Pull up your membership website right now. Go on, actually do it. Now look at your main navigation. If the labels across the top read something like "About Us," "Policy & Research," "Events," "Training," "Governance," and "News" - congratulations, you've built a website that perfectly mirrors your org chart. Which is great for your internal teams. Less great for the member who just wants to renew their CPD log and has forty-five seconds before their next meeting.
I see this constantly. Not occasionally - on the overwhelming majority of membership organisation websites we review. The site isn't structured around what members are trying to do. It's structured around how the organisation is arranged internally. Every department has its section. Every team has its page. The homepage is a negotiation outcome, not a design decision.
We restructured the site last year. The problem is that members just don't engage with digital.
I hear this a lot, and I want to push back on it - because in almost every case I've looked into, the members aren't disengaged. They're frustrated. They came to do something specific, couldn't find it, and either called the support line or gave up. That's not a member engagement problem. That's an information architecture problem. And it's one you can fix.
Most organisation-centric websites don't feel obviously broken to the people who built them. The content is there. The pages exist. Everything is technically findable if you know where to look. The trouble is, your members don't know where to look - and why would they? They don't work there.
The patterns I see over and over: navigation that mirrors department structure - "Policy," "Communications," "Professional Development," "Membership Services" - rather than the things members actually come to do. Content written in the language of your staff, not your members. Internal acronyms everywhere. References to processes that only make sense if you sit in the building. Features and tools built around internal workflows rather than member tasks, so the CPD logging system makes perfect sense to the team that administers it but requires six clicks and a PDF download for the member who has to use it.
And here's the one that really gives it away: different departments are clearly "owning" different sections of the site, and each section has a subtly different tone, layout, and level of quality. You can almost see the internal politics in the page structure.
None of this is malicious. It's just what happens when a website evolves organically around the organisation's needs rather than being deliberately designed around the member's. The org chart becomes the site map, one committee meeting at a time.
I'll be honest - we've occasionally been guilty of this ourselves. Early in a project, before the research is done, it's tempting to use the client's own language and structure as a starting point. It feels efficient. It isn't. You end up building something that makes perfect sense to the client and baffles everyone else.
So the site is structured around you, not them. How do you figure out what they're actually trying to do? You've probably got more data than you think - it's just sitting in places nobody's looking.
Start with your support tickets and phone logs. This is the single most underused source of insight in membership organisations. Every phone call to your membership team, every email to your support inbox - those are failed digital journeys. Someone tried to do something online, couldn't, and picked up the phone instead. If you categorise three months' worth of inbound queries, I'd bet good money that 60-70% cluster around a handful of tasks: renewing membership, updating personal details, booking events, accessing CPD records, downloading specific resources. Those clusters are your priority list.
Then look at your site search data. What are people actually typing into the search box? This is pure intent data - members telling you, in their own words, what they came to do. If your top search terms are things like "renew," "invoice," "CPD," "upcoming events," and "login" - and they almost always are - those tasks aren't prominent enough in your navigation. People search when they can't find.
Check your analytics for drop-off patterns too. Where do members land, and where do they leave? A high exit rate on your CPD page probably isn't because members have decided they don't care about professional development. More likely the page didn't give them what they needed, or the next step wasn't clear. Look at the journeys that start but don't complete.
And then - this is the bit that takes more effort but is worth every minute - talk to your members. Not a satisfaction survey. Not a "rate your experience 1-10" popup. Actual task-based research, where you sit with members (or watch remotely) and ask them to complete the things they'd normally come to your site to do. "You need to book a place on the upcoming regional conference. Show me how you'd do that."
The gap between what you think the experience is and what you actually watch someone go through is, frankly, humbling. I've seen heads of digital go very quiet during these sessions. And I've been in the room when it was our own recommendations being tested - watching a member click somewhere we were absolutely certain they wouldn't, then do it again, then a third time - and having to sit with the fact that we'd got something wrong. It's not comfortable. But it's the most useful thing you can do.
