From strategy to reality: How AMOSSHE transformed their digital foundation

About AMOSSHE

AMOSSHE, The Student Services Organisation, supports 908 members across 234 UK higher education institutions. For over 20 years, they've been empowering Student Services leaders – spanning career services, wellbeing, and disability support – to enhance the student experience through collaboration, professional development, and sector influence.

The challenge: aligning infrastructure with ambition

In 2023, AMOSSHE reached a pivotal moment. Their 2020-2024 strategic plan had been disrupted by COVID, and as they developed their ambitious 2025-2030 plan, leadership recognised an opportunity: to build digital infrastructure that could truly support their strategic ambitions.

While their existing platform, Wild Apricot, had served them well for several years, AMOSSHE's needs had evolved. Members were finding it increasingly difficult to locate resources quickly, and there were no forums for community discussion. The platform offered limited analytics and didn't provide easy ways for members to find and connect with peers across institutions. Staff often found themselves facilitating introductions between members via email.

AMOSSHE also relied on several additional systems for communications, events, and a manual process for invoice management with Xero. While functional, this setup meant members needed multiple logins and staff juggled multiple subscriptions.

An external consultancy evaluation helped clarify the path forward, as Julia Jean-Baptiste, Communications Manager, said:  "The website wasn't able to host all of the activities and wasn't the main focus for all of our members. Members didn't feel as one entity, as if we were capable of working as one under one umbrella."

"It was really important with the launch of the strategic plan that we needed something that would allow us to see the progress year on year." Having experienced how COVID had derailed their previous plan, AMOSSHE wanted infrastructure that could actually deliver and measure strategic outcomes.

A strategic approach to selection

Rather than simply seeking a platform upgrade, AMOSSHE took a fundamentally different approach. They didn’t start with "What features do we need?" but with "What must members and staff be able to do to deliver our strategic plan?" Their 2025-2030 strategic plan outlined three core aims:

1. Empower our community – Create an environment where every member feels included and empowered to contribute
2. Cultivate excellence – Share and develop tools, resources and encouragement to help members excel and innovate
3. Influence our sector – Use the community's voice to shape higher education policy and investment

AMOSSHE needed a platform that could enable all three aims through integrated capabilities. In October 2023, they selected ReadyMembership, treating digital infrastructure not as an operational upgrade but as the strategic foundation for organizational transformation.

How ReadyMembership delivers on strategic aims

Empowering community through connection

ReadyMembership provided the infrastructure AMOSSHE's community needed to truly function as one entity.

Member and organization directories allow members to search by name, institution, region, and topics of interest, with direct messaging between members. Julia explained: "Members no longer have us as their point of contact. They can directly take ownership of the sort of projects that they want to take on, and directly message the different members in our organisation." Staff can now focus on higher-value work while members connect directly with colleagues at similar institutions.

Discussion groups created spaces for ongoing collaboration across regional networks, special interest topics, policy workspaces, and event attendee networking. The impact has been significant: 443 members (49% of the total membership) are actively engaged through participating in conversations, sharing documents, and starting discussions.

One powerful example is the impact project group focused on standardizing student mental health data across UK higher education. Through a dedicated discussion space, members across the UK collaborate on developing a national mental health dataset, creating toolkits, building training frameworks, and establishing sector-wide standards. The platform enables discussion threads for coordination, document sharing for collaborative drafting, and progress tracking visible to all participants. Expected outcomes will be released at the 2026 National Conference, informing practice across all UK higher education institutions.

Julia noted: "All of these projects that would have been very difficult for us to jumpstart have been made easier through those different aspects on the website. Right away there's this machine to get started and get going on a project."

Cultivating excellence through resources and development

Professional development portal – Julia emphasized: "We built an online professional development portal that we would have never been able to do on Wild Apricot."

The portal features structured learning pathways, member progress tracking, certificate generation, and the resource library.

Transformed resource library – Members can now filter by topic, year, type, and region, with rich content widgets for videos and expandable sections.

Online magazine – AMOSSHE launched a regular publication schedule with member contributions, searchable archives, and multimedia content.

Integrated event resources – Post-conference materials are now automatically linked, with session recordings and presentations accessible in one location.

Influencing the sector through rapid mobilization

ReadyMembership dramatically accelerated AMOSSHE's ability to respond to sector developments.

