AUSTAT
AUSTAT put a demanding brief out to tender: tiered member access, a find-a-teacher directory, eLearning, a digital library and self-service membership upgrades, all run by volunteers. We won the tender and built the platform.
A tendered WordPress build that gave Australia's Alexander Technique teachers tiered member access, a proximity-based teacher directory and self-service upgrades, delivered on time and on budget.
What we were solving
The Australian Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (AUSTAT) is the professional body for qualified Alexander Technique teachers. It sets the training standard for new teachers and represents them in public. It is a small society with a big remit: raise awareness of an education-based method for easing chronic pain and improving how people move, and help members fill their teaching schedules.
The old website worked against both. It wasn't responsive, the imagery was dated, and the language was passive where it needed to persuade. The find-a-teacher tool, the one feature the public used, couldn't list two teachers in the same location. There was no way to control who saw what, so the society couldn't give affiliate members a reason to upgrade to full teacher status.
AUSTAT ran a formal tender for the rebuild, and Chillybin won it. The committee set three measures: more newsletter subscribers, more affiliates converting to teacher membership, and more clicks from find-a-teacher profiles to the teachers.
How we tackled it
Design for the person in pain, not the anatomy textbook
The Alexander Technique is education, not therapy, and AUSTAT was clear about the line: no talk of cures, no skeleton diagrams. The design settled on calm layouts, plenty of white space and photography showing life after the problem (joy in activity, not clinical illustration). We produced visual designs for the homepage, about page and find-a-teacher, with wireframes for events, teacher profiles, blog and contact, then built it on WordPress with Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer so a volunteer committee can edit anything without a developer.
Membership tiers that pay for themselves
The heart of the build is access control. We structured membership into distinct groups plus a free "friend" tier for the public, each unlocking a different slice of the site: eLearning courses, a video library, flipbook newsletters, reports and a book catalogue. Members request upgrades on the site, AUSTAT approves them, and payments pro-rate automatically, which turned a paperwork chore for a volunteer secretary into a few clicks. We migrated the existing member records across.
A directory that finds teachers fast
Find-a-teacher was rebuilt around how the public searches: by name, postcode or geolocation, filtered by teaching format and specialty, powered by FacetWP over custom fields. Every teacher gets a profile with practice addresses, hours and contact details, so a profile click can become a booked lesson. Events and news round out the public side, giving the society a platform for its biennial conference and workshop programme.
What we delivered
AUSTAT launched in 2024 with a platform that ran its membership operations end to end: registrations, approvals, upgrades, renewals and member-only resources in one place, administered by volunteers. The public got a directory that works and an education-led case for trying the Technique. Documentation and a full owner's manual went with it, so each process survives the person who learned it leaving the committee. The project landed on time and on budget.
What we learned
For an association, the membership plumbing is the product. The public pages matter, but what changed AUSTAT's daily reality was the machinery underneath: approval queues, pro-rated payments, tier-based access rules. Scoping that machinery honestly at tender stage is why the project landed on time and on budget.
Volunteer-run organisations need workflows designed for handover. The people administering the site change with each committee, so every process (approving a member, publishing an event, uploading a newsletter) had to survive a change of hands.
More than this, Chillybin understands the web development process. They really know each step from development of an idea to a visual representation, through to navigation and so on.
