British Equine Veterinary Association (BEVA)

260,000 Records Migrated. Five Connected Platforms. One BEVA Experience.

How Cantarus brought Web, CRM, Portal, App and Community together through its market-leading MemConnect ecosystem.

Introducing BEVA

The British Equine Veterinary Association (BEVA) is the UK's leading membership organisation for equine veterinary surgeons and nurses, supporting thousands of professionals, students and practices with the education, clinical guidance and resources they need to deliver the highest standards of equine care.

Like many small-to-medium-sized membership organisations – BEVA operates with a headcount of just 16 people and annual revenue under £3m – the Association must still deliver a broad range of digital services comparable to that served by much larger organisations. BEVA therefore needed a supplier who combined highly productised yet richly configurable best-of-breed membership technology with deep implementation and sector experience.

As the organisation continued to grow, so too did the range of digital services available to members. From accessing clinical resources and booking events to managing memberships and professional development, members increasingly relied on BEVA’s digital platforms throughout their careers.

To support its long-term digital strategy, BEVA partnered with Cantarus to transform its digital estate, leveraging Cantarus’ MemConnect™ Member Experience Ecosystem to deliver a new Umbraco website, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, member portal, mobile app and online community.

BEVA and Cantarus approached the programme through the lens of the MemConnect ecosystem, bringing the selected platforms and integrations together around connected member journeys. This linked the services members use to find clinical resources, manage their membership and access professional development, while giving BEVA a foundation it could extend as its needs evolve.

The Impact

260,000+ CRM records migrated from Silverbear Membership to Dynamics 365 through a managed migration process
57% reduction in the size of the CRM database, retaining only active, valuable data
154 → 45 membership price points, reducing complexity for staff and making the membership offering clearer for members
250 → 6 prices and 9 discounts for Congress, BEVA’s flagship event, simplifying administration and the booking experience
Mobile-first website designed and developed to WCAG 2.2 AA standards
Website, Portal, CRM and updated app all launched at the same time, with zero rollback or maintenance page required at cutover

The Challenge

Like most organisations, BEVA’s digital estate had grown organically, service by service, without those services evolving together. The strain showed up differently at every stage of the member journey.

On the website, finding information had become more difficult as its structure expanded. Key content sat several layers deep. Without a shared taxonomy, search and filtering struggled to surface related content, and areas like Resources, Career Support and Clinical Resources had become difficult to navigate. With limited templates and design controls, similar content could look and behave differently depending on where a member found it, and some relied on PDF thumbnails just to work out what they were opening.

For BEVA's lean web team, keeping up with that meant rebuilding layouts by hand on the ageing DNN (formerly DotNetNuke) CMS, without the templates, governance and approval controls needed to make publishing more efficient.

Elsewhere, routine membership processes created their own administrative burden. Membership involved 154 separate prices, while welcome emails, renewals and reminders relied on manual processes. The member portal offered limited self-service and struggled with slow load times and unreliable uptime, meaning members couldn’t always complete routine tasks independently.

Events brought another layer of complexity. Managing different event types and booking journeys through the existing setup was challenging for BEVA's team, while the booking experience wasn't always as straightforward as it needed to be for members. With around 250 pricing options for Congress alone, BEVA needed a more flexible approach that could simplify event management behind the scenes and make booking easier for members.

Even measuring the problem was a challenge. The old portal had been a blind spot for analytics, meaning BEVA lost visibility before important conversion points.

Although the individual challenges were different, they pointed towards the same strategic need: a more connected digital ecosystem that could improve the member experience, reduce operational complexity and support BEVA’s long-term ambitions.

Our goal wasn’t simply to replace technology. We wanted to make it easier for busy equine professionals to find the information they needed, while giving BEVA a platform that would continue evolving alongside its members.

Brendan Killough Chief Delivery Officer, Cantarus

Our Solution

Discovery brought BEVA’s stakeholders and the Cantarus team together – through internal workshops and member interviews – to understand not just what was broken, but how members wanted to move through BEVA’s services.

Beginning with BEVA’s organisational strategy, the programme considered content, membership, data and member services as one connected system, while recognising the distinct requirements of each underlying platform. This ensured that decisions across the programme were guided by BEVA’s wider ambitions rather than the needs of individual technologies.

