How RAPS built one platform for a global, personalized member experience

Three months after going live on ReadyMembership, RAPS has pulled a fragmented technology estate into a single platform, laid the groundwork for genuine personalization, and improved the user experience.

About RAPS

RAPS, the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society, is the professional association for the people who keep medicines and medical devices safe. Its members work in regulatory roles across the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, the professionals responsible for making sure that drugs and devices meet the standards that protect patients. RAPS supports them with education, certification, career pathways, networking, and events, with a mission to advance the regulatory profession.

The organization serves around 30,000 members and a wider customer base of roughly 180,000 individuals. Its online reach is larger still. The RAPS website draws about 14 million users a year, powered in part by a respected newsroom whose reporters are often first to report regulatory developments such as FDA decisions. Alongside that content, RAPS sells books, e-books, courses, events, credentials, and sponsorships. Since incorporating in Europe, it has also run conferences and events on both sides of the Atlantic, which is where its previous setup started to show its limits.

The challenge: a fragmented estate, and a hard border at the currency line

For years, RAPS ran on an established association management system that served it well. The organization had customized the platform heavily to support everything it offered, from courses and events to its large content operation. The problem was not capability in the abstract. It was that two things the organization increasingly needed were not on the table.

The first was multi-currency. When RAPS incorporated in Europe and began running events there, it quickly found it needed to charge members in local currency, and to handle VAT and other tax requirements properly. The team raised this repeatedly with its incumbent vendor and asked for it on the roadmap. For its own business reasons, the vendor chose not to build it. RAPS respected the decision, but it left them with a choice: run a second European system or migrate to a system that supported RAPS’ international needs.

The second was unification. RAPS ran a separate front-end content management system stitched to its association platform through APIs, and keeping the two in step was a constant effort. The website itself was built dynamically, with pages assembled on the fly, which meant a full-stack developer was needed for routine changes and a significant update could take a full day to deploy. The member-facing checkout, meanwhile, was a recurring source of friction.

Finding a platform that could do both

As RAPS researched alternatives, ReadyMembership stood out almost immediately. The first demonstration was, in Wendy’s words, a moment when a few people looked at each other and asked whether they were ready for a new system as it was apparent ReadyMembership may be their answer. The team kept its discipline and continued to evaluate other multi-currency options, but two things set ReadyMembership apart from their other competitors.

One was practical: the platform is built and supported in Europe, which mattered to a US organization trying to operate cleanly across European tax and currency requirements. The other was architectural, and it spoke directly to where Wendy wanted to take RAPS. ReadyMembership uses the same rules engine across the whole system, tying the commerce experience to the front-end website rather than treating them as separate worlds.

For a technologist, that was the unlock. It meant RAPS could take any data it held, what someone had purchased, what type of member they were, the topics they cared about, and use it to shape both the content a member saw and the journey they were sent on. And it meant the content management system and the association platform finally lived in one place, instead of being married together with effort.

The transformation: built on data, designed for the user

What makes the RAPS story unusual is that the platform change sat on top of years of preparation. Wendy had spent around five years building the organization’s underlying data infrastructure, including a data lake that pulls together information from the systems RAPS runs alongside its core platform. Multi-currency may have been the trigger, but she treated the move as a step in a much longer journey toward personalization.

That principle shaped how she approached the whole project. Rather than starting from a single technical problem, she started from the member: what someone wants to do when they arrive, whether that is reaching their network, making a purchase, or registering for an event, and let the rest follow from there. She is candid that the ambition is consumer-grade. The experiences members now expect online are set by Amazon and Google, and a non-profit has to meet that bar rather than arrive late to it.

The hardest part, as it often is, was people rather than technology. Introducing new processes across a largely remote team meant managing change carefully, and managing expectations too, since a faster platform quickly resets what colleagues consider a reasonable turnaround. Wendy ran the change deliberately: a steering committee that acted as advocates across the wider staff, weekly working sessions with her technology team, and weekly progress updates direct to the executive team so leadership understood what was working and what was not. Her advice to peers is simply not to do it in a silo.

The capability that ties it all together, and the one Wendy names as her favorite, is the rules engine.

That same thinking shaped the member experience. The MyRAPS area now brings a member’s profile, communities, and purchases together on a single page, something the previous split between two systems had made almost impossible. RAPS also worked with the ReadyMembership team to build a My Purchases page, giving members who buy e-books and courses a single, fast route back to what they own.

Early results

Even at three months, the operational gains are visible. On the technology side, the team can make website changes through widgets without a deployment cycle, and has begun automating work that used to be manual, including renewal emails it can now schedule and adjust against its own rules rather than pushing everything into a separate marketing system. The integration with Zoom has taken meaningful time out of running events, which matters at RAPS’s scale of more than 150 a year and up to 10 in a single week. The clearest sign of progress, Wendy notes, is staff asking how the system is now doing something they used to do by hand.

For members, the move has been fairly smooth in a way migrations rarely are. Someone purchased a membership within six minutes of the platform going live, and within the first few days RAPS saw purchases across every product line, with none of the hand-holding the old checkout used to require. The support data tells the same story. The team watches ticket volumes closely in the first week after a major change and would normally expect them to roughly double. This time they saw less than half of expected additional tickets, a strong signal that members could find their way around the new environment without trouble.

Looking ahead

RAPS is already extending what it does with the platform. The ReadyIntelligence back-end assistant, which Wendy asked to switch on for the live environment after seeing it during testing, has reduced the team’s reliance on the dense process documents it used to maintain, and a wiki-style space now lets groups such as the newsroom self-serve on how to get their work published. The rollout is being handled carefully and internally first.

Beyond that, RAPS is scoping a broader exploration of how AI can serve its members directly, with ReadyIntelligence part of that planning. It is the natural next step for an organization that has spent years building the data foundation to support it, and a leader who pays as much attention to where consumer technology is heading as to where association technology is today.