History of OPENAssociations

We believe the one area that clearly distinguishes TCAG from other AMCs is our technology expertise.  This expertise is driven by Brett Wangman, who spent more than 7 years (1998 to 2005) working for several leading internet and software technology providers in the Chicago area.  This experience outside of the association world has brought a fresh perspective to how TCAG has developed its technology platform to provide best-of-breed capabilities at a fraction of the cost. 

Two technology developments that TCAG uses to dramatically increase the quality and sophistication of the technology capabilities available to our clients are Open Source Software and Software-as-a-Service (SAAS).  All of our client web sites are built on top of leading open source content management system (CMS) called Plone.  Plone has been developed by "volunteer" software programmers from around the world over the last five years and its capabilities continue to grow.  TCAG has taken this “free” system and built out a variety of new functionality specific to associations (membership directory, resource library, advertising delivery, job bank, video, etc…).  As we build out new capabilities, we then share this with every client we have, so that all of our clients can benefit from this collective approach.

In addition to open source software, TCAG also uses a variety of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to help us bring new features to our associations without significant up front investments. For example, we recently launched a new Web 2.0 collaboration center for one of our clients.  For a fraction of what it would cost to build a similar set of features, our client essentially rents this system on a monthly basis and gets continual upgrades to the system as part of its monthly fee. More importantly, this new collaboration center enabled us to offer a new advertising channel to service providers, thus helping to self fund these new capabilities.