A professional membership body with 22,000 members across the UK had a growing problem: engagement was declining year on year. Renewal rates had dropped from 88% to 79% over three years. The CEO believed the issue was partly digital - the member portal was 8 years old, difficult to use, and offered little beyond a login page and a PDF library.
Members were increasingly comparing the experience to consumer platforms and finding it lacking. Younger members in particular were questioning the value of membership when most of the benefits required phoning the office or waiting for a quarterly email update.
"Our members were not leaving because they did not value what we offered. They were leaving because we made it too difficult to access. The new portal removed those barriers, and the renewal numbers showed the difference immediately."
Our assessment focused on understanding what members actually valued, not what the organisation assumed they valued. We conducted research with 40 members across different segments - new members, long-standing members, lapsed members, and non-members who had considered joining.
The findings reshaped the brief. Members did not want more content. They wanted easier access to the three things they used most: CPD tracking, event booking, and peer networking. The existing portal made all three unnecessarily difficult.
We rebuilt the member portal on Payload CMS, integrated with the organisation's existing membership database and events platform. The new portal was designed around those three core tasks, with a personalised dashboard that showed each member their CPD progress, upcoming relevant events, and activity in their local group.
Event registration was rebuilt as a two-click process. CPD logging was simplified from a PDF upload to a structured form with automatic verification for approved providers.
Member engagement - measured by portal logins, event bookings, and CPD submissions - increased by 45% within six months. Portal adoption reached 72% of active members within three months, up from 34% on the old platform. Event registration was three times faster, which contributed to a 19% increase in event attendance.
Most significantly, member churn dropped from 21% to 15% - a 28% reduction - in the first renewal cycle after launch.
