Ten Years, £150K and One Bespoke Platform

This blog is an independent recap of SLCC’s session at Digital Excellence 2025. The piece is not produced, commissioned or endorsed by MemberWise; it’s simply our reflection on the session’s key lessons and is aimed at senior membership-sector leaders.

In 2014 the Society of Local Council Clerks (SLCC) processed every renewal by hand, kept event bookings in spreadsheets and moderated its Yahoo-based community forum one email at a time. ‘We were rebuilding the ship while still sailing,’ recalled Head of Marketing, Membership & Digital Gemma Rickard during the session ‘Digital transformation on a budget’ .

Mapping the Paper Mountain

With just £30k and a one-person digital team (Rickard), SLCC formed a discovery group that ranked tasks by pain and payoff. Renewals, event booking and community management topped the list. The group also confronted a knotty data problem: most clerks work for multiple councils, 97 per cent expect the councils to split the fee, and many share email addresses .

Why “Off-The-Shelf” Failed

Standard packages such as Microsoft Dynamics could not model SLCC’s multi-payer, multi-email reality. The board therefore approved a bespoke platform, rolled out in stages between 2016 and 2019 to match annual budget cycles .

Chief Executive Rob Smith reflected: “We had to choose between bending the software or bending our membership model. The model won”.

Building in Phases

• Phase 1 – renewals automation: manual processing time collapsed, and phone calls fell from fifty a day to ten a week.
• Phase 2 – event booking: an online flow underpinned a surge in virtual training, vital during the pandemic.
• Phase 3 – community forum and CPD logging: clerks now track professional development and share best practice in a moderated space.
• Phase 4 – finance system integration: completed 2024, closing the loop between membership and accounting.

A dedicated IT applications manager now oversees the ecosystem.

Tangible Impact

• Staff have shifted from “waste work” to value-adding advice.
• Click-through tracking guides personalised campaigns.
• Membership satisfaction scores have risen, a change Smith attributes to “members seeing us as a digital partner, not a paper factory”.

The Hidden Ledger of Risk

• Single-developer dependency: the same contractor still maintains the code. If they leave, support could collapse.
• AI catch-up: packaged platforms release AI features quarterly; bespoke systems may lag.
• Total cost of ownership: the original £30k became roughly £150k over ten years – modest but triple the headline figure .

During Q&A Smith advised caution: “We got lucky with our developer. Luck is not a strategy other organisations should rely on”.

What’s Next

• Seven member personas will drive deeper personalisation.
• A Brightspace learning-management system is in build.
• Regular member surveys inform the backlog, while the developer keeps the stack current .

Boardroom Reflections

• Stress-test the “bus factor”. If one person holds the keys, what happens if they move on?
• Automate your biggest pain point first; early wins fund later phases.
• Re-validate ROI annually. A ten-year journey needs more than one business case.
• Beware bespoke heroics. Custom platforms can be liberating, but they divert energy from strategy to maintenance.

Leadership Takeaway

Bespoke worked for SLCC because their business rules were truly unique – and because a gifted developer stayed the course. For most membership bodies the safer route is configuring, not coding. Either way, long-term vision and phased delivery beat quick fixes every time.