IVCA: member renewals cut from three weeks to four days

IVCA brings together private equity and venture capital funds, alternative investment managers, corporate advisers, lawyers and institutional investors. Its members are busy, senior and used to good service. They expect an association to be as organised as the firms it represents.

We knew the organisation before this project. IVCA was a Hosting Seva customer in 2019, Prem Raval had worked alongside its team as a developer, and D&C rebuilt the public website in 2020. So when the membership team asked for help with renewals, we already knew where the paperwork lived. Mostly, it lived in inboxes.

A firm applies, sends documents, is reviewed against eligibility rules, pays, gets access, uses the resources and, a year later, renews. Each of those steps sat somewhere different: a web form, an email thread, a bank statement, a shared drive and a spreadsheet. At our first workshop the member services team brought that spreadsheet. It used eleven colours to track the state of a renewal, and only two people knew what all eleven meant.

The public website looked like the product. It was not. The real product was the set of rules around eligibility, fee tiers, approvals, access and reminders, and every one of those rules had to keep working while the association carried on with a full calendar of events and policy work.