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Association website development

For chief executives, membership secretaries and honorary officers of trade associations, professional institutes and learned societies who need membership grades, renewals, governance and CPD to run from one system that reflects their own rules rather than a plugin bent to fit.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

An institute with four thousand members in five grades runs on a membership database bought a decade ago, a separate website with a members area that nobody trusts, a spreadsheet of committee memberships kept by the company secretary, and a shared drive where minutes are filed by whoever took them.

  • Renewal season starts in January: letters and emails go out, direct debit collections are reconciled by hand against the database, and three hundred members whose payments bounced are chased individually.
  • Members who upgraded from Associate to Member mid-year are billed at the old grade because the upgrade lived in an email thread.

Where it gets harder

The AGM notice goes out by post because the system cannot tell which members are entitled to vote, and proxy forms come back as scanned PDFs that the secretary tallies on paper.

  • CPD is recorded by members on their own spreadsheets and audited by sampling, so nobody knows who is out of compliance with the institute's own rules until a complaint arrives.
  • Branches run their own events on their own ticketing sites, so head office cannot see who attended what.
  • The public register of members on the website is a static page updated quarterly, which means lapsed members appear accredited for months.
  • Each of these is a small failure; together they cost the membership team its year.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom association build normally covers:

  • Membership grades with eligibility criteria Supporting evidence and an approval route to a membership committee
  • Applications with references where the grade needs them
  • Renewals with a cycle the association sets Pro-rata joining, grace periods and lapsing rules
  • Payments by card and a recurring collection option through the payment adapter, with each collection recorded against the member
  • A member directory With privacy choices made by each member and a separate public register showing only current accredited members
  • Committees and working groups with terms of office Minutes archive and action tracking
  • AGM and general meeting notices with eligibility rules Proxy forms and a vote with a tally and an audit record
  • CPD logging against the association's own categories With annual summaries and audit selection
  • Branches or regions with their own officers Events and member pricing
  • Policy consultations with member responses collected and summarised

How discovery works

Discovery works through the association's year with the membership secretary and the company secretary: how a grade is awarded and reviewed, when renewals run and what happens to a member who has not paid by the cut-off, how committees are constituted and who may see which minutes, how the AGM is called and who may vote, what CPD evidence looks like and how it is audited. Each of those becomes a named stage in the scope document: apply, approve grade, renew, participate, govern.

Deliberately out of scope

  • Accounting and the ledger itself, examinations and assessment marking where the institute runs qualifications, and the publishing of a journal. Those stay in the tools that own them and are connected where it earns its place

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A professional institute with five grades, twelve regional branches, a council and nine committees, a mandatory CPD scheme and a public register.

That needs

  • Grade workflows with evidence, branch-level officers who see only their region
  • A minutes archive with access per committee
  • A register that updates itself the moment a member lapses

That is a different build from a trade association with one grade of corporate member and an annual dinner, and the scope document says so plainly.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from a walk through the membership year, the governance calendar and the current database
  • A written scope document naming each stage from application to AGM, with what is out of scope
  • Design of the member account, the membership secretary's renewal board, the committee area and the public register, checked on the devices officers actually use
  • The build, deployed to your hosting or ours
  • Migration of member records, grade history, payment history and minutes from the current database and shared drive, where relevant
  • Training for the membership team, the company secretary, branch officers and committee chairs, with a short written guide
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your data

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access, contacts and a look at the current membership database, the website members area, the committee spreadsheet and the minutes drive.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Discovery with the membership secretary and company secretary; grades, renewal cycle, governance rules and CPD categories are agreed in the scope document with a milestone plan.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Clickable designs of the application flow, the renewal board, the committee minutes area and the public register, reviewed with officers who will use them.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in stages: members, grades and renewals first, then payments and the directory and register, then committees, meetings and voting, then CPD and branches.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The membership team runs a test renewal cycle and a mock AGM notice on migrated data and tells us where it does not match how the association works.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Grade rules, eligibility checks, minutes access and vote tallying are adjusted from the review and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Members and history migrated, recurring collections mapped to members, renewal emails tested on addresses you control, the register verified, checklist signed off.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The association runs its next renewal season and general meeting on the new system; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Card payment and recurring collection providers for joining fees and renewals
  • Email providers for renewal reminders, meeting notices and branch newsletters
  • Accounting software for fee income and branch remittances
  • Single sign-on so members use one login for the journal, learning platform or forum
  • Video meeting platforms for hybrid committee meetings and webinars
  • Examination or qualification systems that feed grade eligibility
  • Calendar feeds for committee meetings and branch events

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

An institute with five grades, twelve branches and a mandatory CPD scheme

The situation

A professional institute awarded five grades through a membership committee that met six times a year, ran twelve regional branches with their own officers and events, and required every full member to log CPD against six categories. Renewals were reconciled by hand, branch attendance was invisible to head office and the public register lagged months behind reality.

Why it is a custom build

This needs a custom build because grades, eligibility and governance differ from one institute to the next and are set out in the institute's own articles, which a generic membership plugin cannot be configured to follow.

The scope we would propose

  • Grade applications with evidence uploads and referee requests routed to the committee's next meeting
  • A renewal engine with grace periods and automatic lapsing that removes a member from the public register the same day
  • Branch officer accounts scoped to their region with event pricing by grade
  • A CPD log with annual summaries, a random audit draw and a reminder before the year end
  • A minutes archive where each committee sees only its own papers while council sees everything

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Number of membership grades and whether applications need evidence, referees or committee approval
  • Renewal cycle complexity: pro-rata joining, grace periods, lapsing and reinstatement rules
  • Branches or regions with their own officers, events and finances
  • Governance tooling: committees, minutes access rules, meeting notices, proxy forms and voting
  • CPD scheme categories, evidence uploads and audit requirements
  • Volume and condition of member, payment and minutes history to migrate
  • Single sign-on to a journal, learning platform or other member services
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Association membership package

Membership grades, renewals and recurring collections, a member directory and public register, committees with minutes, AGM notices with voting, CPD logging and branch events for associations and institutes.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

When is the package enough and when do we need a custom build?

The association membership package covers grades, renewals, a directory, a public register, events, committees with minutes and CPD logging through configuration. A custom build is the honest answer where grade eligibility is assessed against external qualifications, where branches keep their own finances, where voting rules are unusual or where the system must gate several other platforms. Discovery tells you which before anything is quoted.

Can the system follow our own articles and byelaws?

That is the point of the custom route. Grades, eligibility, notice periods, who may vote and how proxies are counted are entered as rules you own, and the scope document quotes the clause each rule comes from so the committee can check it. We build what your governing documents say; we do not advise on what they should say.

How do you handle direct debit style renewals?

Recurring collections run through a payment provider connected during the build; the system records each collection, failure and retry against the member and shows the membership team who is paid, who is in grace and who has lapsed. The provider and mandate wording are chosen with you in the proposal.

Can branches run their own events without seeing the whole membership?

Yes. Branch officers are scoped to their region: they create events, set member and non-member pricing, see their attendees and send their newsletter, while head office sees every branch. Members of the region appear to the branch; the rest of the membership does not.

Who owns the system afterwards?

The association does. Source code and data are handed over at delivery; hosting and maintenance are optional and separately agreed, and the system can move to another provider.

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