Most associations run membership with a small team and a spreadsheet. An application comes in through a form, someone copies it into another system, the board approves it at the next meeting, and renewals get chased by hand. I automate that process inside the systems you already pay for, and build the member portal on top of it when your members need somewhere to go.
New applications land in one place, complete, with the supporting documents attached, so nobody copies details from an email into the member list.
Whoever signs off, staff or board, gets the application with everything they need to decide, and the decision is recorded against the member.
Once someone is approved, their welcome email, invoice and portal login go out without anyone entering their details a second time.
Reminders go out on schedule, payments are matched to the member, and anyone who lapses loses access to member-only pages and files.
The spreadsheet, the forms tool and the email contacts merged into one list of who is current, who is lapsed and who is waiting on approval.
Member numbers, renewals and portal usage pulled from the same data, ready for a board meeting or a grant acquittal.
Wild Apricot, Join It and systems like them already handle memberships, renewals and payments well, and I'll recommend one of them before I recommend building anything. The real work is usually the setup, moving the member list across, and connecting it to everything else: your website, Xero or Stripe, and the forms people already fill in.
I build custom where nothing off the shelf fits, which for most associations is the member-facing side: the portal, the resources and the tools members actually use.
A member portal for the Association of Artist Managers, the national peak body for Australian artist managers, supported by Sound NSW. Members sign in with their existing AAM membership login and only current members get in. Live at managershub.aam.org.au since July 2026.
See the full case study →"I feel like I've acquired a uni degree in a few months just from the skills we're learning in this process."
Maggie Collins, Executive Director, Association of Artist Managers
Every build is scoped on a call, with a fixed written estimate before I start, so the figure can go straight into a board paper or a grant application. Larger builds are staged: the membership foundations go in first, and extensions get added as funding arrives.
Everything lives in your own accounts: the domain, the code, the hosting and the member data. Once it's live, you choose how it continues:
We walk through how a member joins, renews and gets help today, and where your team's hours go.
The membership process first, inside your own systems, then the portal and member tools in stages.
Your team gets the documentation and the keys, and the training if you want it. It's yours to run and change.
Fifteen minutes on a call. Walk me through it and I'll tell you what I'd automate first.
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