European Association for International Education
Introducing…the EAIE
The European Association for International Education (EAIE) is a membership organisation and a global community united by a shared vision: to bridge cultures worldwide and internationalise higher education through collaboration, knowledge exchange, life-long learning, and professional development.
The Challenge
Moving Beyond Workarounds: Streamlining Systems with ReadyMembership
Before partnering with ReadyMembership, the EAIE’s technical landscape was a patchwork of systems held together by custom coding, gradually leading to increasingly failing integrations. The EAIE team had to resort to manual workarounds to complete everyday operational and financial tasks. Poor customer service from providers compounded difficulties.As the size of the EAIE Annual Conference and Exhibition - a vital revenue stream - grew each year, the need for a reliable membership platform became even more urgent.
One of the driving forces behind our transition to ReadyMembership was our need for one unified platform that would be capable of managing membership, event registrations and more without the need for custom integrations.
The Project
When moving to ReadyMembership one of the EAIE’s priorities was to ensure the smooth end-to-end management of their 2024 Annual Conference held in Toulouse, France.
With over 7000 attendees, a streamlined and customised registration and payment process was essential. This involved configuring ReadyMembership to handle complex VAT rules and implementing controls on tickets for participants based in multiple countries - a flexibility the EAIE team greatly appreciated.
Previously, the payment processing system’s integration with the event registration software led to issues reconciling payments, with the CRM, event registration platform and finance systems flagging each other at fault.
The ReadyMembership team solved this issue by integrating the platform with Stripe, a trusted payment provider ensuring transactions were automatically captured in the CRM and the payment platform.
Benefits & Results
2024 Conference: record attendance, easier registration, payments & time-saving
The EAIE operations team was delighted with the registration, rule-based ticketing and payment process which they say was much smoother compared to previous years. Over 7000 participants booked on the platform - the largest attendance in the conference’s history.
The team loves that participants now have self-service tools on the website to download invoices, receipts and attendance certificates. Previously this would have to be done for participants and involved creating manual mail merges for over 6000 people. ReadyMembership has saved many hours in administration for the conference.
A key benefit has been the custom content that can display based on the users’ locations. This allowed the EAIE to personalise the experience and ensure that only users from specific locations see the tickets relevant to them.
Step-by-step voting and data integrity transform elections
With critical election and appointment processes due to take place shortly after their new website launch, it was crucial that the platform empowered members to participate easily in shaping the future of the EAIE.
Previously, members found the processes for Governance and volunteer elections and appointments confusing. Many struggled to understand what steps to take and abandoned these time-consuming procedures. Now members can log into the website and easily vote, submit recommendations or apply for positions that they are eligible for.
Behind the scenes, the EAIE team used ReadyMembership’s permission capabilities to ensure that only the appropriate staff had access to sensitive election data, maintaining integrity and transparency throughout the process.
The transformation in our election process has been one of our biggest wins this year. We feel confident in the voting data we’re capturing and reporting. Our elections committee could easily see that integrity was maintained and the process was fair to all.
The future
Exploring ReadyMembership’s community and on-demand courses potential
Now that the conference and elections have run smoothly, the team are turning their attention to expanding membership services. This will include on-demand. courses delivered through a seamless ReadyMembership integration with learning platform Brightspace, available to buy online. User progress will be captured in the members’ area and users can pick up where they left off at any time.
But at the heart of the EAIE is a commitment to community. With a new Community Coordinator leading the way, the team can now explore ReadyMembership’s integration with Discourse, a powerful digital community platform - extending their conference success online.
Looking beyond our Conference, we are ready to drive engagement and facilitate vibrant discussions online. And thanks to ReadyMembership, as our 2025 conference theme states, we are ready to “Go explore, Go collaborate, and Go create.