Your advocacy platform is only as powerful as the data behind it. But for most organizations, that data lives in silos — membership records in an AMS, campaign activity in VoterVoice, donor history somewhere else. Moving it between systems is a manual, error-prone process that eats staff time and creates lag exactly when you can’t afford it.
In a recent VoterVoice webinar, we sat down with Ben Muscolino and Justin Deragon from AMS Geek, an integration partner that specializes in connecting advocacy platforms to the systems organizations already rely on. What emerged wasn’t a pitch for going big right away. It was a practical framework for getting started without breaking what’s already working.
Here are the four principles they came back to throughout the conversation.
Our Panelists
Ben Muscolino
Founder and CEO, AMS Geek
Ben has spent 20 years in association technology, with roots going back to GR Software and roles spanning AMS consulting, community software, and integration work. He founded AMS Geek to help organizations connect their systems, clean up their data, and free their staff to focus on mission over manual tasks.
Justin Deragon
Director of Growth & Partnerships
Justin brings nearly 20 years of association technology experience to his work connecting advocacy platforms and member management systems. At AMS Geek, he focuses on partnerships and helping organizations find the right integration approach for where they are today.
Watch key moments from the webinar
What Finally Pushes Organizations to Integrate Their Data?
What Are the Quick Wins, and When Will I See Them?
Where Do People Get Stuck?
What Actually Changes About My Day-to-Day Once Integrations Are in Place?
Start with a Data Audit, Not a Technology Decision
Before you connect anything, you need to know what you’re working with.
Ben’s first recommendation is to build a simple data dictionary — a side-by-side inventory of the fields you’re tracking in each system.
”Let's forget about the workflow for a second — let's inventory our data. And all of a sudden, you start to realize the naming conventions are a little different. Let's match those up.
Ben MuscolinoFounder and CEO, AMS Geek
This exercise reveals where fields don’t line up between systems: a “member type” in your AMS might be labeled differently in your CRM, which creates problems the moment you try to sync them.
It also helps you trim: you’ll find data you’re tracking in one system that serves no purpose in another. Removing it from scope keeps integrations clean and focused.
The output doesn’t need to be sophisticated. A shared spreadsheet with two columns — fields in System A, corresponding fields in System B — is enough to start. What matters is that it exists, and that the people who manage each system have looked at it together.
Decide Early Whether You Need Data to Flow Both Ways
Most integration conversations start with a one-way flow: get the data from System A into System B. Where things get more interesting — and where a lot of organizations get stuck — is when you consider whether you need data flowing back the other direction too.
This is called a write-back. Your member data moves from your AMS into VoterVoice so you can run campaigns. Then the activity those members take in VoterVoice (letters sent, actions completed, campaigns supported) flows back onto their individual records in your AMS or CRM. A to B, then back to A.
Shared Hope International, an organization that has spent over 20 years combating human trafficking, built exactly this. Their supporter data lived in Salesforce. It flowed into VoterVoice to power their advocacy campaigns. And then every action a supporter took flowed back, written directly onto their Salesforce record.
”Their VoterVoice data is now unified inside of Salesforce where they can use it for reporting, segmentation, and analysis. And more importantly, this unified data now informs their communications campaigns and messaging.
Justin DeragonDirector of Growth and Partnerships, AMS Geek
Start Small, Then Expand
The organizations that get the most out of data integration aren’t the ones that built the most complex system from the start. They’re the ones that shipped something simple, proved it worked, and then added to it.
Ben described a pattern he sees repeatedly: an organization comes in wanting to connect five things at once. AMS Geek advises them to start with two or three. A few months later, they call back — not to report problems, but to add scope, because now they understand exactly what they have and what they want next.
”They call us back a few months later and say, 'This is working great for us, and we just had a conversation around how we might use this other field.' And can we add that?
Ben MuscolinoFounder and CEO, AMS Geek
Starting small also lets you validate assumptions before they’re baked into infrastructure. You’ll learn things about how your team actually uses the data that no planning doc would have surfaced.
