Membership Portal & Governing-Body Platform

The Operational Challenge

The association ran its membership on a WordPress setup that had stopped working for everyone. Members found it frustrating and hard to use, so renewals and sign-ups became a struggle. Administrators couldn’t get it to do what they needed, so the gaps were filled by hand — chasing renewals, reconciling payments, managing records manually. The result was ongoing membership problems and a heavy, recurring admin burden on a small volunteer-led team.

It wasn’t a problem more plugins could fix. The platform itself was the wrong foundation for what a national governing body actually needed to do.

Systems Blueprint

We started by looking at how the association really operates, not just the website that was failing. Membership is only the entry point: behind it sit clubs and regions, families and dependants, horses, coaching and grading, events and officials, and real money moving through the system.

The blueprint was a properly modelled platform with clean separations between those domains, built so new capabilities could be added without destabilising the rest. Crucially, it was designed multi-tenant from the start — a shared, centrally-updated core with a per-association overlay — so the same platform could later serve more than one governing body.

The Built Solution

A custom public website and member portal, replacing WordPress entirely, built on a modern stack: a Next.js front end and a NestJS/Prisma/PostgreSQL back end, with Stripe handling payments directly.

Members get a portal for their profile, dependants, horses, memberships and event entries, with secure accounts and two-factor authentication. Clubs manage their own members and team entries. Administrators get a full admin area for memberships, bundles and discounts, content, email, reporting, audit history and import/export — the tools that used to be manual work.

From that foundation, systems thinking drove a steady expansion into the rest of the sport’s operations:

• Horse welfare — records and monitoring for the animals central to the sport.
• Event management — entries, officials, scheduling and a live order of play.
• Grading & coaching — player grading, coach levels, certifications and training.
• Commerce & compliance — payments, orders, merchandise, plus safeguarding data (DBS, first aid) and equality reporting handled properly.

Each addition reused the same modelled core rather than becoming another disconnected tool.

Business Outcome

The association replaced a system that members disliked and admins fought with, with one platform they actually rely on — cutting the manual overhead that had been weighing the team down. Because it was engineered as a proper platform rather than a patched website, it kept growing to manage more of the sport over time. The same multi-tenant foundation is now being extended toward other national governing bodies and an international council for the sport — turning a fix for one association into shared infrastructure used more widely.