When we first went through discovery with ISPAH it was clear they were an ambitious organisation poised for growth and were keen to make sure they moved to the right technology platforms to manage their organisation both now and in the future.
Prior to our engagement, ISPAH had worked manually with a legacy membership system that had originally been developed for running events, payments were taken manually and there was a disparity between internal finance, membership administration and their wider communications.
The organisation did have a website on Squarespace which they had been running for a few years and contained some great content, but a lot of the content was not available or listed in a logical way for website visitors to access it.
ISPAH also had considerable manual processes in place for running their biennial congress events which offered existing members discounts and other benefits. They were keen to ensure that future events could be better managed and the event details, functions and payments could be accessible online.
The organisation was also very keen to offer its members a range of online benefits such as exclusive content, access to niche academic portals, members-only communications and a members directory, similar to Linkedin.
We worked with the ISPAH internal communications, IT and exec teams over a period of 6 months to develop a custom membership website that met all of their criteria. This membership website was built using an open-source content management system (CMS), WordPress, which provided the platform to develop a custom membership solution and allow for future expansion to encompass other systems for payments, communications and enhanced functionality.
We developed and designed a members-only area of the website which included a members directory, professional profiles for each member, separate areas for various councils and networks and specific functions for AGM documents, webinars, congress highlights and access to 3rd party vendors offering academic journals.
Once the website had been designed and all functionality created, we then migrated all existing membership data from their legacy system, ConfManager, sanitised all inaccurate data or data that surpassed ISPAH’s data retention guidelines and then imported this data to the new system.
We then gathered all legacy website posts and content from the SquareSpace website and rebuilt the posts and pages into the new system. This was carefully planned and we ensured that we worked to a lean design system in line with the ISPAH brand guidelines.
One key factor to this website was simplicity. Not only for members to navigate and use but for the ISPAH board members to manage the website and carry out tasks such as adding new content on pages, posts and the membership area with ease. In order to do this, Tecology developed a custom WordPress admin dashboard allowing board members access to their specific needs, for example, Finance with specific access to all reporting functions, membership admin access to manage member accounts.
We also integrated the website with two payment merchants, PayPal and Stripe to ensure that anyone, globally, could become an ISPAH member.
The ISPAH website has a clean and minimalist UI that is easy on the eye and simple to use. It is heavily focused on ease of access and speed rather than elaborate design and is one of the websites that we were very proud to deliver to an organisation that genuinely helps everyone, globally, achieve a better standard of physical activity and health through academic research.
