Modernising Membership Systems to Serve a Global Engineering Community at IMechE

IMechE supports a large and diverse community: student members, apprentices, chartered engineers, fellows and corporate partners across more than 140 countries. Each group has its own membership grades, fees, registration routes and continuing professional development (CPD) requirements, and the systems that managed them had grown up separately over many years.

Member records, professional registration, event bookings, training and subscription billing lived in different platforms with limited integration. Staff relied on manual exports and reconciliation to get a complete view of a member, which slowed down enquiries, created duplicate records and made reporting to governance bodies laborious.

Renewals and fee collection were a particular pressure point. Annual renewal cycles generated peaks of manual work, payment status was not always reflected promptly across systems, and members could not always self-serve routine changes such as upgrading a grade or updating their details.

Communications with members were sent from several tools with no shared segmentation, so messages about renewals, CPD deadlines, events and volunteering opportunities were not consistently targeted or timed. Engagement varied widely across member groups and regions.

The legacy estate also carried technical debt: ageing customisations, limited APIs and on-premise dependencies that made it hard to adopt modern CRM, finance and analytics capabilities or to scale for a growing international membership.

IMechE needed to modernise without interrupting the services its members depend on every day, including registration applications, CPD recording and payments, and to do so within the governance and data-protection standards expected of a chartered professional body.