NZ Marketing Association moves to hubAMS

From MemberConnex to hubAMS

National Industry Body · New Zealand · marketing.org.nz

The Organisation

The Marketing Association is New Zealand's national industry body for the marketing profession. It serves individual marketers and organisations across the country through events, training programmes, a resource hub, job listings, and membership services.

As the professional home of New Zealand's marketing community, the MA's ability to communicate, engage, and deliver a credible digital experience isn't incidental - it's part of the product.

Life on MemberConnex

By 2019, the MA's platform had passed the point of manageable frustration. MemberConnex - running their membership database, website, events, and communications - had, in their own team's words, reached the point where it was 'no longer fit for purpose.' Staff were spending the majority of their days on administration and troubleshooting, rather than serving members.

The problems were specific and well-documented:

• Broken member login - The member login and password reset function was outright broken. Not slow or cumbersome - broken. Members who couldn't access their account had no self-service option. This was actively damaging confidence in the MA.
• Completely manual communications - Sending any member communication required manually exporting data from MemberConnex and importing it into a separate email platform (Ubiquity). There was no automation anywhere in the process.
• Double and triple handling - Products had to be set up in both MemberConnex and Xero. Invoicing and payment reconciliation had to be managed across both systems. Creating a new course required multiple steps and developer intervention just to go live.
• Data and duplicates - There was no way to prevent duplicate accounts from being created. Duplicate registrations using the same email address weren't even flagged. Managing duplicates across different email addresses was extremely difficult.
• No membership pipeline - There were no processes or automation for handling new member leads or renewals. Renewals depended on a staff member manually checking - with no notifications when a member paid, creating persistent issues with the grace period process.
• Poor segmentation - Data could only be segmented into two main mailing lists. Targeted communications were almost impossible. For the national body representing the marketing profession, this had particular sting.
• Events and courses - Cancellations, substitutions, attendance tracking, failed payments, and survey reporting were all manual. Setting up a new course was described as 'clunky and time consuming' and routinely required developer involvement.
• An outdated, broken website - The MA's website was hosted and built entirely on MemberConnex. Forms were manual PDFs. The cart and checkout process was broken. The clunkiness of the CMS flowed directly through to a poor member experience.
• Financial double-ups - Payment transactions processed in MemberConnex had to be manually re-processed in Xero via a daily export. Credits, refunds, and reconciliation were a persistent source of accounting errors. Board reports were compiled across four layers of manual work.

 The platform they had built to serve members had become the main reason it was difficult to serve them.

The Decision to Move

There was an unmistakable irony in the situation: New Zealand's national body for the marketing profession couldn't execute basic marketing automation. Sending a campaign meant manually exporting data, importing it elsewhere, and running the process by hand. For the MA's leadership, this had moved beyond an operational inconvenience into something that was becoming genuinely embarrassing.

The initial brief to Engaging Partners wasn't a full platform migration. It was focused: fix the communications problem. Give the Marketing Association the ability to actually do marketing. The first phase of the project would move the MA's communications function into HubSpot Marketing Hub - nothing more. Get that working first.

The Transition

Phase 1 - Fixing the marketing problem

The first engagement was deliberate and contained: move the MA's communications and marketing function from the manual export-import cycle into HubSpot Marketing Hub. For an association whose professional identity is marketing, having modern automation, proper list segmentation, and engagement tracking wasn't a nice-to-have - it was a baseline requirement before anything else could change.

Delivering this phase gave both organisations a working foundation and a much clearer picture of what needed to happen next.

Phase 2 - The full platform migration

With HubSpot in place for marketing, the scope expanded. Engaging Partners presented a plan to migrate the full platform - website, membership administration, and commerce. This was 2019, before HubSpot had a native commerce layer capable of handling subscription transactions. The solution was to build the membership portal on WooCommerce and integrate it back into HubSpot via API.

The integration worked - but it was fragile. When issues arose, diagnosing whether the problem was in WooCommerce, in HubSpot, or in the API layer between them was genuinely complex. For a team with limited technical depth, that complexity was difficult to manage. The MA had trusted Engaging Partners with their platform, and when the integration caused problems, the distinction between 'what we built' and 'what the API does' wasn't always a useful one. This phase delivered the migration, but carried ongoing friction neither party had fully anticipated.

Phase 3 - Migrating to CommercePro

The WooCommerce integration phase made one thing clear: the right answer was a native commerce layer inside HubSpot itself - not a third-party platform connected by an API. That realisation became the founding brief for CommercePro, which now powers the commerce layer in hubAMS. The MA's experience of the WooCommerce API limitations was, in a direct sense, the reason CommercePro exists.

While CommercePro was being built, the MA continued operating on the WooCommerce integration. Another Engaging Partners client - the New Zealand Green Building Council (GBC) - became CommercePro's first live customer, going through the difficult process of taking a new product into production for the first time. Once CommercePro was deployed aat the GBC, the MA migrated from WooCommerce to CommercePro, completing the third and final phase of their transition.

The MA's platform is now fully native to HubSpot. The WooCommerce integration - and the fragile API dependency that had caused so much friction - is gone. The commerce layer that was the hardest part of the journey is now the most stable part of the platform.

The Platform Today

marketing.org.nz is now fully operational on hubAMS. The MA team runs a sophisticated, fully integrated association management system - website, membership database, events, training, communications, and commerce operating as one connected platform.

The day-to-day picture is different from 2019 in specific ways. The board receives accurate, real-time membership reporting - numbers that can be trusted, not assembled through four layers of manual work. Staff manage automations across the member lifecycle: event bookings, renewal sequences, new member onboarding - workflows that run without manual intervention. The website and events are managed directly in the CMS without developer involvement.

For members, the experience has changed entirely. The purchase process is logical and complete. After buying a ticket or renewing a membership, members can log in, see what they've purchased, access event details, and manage their relationship with the MA - without calling or emailing the team.

The last point matters most: the MA was a well-run organisation before this transition. The system wasn't the reason they existed - but it was the ceiling on how far they could grow. Since moving to hubAMS, the association has been able to scale its programmes and membership significantly, without technology becoming the blocker. What was once a constraint is now infrastructure.