One connected platform for a growing academic society
About the client
The Asia-Pacific Society for Physical Activity brings together researchers, practitioners and policymakers to advance the science and practice of physical activity across the world’s most populous region. Founded in 2020, ASPA has quickly grown into a genuinely regional community, with members across the Asia-Pacific, six special interest groups and a thriving early-career network.
Its annual conference has become a fixture in the field — Newcastle in 2025, Hong Kong in 2026 — and the society’s open, multidisciplinary ethos makes it one of the most energetic member communities we work with.
The challenge
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.
Our approach
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.
What we delivered
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