About the Client
The Australian Veterinary Association (AVA) is the national representative body for veterinary professionals across Australia. With over 7,500 members, 19 special interest groups, and more than 150 events delivered each year, AVA is one of Australia’s most complex and wide-ranging membership organisations.
AVA’s work spans the full breadth of the profession, from student engagement and early-career support through to advanced professional development, advocacy, wellbeing programs, and national industry leadership. The depth of what AVA delivers is genuinely impressive. Getting members to see and feel that value was the challenge.
Client: Australian Veterinary Association
Category: Digital Systems Review
Date: November 2025-February 2026
The Challenge
AVA approached MemberBoat at a pivotal point in its evolution. The organisation had a strong mission, committed staff, a broad suite of member benefits and a clear Member Value Proposition. What was missing was a digital ecosystem that brought all of that together into a single, seamless member experience.
AVA’s marketing technology was robust and supported by a dedicated IT team. The challenge was that the ecosystem wasn’t yet delivering the seamless, personalised experience that AVA members expected.
This is a familiar story for many associations. As the value on offer grows, the number of systems quietly multiplies behind the scenes. The difficulty is rarely the individual tools, it’s getting that ecosystem to work symbiotically. Members don’t care about the machinery behind the curtain. From their point of view, they’re dealing with one organisation, and they expect it to behave like one. Instead, they encountered separate logins and journeys that handed them off from AVA’s own pages to third-party platforms that looked and felt different.
While some members were clearly expressing frustrations, it was never about a lack of value from AVA, but more about the friction of accessing that value. Over time, the website had become difficult to navigate, with a level of complexity that reflected the sheer breadth of AVA’s growing services and benefits.
An extensive September 2025 Member Value Proposition consultation confirmed what many inside AVA already suspected. The issue was never members’ belief in AVA’s mission. It was the friction of systems that made AVA’s value hard to find, navigate and benefit from.
Core Issues
- Fragmented Enterprise Tech Stack
- Poor Website User Experience
- Communication Overload Across 19 SIGs
- Complex Membership Structure
- Early-Career Member Retention
Our Approach
MemberBoat stepped in as a genuine partner to the organisation, not an outside reviewer handing down a verdict. Our project goals were aligned with AVA’s own. It was to review and optimise the marketing technology ecosystem so that it measurably improved member engagement and satisfaction. That was the north star for everything that followed.
Over a three-month engagement, we took a 360-degree view. We spoke directly with members to understand the exact problems they were facing and what they expected from AVA. And we spoke with AVA’s operational and management teams to understand how the systems were actually being used day-to-day, and where the gaps and bottlenecks sat. Only once both sides of that picture were clear were we ready to put forward recommendations that were customised, strategic and actionable for the AVA team to move forward with.
Mapping the Member Journey from End to End
The review began with a facilitated Member Journey Mapping Workshop, bringing together representatives from across AVA to map the full member lifecycle, from first awareness through to contribution and leadership. The workshop aligned team perspectives, surfaced key friction points, and identified the moments that matter most to engagement and retention.
Five distinct journey stages emerged.
- Awareness and Consideration
- Onboarding and Early Experience
- Engagement and Value Delivery
- Retention and Renewal
- Contribution and Leadership
In-Depth Internal Needs Assessment
Across in-depth workshops and interviews with teams from Membership, Marketing and Communications, Education, Events, Advocacy, Wellbeing, Special Interest Groups and IT/Digital, MemberBoat built a detailed blueprint of AVA’s systems, workflows and interdependencies.
The assessment mapped day-to-day operations, manual workarounds, reporting constraints and cross-team dependencies, surfacing where the ecosystem was capable but underused and where it was creating genuine operational and continuity risk.
Member Interviews and Live Usability Testing
To balance the internal view, MemberBoat conducted a series of member interviews incorporating live usability testing of the AVA website and digital platforms.
These sessions explored how members navigate key touchpoints including the website, event registration, CPD access and communications.
The research identified gaps between AVA’s intended member experience and the reality on the ground, and surfaced what members needed from a modern association digital environment.
Comprehensive Review Report
The reporting phase brought two strands together. The AVA member experience review and the internal needs assessment from across AVA’s teams. Consolidating these into a single, holistic view meant the findings were grounded first and foremost in the member voice, while clearly setting out the challenges and opportunities for AVA’s team to act on.
The result was a detailed, board-ready report. It set out the current state of the digital systems, walked through the member journey across all five stages, looked at each team in turn, and laid out a clear, prioritised list of recommendations. Crucially, it went beyond a simple technology audit, getting to the structures, principles and skills AVA would need to keep improving over the long term.
We also knew different people would read the report for different reasons, the Board sees things one way, the operational team another. So, we produced a few different formats to suit each audience, and packaged the member research as a separate report the AVA team could use on its own. The end goal was to make the insights easy to understand, easy to act on, and relevant to whoever was reading.
The Results
A Full-Organisation View of the Digital Ecosystem
AVA now has a documented, evidence-based understanding of how its systems, workflows and member touchpoints interact, and where they fall short.
A Member Journey Mapped Across Five Stages
Every stage of the AVA member lifecycle has been mapped, with critical breakpoints, friction points and conversion opportunities clearly identified.
Team-Level Insight with Practical Recommendations
Each AVA team has a clear analysis of their systems, pain points, workarounds and dependencies, alongside targeted recommendations to reduce manual effort.
A Three-Horizon Digital Evolution Roadmap
A staged, 24-month implementation plan gives the AVA Board a clear and sequenced path from the current state to a modern, member-centred digital ecosystem.
A Report with Measurable Success Criteria
Every recommendation is tied to specific success measures, giving the organisation the tools to track progress and hold delivery accountable.
This engagement reflects what becomes possible when a membership organisation takes an honest, structured look at the gap between intent and experience. AVA has strong underlying value, committed people and an important mission. This review gives the organisation the evidence, direction and roadmap to close the gap between what AVA offers and what members experience on the ground.
“We came into this review knowing things were complicated, but MemberBoat helped us see exactly how complicated and, more importantly, what to do about it. What stood out was how quickly they got to the heart of it. They weren’t just auditing our systems, they were listening to our people, watching how things actually worked, and joining the dots in a way we hadn’t been able to do ourselves. The report gave our Board something concrete to act on. For an organisation that’s been talking about digital evolution for years, that was no small thing.”
Sarah Bell, Head of Strategic Projects, Australian Veterinary Association (AVA)