International Society Membership Website

From our first discovery sessions it was clear ISPAH was an ambitious organisation poised for growth — and keen to choose technology platforms that would serve it both now and in the future.

Before our engagement, membership ran on a legacy system originally built for event management. Payments were taken manually, and finance, membership administration and wider communications sat apart from one another.

The society’s existing Squarespace website held some excellent content, but much of it was hard for visitors to find or was not organised logically.

ISPAH also ran considerable manual processes around its biennial congress, where existing members receive discounts and other benefits. Future events needed to be better managed, with details, functions and payments accessible online.

Finally, the society wanted to offer its members genuine online benefits: exclusive content, access to specialist academic portals, members-only communications, and a member directory along the lines of LinkedIn.

We worked with ISPAH’s communications, IT and executive teams over a period of six months to develop a custom membership website that met every criterion. We built it on WordPress — an open-source CMS that provided the platform for a custom membership solution, with room to grow into further systems for payments, communications and enhanced functionality.

We designed a members-only area including a member directory, professional profiles for each member, separate spaces for the society’s councils and networks, and dedicated functions for AGM documents, webinars, congress highlights and access to third-party academic journal vendors.

With the functionality in place, we migrated all existing membership data from the legacy ConfManager system — sanitising inaccurate records and anything beyond ISPAH’s data retention guidelines — and imported it into the new platform. We then rebuilt the legacy Squarespace posts and pages in the new system, working to a lean design system aligned with ISPAH’s brand guidelines.

Simplicity was the governing principle — for members navigating the site, and for the board members running it. We developed a custom WordPress admin dashboard that gives each role access to exactly what it needs: finance sees the reporting functions; membership administrators manage member accounts; nobody wades through options that do not concern them.

We also integrated two payment merchants, PayPal and Stripe, so that anyone in the world can become an ISPAH member.

The result is a clean, minimal interface focused on ease of access and speed rather than elaborate design — built for an organisation that genuinely helps people everywhere achieve a better standard of physical activity and health through academic research.