How NZGBC Unified Memberships, Certification and CPD on hubAMS

From MemberConnex to hubAMS

Not-for-Profit Certification Body  ·  New Zealand  ·  nzgbc.org.nz

The Organisation

The New Zealand Green Building Council (NZGBC) is Aotearoa's leading sustainable building not-for-profit, founded in 2005. It represents over 700 member organisations - from government departments, banks, and insurers to property developers, architects, and construction companies - who share a commitment to transforming New Zealand's built environment.

NZGBC's work spans member services, training and events, advocacy, and - critically - the management of New Zealand's primary green building rating systems: Green Star (commercial buildings), Homestar (residential), NABERSNZ (energy benchmarking), and HomeFit. Running these programmes means NZGBC isn't just a membership body. It's a certification authority.

That distinction matters for understanding the operational complexity of the platform they needed. NZGBC manages professional qualifications for thousands of practitioners across multiple qualification types - Green Star Accredited Professionals, Green Star Assessors, Green Star Practitioners, Homestar Assessors, Homestar Auditors, Homestar Designers, Homestar Practitioners - each with their own CPD obligations, renewal cycles, and audit requirements. The platform that runs NZGBC's operations needs to hold all of that, connected.

Life on MemberConnex

NZGBC entered a formal RFP process in December 2021. In their own framing, they were seeking a CRM replacement because their existing platform had 'outgrown its usable lifespan.' That platform was MemberConnex - serving simultaneously as their CRM, their CMS, and their website.

Sitting alongside MemberConnex was a collection of separate tools with no meaningful integration between them: Mailchimp for member email communications, Moneyworks for accounting (itself being migrated to Xero), Braincog for CPD testing, Learnworlds for training courses, Zoom for events, and Microsoft Dataverse holding certification project data for Homestar and Green Star. Each system was its own island.

The pain points NZGBC documented in their RFP were specific:

• Legacy platform at end of life - MemberConnex had reached the limit of what it could deliver. The team could not adopt improved processes for payment, self-service, or membership management within the constraints of the platform.

• Certification registration was entirely manual - The process for building certification registration - Homestar, Green Star - relied on manually completed forms and back-and-forth email exchanges between staff and applicants. There was no online pathway, no automated workflow, no status tracking.

• No online transactions for core revenue - Members could purchase event tickets online. That was the full extent of digital commerce. Membership fees, certification registration fees, and training purchases all required manual handling.

• Systems that didn't connect - MemberConnex held member records. Dataverse held certification project data. Learnworlds held training completions. CPD points - which determined whether a practitioner could renew their qualification - had to be tracked and reconciled manually across these disconnected sources.

• No self-service for members or practitioners - Any enquiry about membership status, certification progress, CPD balance, or invoicing required a staff member to look it up and respond. Nothing was accessible directly by the member or practitioner.

• Communications disconnected from member data - Mailchimp sat entirely separately from MemberConnex. Targeted communications to members or specific practitioner groups required manual list exports and imports - the same fragmentation NZGBC's peer organisation the Marketing Association had experienced.

For an organisation whose operational complexity includes seven different professional qualification types, multiple certification rating tools, and CPD compliance obligations across thousands of practitioners, this level of fragmentation wasn't just inconvenient. It was a direct constraint on NZGBC's ability to grow and serve its community.

The Decision to Move

NZGBC approached this decision carefully. As a not-for-profit, they couldn't afford to trade one set of operational problems for another - swapping a fragmented legacy platform for a new one that would require expensive ongoing technical support to keep running. Whatever they moved to needed to be something their own team could operate and grow without sustained external dependency. That framing shaped everything about how they went to market.

In December 2021, NZGBC issued a formal RFP - a competitive tender open to multiple vendors. The process was rigorous and the brief was clear: they needed a platform that could handle the full complexity of what NZGBC actually does, not a product designed for a simpler membership model that would require heavy customisation just to get to baseline requirements.

Engaging Partners won the RFP, and the reason was direct: they were the only respondent who had already done this. The migration of the Marketing Association from MemberConnex to HubSpot was completed. EP understood MemberConnex's data structure, its extraction challenges, and the specific complexities of migrating member history, financial records, and event data into HubSpot better than any other vendor in the market. They arrived with a blueprint and a team with the scars to prove it.

