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For the past couple decades, integrating with association management systems (AMS) has been a very one-off experience, for consultants and vendors as well as for the association customers.  About 8-10 years ago we even started referring to some of the integrations we’d built as “productized integrations” with the idea that; we’ve already built this or something similar for another customer so we have the code and can reuse portions of it to lower the level of effort a little and speed up the delivery of the integration.  This was done with the clients in mind and to better help associations and nonprofits “do more with less”.  We also want to maximize their budgets since we are planning to make money and their mission is to make some level of positive change in the world every day, so let’s enable them to do that faster and more effectively.

Fast forward to 2019, our founder Ben Muscolino, set off on a mission to create a truly balanced company of recurring revenue and services revenue, again with the nonprofits and associations in mind.  This began with AMS Jobs (www.amsjobs.com) a job board, not just for associations, but with the mission of organizing the technology talent and systems focused needs in the association market, “making it easier for people that have specific association systems skills in this market, to stay in this market we love so much”, says Muscolino.

Shortly after launching the association systems industry job site AMS Jobs, association systems consulting including implementation and integration work was still in very high demand, so the AMS Geek brand was born.  Our founders second go-around leading a services consulting company, armed with lessons learned and a clear vision for the highest quality of service.  Specializing in AMS consulting including customizations, business process consulting, configurations, project management and of course, systems integrations.  By November of 2019 the company had over 30 customers and seeing the demand for integrations only becoming greater, the idea that had been just that for 10+ years began to turn in to code.  A middleware or, integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), tailored to meet the unique needs of associations and nonprofits started to come to life and 6 months later, Data Sangria had its first customer.  The team at AMS Geek, the creators of Data Sangria, in their pursuit of validating the need in the market, quickly began to sign more customers while keeping the product in beta-mode, with no brand launch, no marketing, no thinking about sales but staying laser focused on product.  Now in 2022, dozens of successful integrations later, the brand Data Sangria comes to life under the AssociationWire LLC holding company alongside AMS Geek, the flagship consulting are of the technology portfolio of companies.

“We didn’t know it would be successful, but we knew it was important.  We agreed to give it everything we had, win or lose.  Don’t bet the company on it, don’t go too fast we said, but it was too important not to try.  So we did, and the association market has now told us in so many ways, thank you.  I couldn’t be more proud of Jeremy and the rest of the team here, we’ve done something special that will affect billions of people because of the work our customers do all over the world”