will allow members to reset their own passwords without requiring the assistance of an AAPG staff member. This was one of the most frequent requests our customer experience team received for assistance.
There is one caveat to rolling out this new AMS system: When you renew your membership this month you are going to have to reset your password and validate your contact information. Some of you might also be asked for resume-type information. This is because your membership information in our prior iMIS environment was incomplete or grandfathered from a prior system migration. By adding your resume information, you will help us create a more current and complete member dataset. If you are a Division of Professional Affairs or Division of Environmental Geosciences member, you will have to renew this membership after you first renew your AAPG membership. This requires a two-step process, as membership is a requirement to be in the DPA or DEG, and the system cannot be programmed for this logic. We apologize for this inconvenience but hope you recognize the benefits of making this change.
Explorer
The Explorer magazine team partnered with our member experience team to get into this contest for meaningful member benefit changes and has created a digital Explorer reading experience. This new experience is interactive, quick, and easy to use, and allows readers to scale the magazine to a size for easier reading based on their individual needs. On a tablet or a phone, the Explorer reads especially well and allows the reader to turn pages just like a printed magazine and zoom in on figures for more detailed viewing. If you download the magazine app, you can also read the Explorer offline or have articles read to you. (Instructions can be found in our posted FAQs here: AAPG.org/membership/manage-your-membership). Personally, I find it to be a better reading experience than the printed magazine and have been using it for months.
The publications team took this digital evolution further and all past issues of the Explorer have been digitized and loaded onto the eMagazines digital platform. Current and past issues can now be easily searched for keywords and leveraged for research. Members now have the past 40-plus years of Explorer content at their fingertips, and it goes wherever your mobile device or desktop takes you. The digital Explorer can be accessed via the AAPG website or will be sent monthly to you via an email with a direct link to the magazine’s content.
Explorer Digital Delivery Decision
There was also a cost component to the decision to make the Explorer digital. Printing and shipping cost for the Explorer have skyrocketed in recent years (figure 1) and our financials for each printed copy have become wildly uneconomic (figure 2).
As our membership has declined, we are printing fewer copies of the magazine, while personnel costs involved with producing the magazine have tracked with market conditions. Additionally, we have seen a reduction in the amount of advertising present in the Explorer. A lot of advertisers have gone to digital platforms because they can better track the metrics of their advertising dollars. Printed publications do not allow for this same level of direct return on investment measurement by advertisers.
Additionally, in a cost-cutting effort back around 2015, the AAPG Executive Committee elected to reduce staff costs, and this included the reduction of an advertising salesperson. Since this election, along with declining oil prices, our advertising revenues in the Explorer (figure 3) have declined dramatically. This year we have focused more on advertising sales and are starting to see a small rebound. We hope a digital Explorer will help this rebound grow. Our digital newsletters are also capturing both readership and advertising.
The sum of these factors has drawn the attention of the Executive Committee and myself. The 2024-25 Executive Committee voted to move the Explorer to a digital delivery, but never implemented this decision due to concerns about how it might be received by the members. They never retracted their vote, however. The 2025-26 Executive Committee reviewed this decision along with my recommendation to move the Explorer to a digital delivery due to cost considerations and approved this decision. This change will occur effective July 1, 2026. When you renew your membership this month, you will be given an option to receive the Explorer in a printed format for an additional $99/year above your membership dues. This print-on-demand option is provided so that those who still want to receive the printed version of the magazine can, but please note AAPG has provided you with an enhanced member benefit by making the current Explorer issue and all the past archives available to you on an exceptional digital platform. Additionally, the AAPG is not generating revenue from this print-on-demand option. We are only covering our costs.
To ground-test this decision, I reached out to several members and visited with them about the financials and this decision to move the Explorer to a digital delivery. Some had reservations, and others understood. My former college professor and 48-year AAPG member told me that, even though he is retired, he is still sufficiently tech-savvy to manage a digital magazine. He added that most all of his other publications had long ago made the move to digital delivery, and he supported the decision. I hope you all share his same spirit, as it will help us save and redirect these cost savings to other member programs and benefits.
Accounting
Our new accounting partner, CliftonLarsonAllen (CLA), has also been active in helping us modernize our accounting solutions. AAPG has used the accounting platform Microsoft Great Plains for years, but our current license will no longer be supported past 2030. Additionally, our invoice and expense companion solutions were not fully integrated with Great Plains and resulted in a lot of manual effort. Therefore, the accounting team has begun migrating our accounting environment to new solutions. Effective July 1, when our new fiscal year starts, we will transition to Sage Intacct, which will allow for better reporting with more financial dimensions for greater analysis. We will also have automated links to accounts-payable and -receivable platforms with a new streamlined chart of accounts. This will be a significant step change and will help us to continue to improve our operational cost structure with greater financial clarity.
Conclusion
Jony Ive, the former chief design officer for Apple, once said “give the quiet ones a voice.” He thought that a manager’s most important role was to listen and let all their team members contribute and make a difference. At AAPG, our quiet team members have been listening to our members and just delivered better solutions. We have a more modern and functional website, a new membership platform that allows automatic renewals along with international payment capabilities, a new, enriched Explorer reading experience, and a soon-to-be-updated accounting platform, because of what our quiet AAPG staff and partners have accomplished. We thank them for their successful efforts, and I hope you let their voice reach you.