A Custom Membership Platform, Built for Trust

Texas Fine Arts Administrators (TFAA)

Case Study

A Custom Membership Platform for Texas Fine Arts Administrators resulted in a 75% increase in membership revenue and enhanced the professionalism of arts education.

TFAA is the professional home for fine arts administrators across Texas, the district leaders who champion music, theatre, art, and dance programs for students statewide. Their previous website was a dated WordPress setup that couldn't keep up with a growing membership or the realities of how school districts actually pay and participate.

We rebuilt TFAA from the ground up as a modern, self-service platform: members join and renew online, sponsors sign up and get showcased automatically, and administrators run the whole organization from a single dashboard, no spreadsheets, no manual chasing, no developer required for day-to-day updates.

Problem Statement

Although TFAA is a key advocacy group, its visual identity and digital infrastructure did not reflect its mission. The organization faced three main challenges:

1. Fragmented Identity: The four arts disciplines (music, art, dance, theater) were not visually unified under the TFAA brand.

2. Operational Friction: The digital platform was not optimized for users, making membership renewal and resource access difficult.

3. Perceived Value: To attract future arts leaders and increase grant funding, the brand needed to convey professional authority rather than a volunteer-based image.

Services Provided

A complete, integrated platform with three connected experiences, public site, member area, and admin dashboard, plus the automation to keep them running with minimal staff effort.

Membership & payments that fit how districts actually pay

▸ Online join & renewal with secure card payments via Stripe.

▸ A check / purchase-order option that automatically emails the member a professional invoice with TFAA's W-9 attached, exactly what a district business office needs to cut a check.

▸ Automatic activation the moment payment clears, with a built-in reconciliation safety net so no paid member is ever left waiting.

Sponsorship management, end to end

▸ Self-service sponsor registration with tiered levels, online or invoice-based payment, and automatic welcome materials

▸ Paid sponsors' logos appear on the public site automatically, no manual uploading.

Event tools for meetings & summits

▸ A full events system with schedules, sessions, and registrations. ▸ Downloadable documents per event (agendas, handouts, slide decks) that administrators upload themselves, with per-document control over whether materials are public or members-only.

A true admin command center

▸ One dashboard to manage members, sponsors, payments, events, resources, news, and site content, all editable by TFAA staff without touching code.

▸ At-a-glance payment insight: who's paid, who's pending, and why (card vs. check/PO), with one-click tools to resend payment links or reconcile against Stripe.

Reliability built for a district audience We hardened the flows that have to be perfect.

For example, we solved a subtle but serious issue where school-district email security systems were invalidating password-reset links before members could use them, a problem that would have generated endless support requests, fixed with an approach designed specifically for institutional email.

Client

Texas Fine Arts Administrators (TFAA)

Location

Austin, Texas (Statewide Impact)

A Custom Membership Platform, Built for Trust

Process Notes

We developed the new TFAA identity using our “System of Strands” concept. Instead of prioritizing one art form, we created a visual language where the four pillarsMusic, Visual Arts, Theater, and Dance, interlock to form a stronger whole.

▸ Discovery grounded in the audience. Every decision was filtered through one question: how do Texas school districts actually operate? That's what surfaced the need for checks, POs, W-9s, and institution-friendly email handling.

▸ Iterative, tested, and verified. Features were built, previewed, and validated against real data and real edge cases, not just happy paths. Payment reliability, in particular, was traced end to end and stress-tested.

▸ Self-sufficiency by design. The goal was to hand TFAA a platform their team can run themselves. Content, events, sponsors, pricing, and documents are all managed in-house, the platform grows with them without ongoing developer dependency.

▸ Resilience over assumptions. Where a flow could fail silently (a missed payment, a scanned reset link), we added safety nets and clear admin visibility so problems surface - and get solved - before they become member complaints.

Impact

TFAA now runs on a platform that matches the way their members and sponsors actually work, turning what used to be manual, friction-filled administration into a smooth, self-service experience. 200 new members onboarded in the first month, 20 hours of admin time saved per week and Board members loving every aspects of their new custom made platform.

A system made with their needs in first place.