We worked with a professional membership body - 22,000 members - where renewal rates had dropped from 88% to 79% over three years. When we spoke to 40 members across different segments, the feedback wasn't "we don't value the membership." It was "I can never find anything" and "it takes too long to do simple things" and "I just call because it's easier." The portal offered little beyond a login page and a PDF library. Members were comparing the experience to the consumer platforms they used every day and finding it lacking. After rebuilding the portal around what members actually wanted to do - CPD tracking, event booking, peer networking - portal adoption hit 72% within three months and churn dropped from 21% to 15%.
That's not a technology story. It's a "we finally asked the right questions" story.
You've got your data. You know the top ten things members come to do. Now comes the hard part: restructuring the site around those tasks instead of your org chart.
The principle is simple enough. Organise by what the member is trying to achieve, not by who provides the service internally. "Book an event" instead of "Events Department." "Track my CPD" instead of "Professional Standards." "Renew my membership" instead of "Membership Services." "Find guidance on [topic]" instead of "Policy and Research."
Written down, it sounds obvious. In practice, it's one of the most politically charged changes you can make to a membership website - because when you restructure around member tasks, someone's section disappears. And that someone usually has a seat on the committee that approves the website changes. More on that in a minute.
The practical stuff first.
Map your member tasks to journeys, not pages. A member who wants to book an event doesn't just need an events listing page. They need to find the event, check the details, see the cost, book a place, get a confirmation, add it to their calendar, and potentially claim CPD credit afterwards. That's a journey. Every point where that journey forces them to navigate away, re-login, download a PDF, or call someone is a point where you lose them.
Prioritise ruthlessly. You cannot give equal prominence to everything. If your analytics and research tell you that 80% of member visits are about five tasks, those five tasks should be immediately accessible from the homepage and primary navigation. The other stuff still exists - it just lives deeper. This feels uncomfortable because it means some teams get less visibility. But a homepage that tries to represent every department equally serves no one well.
Use language your members use, not language your teams use. This one catches people out more than you'd expect. I reviewed a membership site last year where the navigation included "Knowledge Exchange" - which turned out to be the library. Members were searching for "resources" and "guides" and "templates." Nobody was searching for "Knowledge Exchange" except the team that ran it. Rename things. Use the words members actually type into search.
Design for the return visit, not the first visit. Most membership sites are designed as if every visitor is encountering the organisation for the first time. But your logged-in members aren't browsing - they're returning to do something specific. The logged-in experience should be a personalised dashboard showing the member their stuff: upcoming events they've booked, CPD status, renewal date, recent resources relevant to their interests. Not the same homepage everyone else sees with a "Welcome back, Sarah" banner stuck on top.
Here's where it gets properly difficult. Restructuring a membership site around member tasks rather than departments means having conversations that go something like this:
"We're removing the dedicated Policy section from the main navigation."
"But Policy is one of our most important functions. Our members rely on our policy work."
"They do. And they'll still be able to access all of it. But the data shows that members search for guidance on specific topics - employment regulation, data protection, sector standards - not for 'Policy' as a category. So we're restructuring around those topics and making the content findable through the paths members actually use."
"But how will people know about the work we do?"
And there it is. The real objection isn't about the member experience. It's about internal visibility. Which department gets represented in the navigation. Whose work is "above the fold." It's a turf issue dressed up as a user experience concern.
I'm not being dismissive - this is genuinely hard. In membership organisations particularly, where governance structures involve councils and committees and elected officers, the politics of what appears on the homepage can be surprisingly intense. I've seen website redesign projects stall for months because two departments couldn't agree on navigation priority. Months. For a menu.
So here's how you manage it.
Separate the conversations. Have one conversation about what members need, informed by data and research. Have a completely separate conversation about how internal teams get visibility and recognition for their work. Both are legitimate concerns, but they have different solutions. The member-facing site solves the first one. Internal comms, annual reports, member newsletters, and conference presentations solve the second.
