AUSTAT
AUSTAT put one of the most demanding briefs we have seen from a professional society out to tender: tiered member access, a find-a-teacher directory, eLearning, a digital library and self-service membership upgrades, all run by volunteers. We won the tender and delivered a platform their Chair says "surpasses expectations".
A tendered WordPress build that gave Australia's Alexander Technique teachers tiered member access, a proximity-based teacher directory and self-service upgrades, delivered on time and on budget by the Chair's own account.
The Challenge
What we were solving
The Australian Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (AUSTAT) is the professional body for qualified Alexander Technique teachers, representing its members in public and setting the training standard for new teachers. It is a small society with a big remit: raise community awareness of a subtle, education-based method for easing chronic pain and improving how people move, and help members (many with performing arts backgrounds) fill their teaching schedules.
The old website worked against both goals. It was not responsive, the imagery was dated, and the language was passive where it needed to persuade. The find-a-teacher tool, the one feature the public actually used, could not even list two teachers in the same location. On the member side there was no way to control who saw what, so the society could not offer real value behind a login or give affiliate members a reason to upgrade to full teacher status.
AUSTAT ran a formal tender for the rebuild, and Chillybin won it. Success had three measures the committee set out from the start: more of the public subscribing to the newsletter, more affiliates converting to teacher membership because the website finally gave them something worth upgrading for, and more clicks from find-a-teacher profiles to the teachers themselves.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Design for the person in pain, not the anatomy textbook
The Alexander Technique is education, not therapy, and AUSTAT was clear about the line: no talk of cures, no skeleton diagrams. The design strategy settled on calm layouts, plenty of white space and photography showing life after the problem (joy in activity, not clinical illustration). We produced visual designs for the homepage, about page and find-a-teacher, with wireframes for events, teacher profiles, blog and contact, then built the lot on WordPress with Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer so a volunteer committee can edit anything without a developer.
Membership tiers that pay for themselves
The heart of the build is access control. We structured membership into distinct groups plus a free "friend" tier for the public, each unlocking a different slice of the site: eLearning courses, a video library, flipbook newsletters, reports and a book catalogue. Members request upgrades on the site itself, AUSTAT approves them, and payments pro-rate automatically, which turned a paperwork chore for a volunteer secretary into a few clicks. We migrated the existing member records across, and the same system handles new registrations, renewals and downgrades end to end.
A directory that finds teachers fast
Find-a-teacher was rebuilt around how the public actually searches: by name, postcode or geolocation, filtered by teaching format and specialty (posture, performance, pain recovery and more, powered by FacetWP over custom fields). Every teacher gets a proper profile with practice addresses, hours and contact details, so a profile click can become a booked lesson. Events, news and an events calendar round out the public side, giving the society a platform for its biennial conference and workshop programme.
The Solution
What we delivered
AUSTAT went from a static brochure that limited what the society could offer to a platform that runs its membership operations: registrations, approvals, upgrades, renewals and member-only resources all in one place, administered by volunteers. The public got a directory that works and an education-led case for trying the Technique.
What we learned
For an association, the membership plumbing is the product. The public pages matter, but what changed AUSTAT's daily reality was the unglamorous machinery underneath: approval queues, pro-rated payments, tier-based access rules. Scoping that machinery honestly at tender stage (rather than treating it as detail to sort out later) is why the project landed on time and on budget.
Volunteer-run organisations need workflows designed for handover. The people administering the site change with each committee, so every process (approving a member, publishing an event, uploading a newsletter) had to survive the person who learned it leaving. Documentation and a full owner's manual were part of the delivery, not an afterthought.
And a small society with a modest budget can still commission serious software. The discipline is saying yes to the ideas that serve the three agreed goals, and finding a simpler route for the rest.