Making information easier to manage

A new user-led information architecture simplified navigation, cut unnecessary depth and consolidated areas that had splintered over time, right down to a more deliberate footer structure. Underpinning it, a new taxonomy gave BEVA a shared model for describing and connecting content – the foundation personalisation, search, filtering and related content had been missing.

The new site, built on Umbraco, replaced the legacy DNN solution with a far more flexible editorial experience. Reusable templates and components replaced the blank-canvas approach to page-building, with governance and approval workflows giving BEVA's small editorial team much greater control over publishing. The site itself was designed mobile-first to WCAG 2.2 AA standards, alongside a light refresh of BEVA's digital brand.

Bringing BEVA’s personality to life

To ensure the new digital experience felt authentically BEVA, the design process began by getting closer to its community. The Cantarus team attended BEVA Congress to interview members and non-members, while a brand workshop with representatives from across the organisation explored what the existing identity was missing. Although the brand had previously felt quite corporate and clinical, the people behind BEVA were consistently described as warm, friendly and full of personality. The new direction needed to reflect that while retaining the organisation’s credibility and heritage.

That personality was introduced through a careful evolution of BEVA’s existing identity. The wordmark became chunkier and more rounded, with a subtle curve added to the crossbar of the ‘A’ to create a distinctive ‘smile’. The familiar horse emblem was also rebalanced and simplified, reducing unnecessary detail so it worked more effectively at different sizes. Within it, the Rod of Asclepius was redrawn to give this important part of the emblem greater clarity and definition.

BEVA’s core colour palette was also reimagined, retaining its recognisable blue while replacing the clinical green with a more characterful, equine-inspired selection. The palette was organised into three flexible groups for vets and nurses, students, and new graduates, each with a hero colour and supporting shades. Alongside refreshed typography, bespoke icons and a new image-treatment style, this created a practical design system that BEVA’s small team could use confidently. It gives them the flexibility to target different audiences while ensuring content across the website and wider communications remains consistent and recognisably BEVA.

BEVA already had an identity that the industry recognised, but it didn’t fully reflect the warmth and personality we encountered in its community. We wanted to bring that character through while retaining the credibility and heritage members value, sympathetically evolving the brand. Just as importantly, we gave BEVA’s team a practical design system they could use consistently across the website and wider communications.

Rob Helsby Creative Director, Cantarus

Simplifying everyday member interactions

BEVA adopted Cantarus CRM, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, alongside a new MemConnect member portal. The CRM’s established membership features are configured around BEVA’s requirements, giving the team flexibility without the need for bespoke development. This product-based approach also provides a clearer path for ongoing upgrades, allowing BEVA to benefit from new features and improvements without maintaining organisation-specific customisations.

One of the clearest examples of how much complexity had built up was pricing: 154 membership price points became 45, while approximately 250 Congress pricing options were simplified to six prices and nine discounts.

Through the new portal, members can join, renew, make payments, download invoices, book events and add-ons, access learning and manage sessions in one place. An integration with BEVA’s existing publishing platform also gives them access to journals. Behind those journeys, the CRM gives BEVA greater flexibility to manage different event types, configure booking journeys and automate communications without relying on technical support.

New integrations also connect those member interactions with the systems BEVA’s teams use behind the scenes. A direct integration with Sage Intacct automates the flow of financial transactions from memberships, renewals, events and other purchases into BEVA’s accounting system. Stripe card and Direct Debit payments are automatically reconciled, while income deferral is handled according to when memberships and services are delivered.

The integration with Totara LMS creates a similarly joined-up journey for learning. When someone books a course through the portal, they are automatically registered and enrolled in Totara, with Single Sign-On (SSO) taking them directly into their learning. The associated purchase also flows through to Sage Intacct, connecting the member journey with the financial processes behind it.

For BEVA’s team, the result is greater control over processes that previously required manual effort or technical input, alongside a more adaptable foundation for developing its membership services over time.

The biggest difference for us is how much easier the CRM feels to work with. It doesn’t feel intimidating for non-technical users, and we have much more control over things like renewals, events and automated emails ourselves. It's also far easier to adapt and integrate with other systems without every change becoming a major development project. For a small team, that makes a huge difference.