Lead with evidence, not opinion. When the head of policy asks why their section isn't in the main nav, you don't want to be saying "because we think it's better this way." You want to be saying "because in three months of data, 0.4% of members navigated to the Policy section via the main nav, while 12% searched for specific policy topics by name. We've restructured to match how members actually look for this content, and it's now more findable, not less." Data makes the conversation about the member rather than about internal preferences.
Get senior sponsorship early. This kind of restructuring needs someone with enough authority to make the call when departments disagree. If you're a marketing lead or digital manager trying to push this through committee, you'll get stuck. The CEO or a senior director needs to champion the principle - "we're designing for members first" - so that individual debates happen within that framework rather than outside it. Without that, every navigation decision becomes a referendum.
If you're reading this thinking "we need to do this but it feels massive" - it doesn't have to be a ground-up rebuild on day one.
Week one: audit your top-level navigation. List every item. Next to each one, write whether it describes an internal function or a member task. Be honest. If more than half describe internal functions, you've got your confirmation.
Week two: pull your data together. Three months of support tickets categorised by query type. Three months of site search terms. Your top 20 most-visited pages. Your top 20 exit pages. This takes a few hours, not a few weeks, and it gives you a factual foundation for everything that follows.
Week three: map the top five member tasks end-to-end. Pick the five things members do most often. Walk through each one on your current site as if you were a member. Count the clicks. Note the dead ends. Note where you'd have to call someone. Note where the language is confusing. Write it all down.
That three-week exercise will give you a clearer picture of your site's member-centricity than any amount of internal debate. And it costs nothing except time.
From there, you can start making changes. Some will be quick - renaming navigation labels, promoting key tasks on the homepage, simplifying a form. Others will require more significant work: rebuilding the logged-in experience, integrating systems so members don't have to re-enter information, restructuring content around topics rather than departments. But you'll be making those decisions based on what members actually need, not what the last committee meeting decided.
It's easy to file "make the website more member-centric" under "nice to have" and move on to something that feels more urgent. I get it. There's always something more urgent.
But a member-centric site reduces support costs in ways that show up in actual headcount. Every task a member can complete online without calling is a call your team doesn't have to handle. We've seen support call volumes drop by 47% after portal redesigns focused on self-service task completion. That's real staff time freed up for work that actually requires a human.
It increases engagement too - not in the vague "more pageviews" sense, but in the "members actually using the things they're paying for" sense. When members can easily access CPD, book events, find resources, and connect with peers, they experience more of the value the membership offers. And members who experience value don't need to be convinced to renew.
Which brings me to the biggest one. If your renewal process involves a member actively deciding whether the membership is still worth it - weighing up the cost, thinking about what they've used, considering alternatives - you're in evaluation territory. That's where you lose people. A member-centric site makes the value of membership visible throughout the year, not just at renewal time. The renewal becomes a formality rather than a decision.
But we've always had strong renewal rates. This isn't something we need to worry about right now.
Maybe. But the organisations I've seen with the strongest renewal rates aren't coasting on inertia - they've made it genuinely easy to get value from the membership, so the question of whether to renew barely comes up. The ones who are coasting find out when the numbers start moving. And by then, the gap between where they are and where they need to be is a lot wider than it would have been.
For many membership organisations, the website sits behind a long queue of priorities. There's the strategy review, the governance changes, the new membership tier, the conference that's eating everyone's bandwidth. The website feels like something you'll get to eventually.
What I'd push back on: every month your site stays organised around your departments rather than your members, you're generating support calls you don't need, losing engagement you could have, and making renewal harder than it should be. The cost isn't dramatic. It's just persistent. A slow leak rather than a burst pipe.
If you want to understand what your members are actually trying to do on your site, a journey mapping session is the fastest way to find out. And if you want a quick sanity check before that, we've put together a member-centric IA audit checklist that takes about fifteen minutes and will tell you where the biggest gaps are.
The organisations winning at member experience aren't doing anything revolutionary. They're just designing for their members instead of for themselves. It's not complicated. But it does require someone to say, out loud, "this site isn't for us."