American Society of Association Executives

Challenge: Decades of Web Debt, No Map to Show for It

The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) serves more than 50,000 members around the world. Known as “the association of associations,” ASAE is the organization that professionals across every industry, from tourism to healthcare, turn to for guidance. But behind that authoritative web presence was a fragmented reality: roughly 30 websites scattered across incompatible platforms, with no centralized visibility and no consistent governance.

When VP of Web Strategy Keith Soares joined ASAE, his first request was simple: a list of where all the web properties lived. Nobody could provide one. "It was a bit of a wild, wild west," he recalls. "I had to spend the first month creating my own list and diagram. And if I were to print it out, it would take up the whole wall."

At the center of the problem was a Sitecore implementation nearly a decade old. Upgrading to a current version meant prohibitive licensing costs, and every functional web change required paid third-party vendors. "Every update we want to make, every functional change, every design and layout change, all of that has been very challenging," says Soares. Even routine work was slow, and the main site's performance score reflected it: hovering in the 30s out of 100.

The two-person web team had become a bottleneck for an organization whose website is a primary revenue engine. "Events are our biggest income driver," says VP of Marketing Strategy Susan Marchese. "We retarget visitors who come to our site but don't register. The ads follow them and convert. That's driven a real impact on event revenue over the last couple of years."

That kind of performance depends entirely on a platform that can keep up.

Solution: One Platform, One Login, One Way of Working

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Soares decided to go with WordPress because of its ease of use, widespread familiarity, and organizational integration decisions. He evaluated multiple WordPress hosting providers before landing on Pantheon and came away with a clear winner on both features and cost. "I compared Pantheon against all the major players in this field, and Pantheon still came out on top. It had features and functionality, but it was also cost-effective. It ticked all the boxes.”

ASAE has since moved 14 sites to Pantheon, with more in progress, including the main ASAE Center site, currently migrating off Sitecore, and Associations Now, its flagship content hub. The organization chose the Elite plan to host its WooCommerce member portal and storefront, which handles membership sales, publications, and paid learning courses.

Staff across the organization now have direct publishing access in WordPress, replacing a ticket-based model where all changes were funneled through IT. 

With Sitecore, we'd job-train staff for just one specific task and keep them out of everything else because it was too hard to navigate. WordPress has really helped alleviate a lot of those bottlenecks." 

-  Keith Soares, VP of Web Strategy

For Marchese, whose team owns ASAE's event portfolio, one Pantheon capability has stood out above the rest. "We can push-button launch an event site," she says. "We use the Dev, Test, Live process to build out completely new branded looks for our events and hold them in the test environment until the moment we want to publish," Soares adds. "Then we do a push, and everything goes live all at once. It's a great way to do a reveal." 

Results: Performance Up, Chaos Down

The impact has been measurable. Since migrating the ASAE Foundation site from Sitecore to Pantheon, the organization's overall Lighthouse performance score climbed from the 30s to the 90s. The distributed publishing team can now self-publish instead of filing tickets, saving the web team hours every week.

More notably, the platform handles traffic spikes of five to six times average load – events that previously would have brought down critical systems. On Sitecore, surge traffic didn't just slow the website; it disrupted event registrations, publication sales, memberships, and ad serving across their entire e-commerce platform. While the migration had its challenges, the team quickly stabilized operations. Today, member complaints are rare, and performance is dramatically improved. 

"It's very important to the financial bottom line that our e-commerce platform maintains uptime and functionality and earns us revenue," says Soares.

He attributes recent spikes in part to AI-driven research traffic: when the Foundation announces grant awards, LLM crawlers and researchers hit the site hard. Pantheon handles it without incident.

The broader gain, though, is organizational clarity. "One administrative login gets you in to manage all of the sites in one place," says Soares. "Even just in terms of mental energy, there’s no more searching for that project from 10 years ago. We've smartly brought everything into one place." 

For an organization that advises thousands of associations on operational best practices, getting its own house in order wasn't just a web team win – it was a blueprint for the industry.