Back when we build our first marketplace, I remember looking at the payments problem and feeling genuinely stumped. You have buyers on one side and sellers on the other. Money needs to flow between them, split correctly, land in the right accounts, handle refunds, comply with rules in different countries,
A community leader said something to me a while back that I haven't been able to shake. Their back door was bigger than their front door. They were brilliant at getting people in. Events full, campaigns landing, the dashboard looking healthy enough to keep the board happy. But
A membership director told me recently that her renewal rate was "about 82%, give or take." Give or take. That phrase stuck with me, because it wasn't her fault. She genuinely couldn't tell me. The number moved every time finance ran it one way
There are two types of membership dashboards I see association membership leaders using: 1. Archaic. It's a spreadsheet. It's rarely updated, it's awful to look at, and it's hard to work out what's going on. 2. Something beautiful. Ring graphs
A CMS held together with plugins. A CRM that half-talks to the website. A renewal flow that only one person in finance truly understands. A comms lead hand-coding HTML because the theme won't bend. This is a conversation I have with membership managers all the time.
I gave a talk at a developer conference last week. A thousand people in Amsterdam. The topic was Laravel, the framework we use to build platforms. But my talk wasn't about code. It was about hospitality. I spoke about three industries that obsess over how they treat people.
Recently i've been working alongside a membership organisation looking to increase their onboarding conversion rates. While I can bring best practices and UX thoughts to the table.... If your prospective members or customer can’t answer this, they won’t join and if your current members forget it,
"I'm currently on the Mont Vallon lift in Meribel, how long is the red and black off this lift. Tell me about them". This was a question I asked ChatGPT last week, while skiing. At work, and at home, i'd be shocked if you&
I’ll let you in on a secret, not every membership organisation needs a bespoke membership platform. Here’s a comparison: not every business needs to own an event space. Most are perfectly fine renting a venue. That’s what using an off-the-shelf platform is. It’s renting.
Summer’s drawing to a close, and as the mornings are crisp and dimmer, I’ve been reflecting on the events I’ve attended, people I’ve met and incredible work we’ve delivered. In a meta-moment, Christina Hug’s talk at CMX stands out. Christina spoke about designing
I recently had the chance to speak with Jake McKee, who is a principal consultant, who has worked with or for the likes of LEGO, Apple and many more.
When I speak with Australians in the tech space, there's one brand they're incredibly proud is from down-under... Canva. I had the chance to chat with Canva’s Celine Riemenschneider to chat about how timing makes or breaks community engagement. When someone be comes aware