For NZGBC, that mattered. The risk of commissioning a vendor to learn the complexity of MemberConnex on their time and budget was real - and it was a risk every other respondent carried. EP had already absorbed that learning cost on behalf of the MA. NZGBC would benefit from it.

The Transition

Scope and complexity

The project kicked off in November 2022. The scope went well beyond a standard membership migration. NZGBC required a full digital transformation: CRM, website, member portal, eCommerce, events and training registration, CPD tracking, certification management workflows, Learnworlds integration, and Xero integration - all as a connected platform.

Running in parallel was NZGBC's own internal migration from Moneyworks to Xero. The CRM project had to be designed around an accounting platform that was itself still being implemented. That dependency added complexity to the integration design and required careful sequencing across two parallel work streams.

MemberConnex data migration

Extracting data from MemberConnex was, as it had been with the MA, more complex than it first appeared. MemberConnex does not provide a straightforward API. The depth of member history, professional qualification records, and historical transaction data held in the system required a methodical extraction, mapping, and cleaning process before it could be imported into HubSpot. EP's prior experience meant NZGBC did not have to discover this complexity during the project - the approach was known and planned for from the outset.

Website, CMS, and communications

MemberConnex was decommissioned as NZGBC's CMS and website, with the new site rebuilt on HubSpot CMS. Mailchimp was also decommissioned - member communications moved natively into HubSpot Marketing Hub, connecting email directly to member data and enabling proper segmentation by membership type, certification status, and practitioner qualification for the first time.

Commerce: from WooCommerce to CommercePro

The project was initially scoped with WooCommerce as the eCommerce layer - the same approach that had been used in the MA engagement, and the best available option at the time. But while NZGBC's project was in development, Engaging Partners was building CommercePro: the native HubSpot commerce layer that the MA's WooCommerce experience had made clear was needed.

NZGBC became CommercePro's first live customer. That meant they were not the beneficiary of a proven product - they were the proving ground. Requirements that hadn't been fully anticipated in the build surfaced once the system was live. There were issues to work through, things that had to be rebuilt, and aspects of the product that could only be resolved with a live client rather than in a development environment. Both NZGBC and Engaging Partners carried the weight of that.

It's worth saying directly: going live as CommercePro's first customer was hard. But it also meant that once the platform had stabilised, NZGBC was running a native HubSpot commerce layer - membership fees, event ticketing, training registration, certification fees - with no external eCommerce platform and no API between systems. The product had been shaped, in part, around the specific requirements of a complex membership and certification organisation. The MA, which had been operating on the WooCommerce integration throughout, subsequently migrated to CommercePro once it was proven.

Certification and CPD tracking

The most operationally significant part of the build was bringing NZGBC's certification and CPD management into HubSpot. Each of NZGBC's professional qualification types was modelled in the CRM - CPD point obligations, renewal cycles, and status fields tracked against individual practitioner records. Workflows now automate the CPD reminder and renewal communications that previously required staff to monitor manually across disconnected systems.

The Learnworlds LMS integration was built to pass training completion data into HubSpot - so when a practitioner completes a course, their CPD record is updated automatically rather than requiring manual entry.

Member and practitioner self-service

A member portal was built allowing members and practitioners to view their membership status, access invoices, check certification and CPD status, register for events and training, and manage their account - all without contacting the NZGBC team. For an organisation where staff time had previously been consumed by individual status enquiries across multiple disconnected systems, this self-service layer represented a fundamental change to how the team spends its day.

The Platform Today

nzgbc.org.nz is now live on hubAMS. The full platform - CRM, website, member portal, commerce, events, training, CPD tracking, and communications - runs in a single connected environment for the first time in NZGBC's history.

Members can join, renew, register for events and training, and pay certification fees online. Practitioners can log in and see their certification status and CPD balance without calling the office. When a training course is completed in Learnworlds, CPD points are credited to the practitioner's record in HubSpot automatically.

The NZGBC team has a unified view of every member and practitioner - membership status, certification history, CPD progress, event attendance, and communications history - in a single record. The manual reconciliation across MemberConnex, Dataverse, Braincog, and Mailchimp that previously defined how the team operated has been replaced by a platform where that data exists, connected, by default.

The team's own description of the change is direct: the transition from processing hundreds of transactions manually to an automated system has not only saved significant administrative hours but fundamentally changed what staff can focus on - the work of promoting sustainable building practice rather than managing disconnected data.