A membership
engine that
runs itself.
A national member-based trade association was running its membership on a chain of disconnected manual steps. The studio replaced the whole chain with a single self-hosted platform — a role-aware onboarding flow, automated payments, a member portal, and a self-renewing billing cycle — that carries a member through their entire lifecycle without anyone touching it.
A redesign on the surface. A systems problem underneath.
The engagement began as a website refresh. But the real friction wasn't the design — it was what happened after someone decided to join.
Membership ran as a relay of separate, manual tasks. A form collected names in one place. A spreadsheet held them somewhere else. Payment was a link sent by hand. Confirmations, portal access, and the newsletter list were each their own job, done by a person, every single time. Nothing spoke to anything else.
Every new member was a series of small manual handoffs waiting to be dropped.
The job, properly understood, wasn't to make the pages prettier. It was to design the connective tissue — to turn a fragile chain of human steps into one system that ran on its own.
From a broken chain to one flow.
The same journey, two architectures. Toggle between the process that existed and the system that replaced it.
Six disconnected tools and a person in the middle of every step. Each handoff is a place the process can stall, double up, or quietly fail.
One system, one path, almost nothing touched by hand. The renewal loop means it doesn't just onboard a member once — it carries them year after year.
The actual system, not a mockup.
A look at the working platform — the public site, the onboarding flow, and the system behind them.
A platform, not a plugin.
Member-facing
- A 19-question conditional onboarding flow, powered by Lygotype — the studio's own form platform
- Four membership paths (Individual, Student, Corporate, Ambassador), each routed automatically
- Automated payment with Stripe, plus e-transfer and offline paths
- Secure member portal with magic-link sign-in
- Automatic welcome, payment and renewal emails
Behind the scenes
- A member database as the single source of truth
- An orchestration layer connecting form, payment, database and email
- An admin backend for managing members
- An automated feed into the association's newsletter tool
- A self-renewing billing lifecycle, with reminders a month ahead
- Self-hosted on infrastructure the studio owns outright
Software like this is normally rented by the month. This was built to be owned.
Architecture before aesthetics.
The instinct on a project like this is to start with how it looks. The studio started with how it moves — mapping the full member lifecycle first, then designing the pieces to serve it.
It was built twice, on purpose. The first version proved the flow end to end on a workable stack. The second rebuilt it on a cleaner, fully-owned foundation — swapping in the studio's own form platform and a leaner automation layer — once it was clear exactly what the organisation needed. Knowing when to rebuild rather than patch is part of the craft.
Every off-the-shelf shortcut was weighed against a cost: a monthly subscription, a transaction fee, a platform that owns your data and raises its price when it likes. The decision was to build on free and open foundations and self-host the result, so the only real cost was the hosting — and everything it ran on belonged to the client, not to a vendor.
That is the throughline of the studio: infrastructure you own, performance you can measure, and no quiet dependence on someone else's platform.