About the MIA

This member based organisation is run with a compact team, a nation wide member base over over 2000 members and 5 combined state branches. The MIA has a large responsibility to its members to communicate the complex legislative changes and to provide professional development that allows migration agents to meet their registration requirements. When Fatpublisher started working with the MIA it was an organisation undergoing transition and organisational change.

The Challenge

As with many member based organisations, a challenge existed in the desire to distribute the responsibility for member data management to the members themselves whilst minimising the likelihood of duplicated effort in managing online information and offline databases.  The administrative processes that had evolved over the years involved varying systems and complex data management solutions.

As membership to the association grew, so did the overheads involved with processing regular transactions such as membership registrations and renewals, professional development records, member status levels and event attendances and payments.

The area of Migration is constantly under scrutiny and the timing of changes is crucial to members of MIA and their customers.  For this reason, MIA is in constant communication with their members to deliver notification of changes to legislation, application deadlines, State level relevant changes, fee changes and many more.  This communication is one of the benefits of being a member so the other challenge was to ensure only financial members were able to receive such coummuniqués.

The Solution

Fatpublisher came to the MIA with a well developed Content Management System that provided a solid foundation for managing information relevant to the website and extended to a full solution for member data management.  Having worked previously with other member based organisations, Fatpublisher had some understanding for the challenges faced by MIA in relation to member data management, communicating with members and engaging members online as a benefit of membership.

Working closely with the MIA team, Fatpublisher formed a comprehensive picture of the unique membership requirements for their association and how these members could move and flex within the system of the association.  This included creating member profile pages to give members access to updating their own information and choosing which email updates they wished to receive.  By creating a section for myMIA, Fatpublisher enabled MIA to consolidate all the online benefits of membership.

Fatpublisher was also able to set up online payments processing to streamline the administration of transactions such as payments for attending events as well as offering members a much simpler way to renew their membership with the MIA.  The simple payment method also encouraged both members and non-members to sign up for professional development events.  The e-commerce solution also opened up the way to selling merchandise which had previously been promoted via paper newsletters or sold at conferences.

To encourage new members to join the MIA, an easy-to-use guided online application was created to speed up the process of new member application with customised details depending on the type of membership that was being requested.

With member communications, Fatpublisher created a streamlined solution for lists of email addresses to be dynamically generated based on the member registration status and the preferences for emails which they had chosen themselves in their profile.  Instant targeted lists and segments to ensure the MIA is communicating relevant and required information to the right people.