One connected platform for a growing academic society

The Asia-Pacific Society for Physical Activity is a young, fast-growing academic society run almost entirely by volunteers. Its digital life was scattered: a legacy WordPress build on custom post types and ACF, Mailchimp for communications, and files shared wherever there was room. Every renewal, every newsletter, every committee document meant manual work — and manual work doesn’t scale when your team is volunteering its evenings.

They needed one platform that brought membership, communications, finance and collaboration together — and that would grow with them, rather than hold them back.

We migrated ASPA onto Membersites, our own platform built for academic societies — migrating 690 user profiles across from their legacy build and remapping every piece of membership metadata into a properly structured model, then retiring Mailchimp in favour of Membersites’ built-in communications and automation. Renewals, receipts, newsletters and member journeys that used to be done by hand now run themselves.

The standout is the Community add-on. Each of the society’s groups — 25 and counting — gets its own private, permission-controlled space where members can add, share, read, edit and collaborate on files, much like a Microsoft Teams environment, but inside the membership site itself. Behind it, a direct OneDrive and SharePoint integration means committees work with their documents in place, without ever leaving the platform or juggling separate logins.

The migration was only the start. Within a few months of going live, we had also launched ASPA’s 2025 conference website for Newcastle on the same platform — abstract management, delegate registrations, e-commerce and committee management, alongside more than a dozen bespoke tools, all delivered through the Membersites conference add-on.

Because everything now lives in one connected system — membership, finance, communications, community and conference registrations — the society finally has a single source of truth, and a platform built to scale with it.