AIT — Ten Years Operating a National Tourism Platform

Our flagship engagement. This is the deepest case study on the site — ten-plus years as the de facto technology team for a national association, operating both a public platform and the internal hub their staff runs on. It's the clearest picture of what a long fractional-CTO relationship actually looks like.

A note on the name. The organization used to be called AIANTA (American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association). They changed their name to AIT (American Indigenous Tourism) in 2025. Same group, same work, new name.

See it for yourself. destinationnativeamerica.com is live right now. It's been live for over ten years. Everything you see there — the directory, the photo galleries, the regional filters, the way tribes update their own listings — we built that. And we still work on it every week.

About AIT

AIT represents tribal nations, Native-owned businesses, and tourism groups across the country. They run the national tourism website for Native American travel experiences. They have hundreds of members. They host a yearly conference, manage grant programs, and work with federal agencies all the time.

When we first sat down with them, every team — leadership, marketing, membership, grants — was keeping their own information in their own spreadsheets. Putting together a report for the board meant someone spending hours on a Sunday night pulling numbers from five different places. People were reaching out to the same tribal contacts from three different email inboxes without knowing what the others had said.

The work

Three parts, over ten years.

Part 1 — destinationnativeamerica.com

The first project: build the public website that shows Native American travel experiences, places to stay, and historic places to a national audience. Tribes can submit and edit their own listings. A simple approval process keeps everything organized. Photo galleries, regional and seasonal filters.

This website has been live for years. destinationnativeamerica.com is the directory of Native-owned tourism businesses across the country. We've been making it better for over a decade — adding photos, improving search, building tools for editors.

Part 2 — The office tools

In 2024 we built a second piece of software: a system for the AIT staff to use every day. It brings together:

• Tribal contact records — connected to the public site, with private notes and follow-up history
• Membership tools — renewals, lapsed members, and connections to Wild Apricot and Constant Contact
• Event tools — calendars and tracking who's attending what
• Grant tools — deadlines, who's reviewing what, awards
• Photo library — organizing photos and using them again across campaigns

This isn't just replacing spreadsheets. It gives the team a shared picture. When the membership person opens a contact, they can see what marketing has sent them, what events they've come to, and what grants they've applied for. No more wondering "did anyone else talk to this tribe already?"

Part 3 — The weekly summary

This is the newest piece — and the one that turned us from "the tech company" into their AI partner.

Every Monday morning, leadership gets a short summary, written in their own voice. It includes:

• Outreach — who the team reached out to, what tribes, how
• Membership — new sign-ups, renewals coming up, members at risk
• Email campaigns — how they performed, with the best subject lines flagged
• Grants — what's in progress, what's due, recent awards
• What's happening this week — current news on Native tourism, federal policy changes that affect tribes, new grant opportunities. With links so you can click through to read more.

It costs about two cents to send. It replaces about three hours of someone's Sunday night.

Different people get different versions. The membership manager sees more about renewals. Marketing sees more about campaigns. Grants sees more about deadlines. Same system, different view.

What working with us actually looks like

Most groups we talk to don't need a whole new system built from scratch. What they need is someone who can:

1. Really understand what's slowing the team down — which usually means sitting with the staff for a couple of days, not just reading a report.
2. Help you decide what to build versus what to buy — most "we need an app" conversations end up being about using the tools you already pay for in smarter ways, plus one or two custom pieces.
3. Ship the new pieces quickly enough that they're real before the moment passes — the weekly summary went from idea to working in under four weeks.
4. Stay around long enough to keep things useful — software that doesn't get updated turns into clutter after a year. We've kept this software useful for ten years.

Why this work, specifically

Most companies show up to Native American organizations with a one-size-fits-all approach. It doesn't work. Sovereignty isn't a side note — it's the most important thing. The relationships go back generations. Federal rules change all the time. The technology that works for other companies doesn't always work here.

Ten years of doing this work — knowing the specific information, the specific people, the specific way decisions get made — is the foundation for everything else we do.

Could this work for your organization?

Two kinds of teams see themselves in this story. Membership organizations — associations, nonprofits, professional networks — that recognize the shape: a member CRM, outreach automation, a curated leadership brief, a public directory, all in one place. And any organization with a real platform and no senior engineer who owns it, looking at what a decade-long fractional-CTO engagement can actually produce.

If that's you — whether you came in through Native tourism or through the fractional-CTO door — book a conversation. We don't pitch on those calls. We just look at where this kind of work could help, and where it can't.