Hobart Walking Club

HWC are one of Australia’s largest bushwalking clubs, operating continuously for nearly a century. After more than 15 years their original web portal had become difficult to update and maintain. Members were struggling to join the Club, pay their fees and participate in trips. Their officers and volunteers had to overcome all kinds of technical hurdles to manage club records. And none of it worked on a phone.

After years of searching for an affordable team to rework their online presence, they found Getbusi. The budget was there; what they needed was a local partner they could trust.

It was a big job. The build would include a public-facing website and a private member portal. The portal would be responsible for all trip planning, internal news & communications, fee payments, a routes database and member management tools. A mobile-first design was needed, despite having dense quantities of data to display. And it had to retain decades of rich history from their previous system.

With a fixed budget and an eight-month timeframe, we built HWC Online: a public website, a private member portal and a suite of migration tools. We built it using open-source frameworks like Django and Wagtail to minimise technical debt and ensure hosting and custodianship of the system could be handed over to the Club or another vendor if circumstances required.

Getting there required a lot of domain knowledge. HWC has a constitution with set rules for how memberships and trips are organised. They have committees, officers and volunteer roles who each need to manage different parts of the system securely. These responsibilities rotate year-to-year, so a role-based permissions system was a must. Fortunately, the Club Executive team had solid IT experience, and we met in person with them every two weeks to make sure everything stayed aligned with how the Club operates.

Features

• Sign-up, fee payments & renewals. Before HWC Online, much time was spent reconciling member application forms and external fee transactions. People expect seamless online checkout experiences nowadays, so we integrated the best tool for this: Stripe. Members can now securely pay via any number of methods as part of the online sign-up form, and the system automatically sets up their membership accordingly. It also allows the Club to roll out annual fee adjustments without needing to consult us. When renewal time rolls around mid-year, members are prompted automatically and can adjust their membership themselves. The entire membership lifecycle now maintains itself.

• Member management & privacy. For legal, financial and insurance reasons, outdoor clubs need to track many personal details about each member: names, phone numbers, addresses, emergency contacts, risk waivers, fee payments, trip history and more. To help HWC preserve the security of this data we implemented several measures: role-based permissions so only the pertinent officers can access this data; a consent system so members can choose which personal information is visible to other members; and a de-identification tool that, in line with the Club’s privacy commitments, automatically anonymises the records of anyone who hasn’t been a member for two years.

• Trips. The backbone of the member portal is the Trips database. It’s what all members must use to participate in club activities, which means the information needs to be clear and easy to interact with, while strictly following the Club’s operational guidelines for trip planning, coordination and reporting. The Club has meticulously recorded its trips since the 1920s — on paper at first, digitally since 2008 — so the system had to support that same standard of record keeping. We ensured the full lifecycle of each trip reflects coordinator and nominee rules and keeps all participants in the loop via email notifications. The system also accommodates cycling and kayaking trips.

• Routes. The Routes database makes it easy for trip coordinators to seek inspiration and find established walking or cycling destinations all across the Tasmanian wilderness. It reflects the sum total of bushwalking experiences of generations of HWC members. Coordinators can find a Route and instantly create a new Trip around it. Routes contain all the background info and history notes, plus everything else necessary to plan a trip. They even support GPX files to show the path on a topographic map.

• The Website, Club News and Resources. As in any recreational club, roles and responsibilities shift regularly. It was important that HWC Online lowered the barrier for authoring, editing and publishing content both on the public website and the member portal. This way anyone willing could contribute to the shared content, news, publications and club knowledge. To this end, we integrated Wagtail, a content management system used by Oxfam, the NHS and many other large institutions. We tailored it so there were clear workflows for editing, reviewing and publishing all kinds of content like the monthly club circular and news bulletins.

Making the switch

The legacy HWC portal was a custom PHP application. Fortunately the data could be exported to CSV. Unfortunately the data formats were not all that consistent, as the schema had clearly evolved haphazardly over the years. The ultimate switch to HWC Online needed to happen without meaningful downtime, so we needed reusable, repeatable migration tooling the Club could operate themselves.

After the database schemas were nailed down in consultation with the Club, the solution we landed on was a web-based importer. This allowed the Club’s data officers to upload their current Member, Trip or Route datasets and review the results as development on HWC Online progressed. This helped them decide what data they could cut, what they could clean themselves and what the import tool would need to handle.

Ultimately, around 10,000 trip records were cleanly migrated, covering the Club’s entire digital history from 2008–2023, plus over 1,000 member records and nearly as many Routes. Not a single record was lost.

Testimonial

"Getbusi built Hobart Walking Club's new website. The Club uses its website to manage its membership and to publicise club walking, cycling, kayaking and social events. We run around 10 events per week.

The website has a public section, and a password protected member portal. https://www.hobartwalkingclub.org.au/

Getbusi built our website on time and on budget, with a minimum of fuss. The project took 8 months elapsed. It went live in June 2023.

With the new website, we are getting around 600 new visitors per week.
New memberships have more than doubled. In the 9 months since go-live, 132 new members have joined the club. For the corresponding 9 months in the year before, it was 66.
The new website has significantly reduced the work required by our volunteer members to run the club. For example, 80% of our members now paid their annual subscriptions through the payment portal, and this saved our volunteers hundreds of hours.
Our members can now access the Club website from laptops, tablets or phones.
The Club will further enhance our website over the next few years. We are confident Getbusi will continue to support us.

The Club had tried alternatives before coming to Getbusi. We have club members who offered to build a new website in their spare time. We looked at WordPress and Wild Apricot but neither met out needs. Because of its size (900 members), the club delegates responsibilities widely, and off the shelf membership management software cannot support this. Getbusi offered a custom build, an although it initially seemed expensive for a club like ours, it has proved worth every cent."