Government consultation coordination – The higher education sector is heavily regulated, with frequent government consultations requiring timely responses. ReadyMembership has transformed how AMOSSHE mobilizes member expertise. When a consultation is published, AMOSSHE includes a call-to-action button in their newsletter. Members click through to join a dedicated discussion group where they can contribute input and help shape the response. Forms capture structured responses, and the process now takes days instead of weeks, allowing AMOSSHE to provide more comprehensive, member-informed responses to government entities.

Policy intelligence gathering – Discussion groups serve as valuable intelligence-gathering spaces. In one example, AMOSSHE's Policy Officer monitored the harassment and misconduct discussion group where members were sharing practice and challenges. From these organic conversations, the officer identified members with valuable case studies and invited them to contribute to sector guidance. This approach helps members see what's working across the sector and directly informs AMOSSHE's policy work and strategic initiatives.

Democratic processes – Executive elections now run through ReadyMembership forms with secure, trackable processes integrated with member records, streamlining what was previously managed through external systems.

Operational transformation

Beyond strategic delivery, ReadyMembership generated significant operational efficiencies.

Finance and administration – Invoice processing time was reduced by 50%. The integrated ReadyMembership-Xero sync eliminated the previous two-step manual process. Julia noted: "We've shaved about half the time off when it comes to invoices. The integrated process has reduced the time we spend on finances, which makes it that we use our resources elsewhere."

Communications consolidation – AMOSSHE is phasing out fragmented systems, with a target of March 2026 for complete mail migration. With 49% of members already engaged in the new discussion group system, the transition is well underway.

 

The results: Strategic aims achieved

Since launching ReadyMembership in October 2024, AMOSSHE has seen measurable progress across all three strategic aims.

Empowering community

The platform has created the unified experience AMOSSHE envisioned. 81% of members (736 of 908) have logged into the platform, with engagement extending far beyond renewal transactions. 49% of the membership (443 members) are actively collaborating in discussion groups, participating in conversations, sharing documents, and starting discussions. Members now connect directly with peers across institutions without staff intervention, and UK-wide collaborative projects like the mental health dataset standardization are thriving in dedicated discussion spaces.

Cultivating excellence

AMOSSHE has launched capabilities that were previously impossible. The professional development portal is now live with structured learning pathways and progress tracking. The resource library has proven its value with 406 downloads across the top 10 resources alone, with the most popular resource ("Support for students studying abroad: guidelines") accessed 107 times. The online magazine publishes regularly with member contributions, and all content is measurable, giving AMOSSHE clear insight into what members value most.

Influencing the sector

AMOSSHE's ability to mobilize member expertise has accelerated dramatically. Government consultation response times have dropped from weeks to days through streamlined discussion group coordination. Policy insights now surface organically from member conversations, informing AMOSSHE's advocacy work. Democratic processes like executive elections run seamlessly through the integrated platform, and comprehensive analytics enable evidence-based advocacy with measurable reach and impact.

Operational efficiency

Staff time has been redirected from administrative tasks to strategic work. Invoice processing time has been reduced by 50% through the integrated ReadyMembership-Xero sync. The consolidation of multiple subscriptions has reduced costs and complexity. With 49% of members already engaged in discussion groups, the transition away from Jiscmail is progressing well toward the March 2026 target.

Strategic measurement capability

For the first time, AMOSSHE can definitively measure their strategic progress. The baseline established in August 2024 enables year-on-year tracking of member engagement, content performance, and strategic delivery. This capability supports quarterly reviews, evidence-based board reporting, data-driven resource allocation, and compelling funding applications.

Julia reflected on the alignment: "Everything we've achieved with the system I can link back to the strategic plan."

The measurement revolution

Perhaps most significantly, AMOSSHE can now answer questions they couldn't before:

• How many members engage with our resources?
• Which topics matter most to members?
• Are members connecting with each other?
• Where is our geographic reach?
• Are we delivering on our strategic plan?

This year-on-year tracking capability enables quarterly reviews against strategic aims, evidence-based board reporting, data-driven resource allocation, and proof points for funding applications.

Member experience: From fragmented to unified

Members now experience a "one-stop shop" with a single login for everything: personalized content based on interests, self-service peer discovery, discussion groups for collaboration, integrated events with all materials in one place, and public profiles to showcase expertise.

The engagement metrics tell the story: 81% of members have logged in beyond just renewal interactions, returning regularly for resources, networking, and collaboration.