Rebecca Radley Head of Marketing and Member Engagement, BEVA

Connecting the wider ecosystem

Replacing BEVA’s CRM also meant replacing the legacy login system that depended on it. Cantarus introduced Microsoft Entra External ID and (SSO), enabling access across the website, mobile app, community, learning management system and journal with a single login. Members can now move from managing their membership to accessing value such as learning and clinical resources without repeatedly signing in, bringing the connected ecosystem into their everyday experience.

The mobile app and online community form part of the same ecosystem. Previously, new resources had to be added to the app manually, which meant content could become outdated and newer resources were not always available. Resources are now pulled directly from Umbraco into the app via API, following the website’s content hierarchy and reducing the need for duplicate content updates.

Data-driven, evidence-based operations

Reliable, comprehensive data and the ability to glean actionable insights from it, is crucial in enabling BEVA, as a smaller organisation with limited resources, to evolve into a more data-driven operator. Return on investment – whether time or money – needed to be highly optimised. Put simply, using evidence to make better decisions, and accurate data to measure the outcomes of those decisions, consistently delivers superior ‘bang for the buck’.

As part of this data-driven operating mode, website analytics were considered across the wider journey. The old portal had been a blind spot for tracking, meaning BEVA lost visibility before important conversion points and had limited insight into how its marketing channels were driving conversions. The new setup creates a stronger foundation for tracking journeys across the website, portal, mobile app and community, rather than viewing those interactions in isolation.

Migrating without disruption

Replacing Silverbear Membership meant moving members, organisations, six years of event history, invoicing and payment data – more than 260,000 records in total – into Cantarus CRM. Rather than relying on manual rekeying, Cantarus developed a managed CRM-to-CRM migration. An agreed cut-off meant only genuinely useful data was carried across, leaving behind duplicate, outdated and system-generated records. The result was a 57% smaller, cleaner, faster database.

The CRM transformation was an opportunity to do more than move BEVA from one system to another. We were able to simplify some of the complexity that had built up over time, clean up the data being carried forward and give the team a platform that’s much easier to manage day to day. The managed migration was a big part of that, particularly given the volume and breadth of data involved.

Dean Terry Technical Director CRM, Cantarus

Bringing the programme together

Almost every part of BEVA's digital estate was either newly built or significantly redesigned at the same time – website, CRM, portal, app, community, authentication, integrations – which made delivery as much of a challenge as any individual platform.

GetSavi supported BEVA in defining its requirements, developing the business case and selecting Cantarus through a structured supplier evaluation process. During implementation, GetSavi provided ongoing project management support alongside BEVA’s internal team, helping the organisation prepare for change and adopt the new systems while Cantarus delivered the connected digital ecosystem.

Specialists across Design, Web, CRM, Data, Marketing Services, Products and Technical Delivery worked across the programme at different points, supported by coordinated approaches to testing, documentation, architecture and change management developed specifically for a programme of this scale and complexity.

Because the platforms depended on each other, coordinating launch took careful planning. The new website, CRM, member portal and updated mobile app all launched together in the first deployment window, with no rollback or maintenance page required at cutover. It was a strong outcome for a programme with so many interconnected parts.

Results and Impact

The transformation has given BEVA a genuinely connected foundation – simpler for members to use, and lighter for staff to run thanks to widespread automation and an intuitive user experience.

Members now have a mobile-first, accessible website that’s easier to search and navigate, and a portal where they can complete routine tasks independently. Behind the scenes, BEVA's team is managing a cleaner CRM, fewer manual processes, and a website they can maintain without rebuilding every page from scratch.

Initial feedback from members included:

"New website is a triumph! Well done everyone who was involved!"
"Looks so good. Epic effort and well done for all the work. Know it's been a huge task."
"It's mobile friendly as well!"

The longer-term value lies in BEVA’s ability to build on this investment. Configurable membership technology, connected services and a shared content structure give the organisation a foundation for developing new member journeys. The programme also reduces duplication in everyday work, from publishing resources across web and mobile to connecting course bookings with learning access and financial processing.

What’s made the biggest difference is how much more joined up everything feels. We’re a small team supporting a busy membership, so having systems that work together rather than creating more work for us is hugely important. It means we can spend less time managing processes behind the scenes and more time focusing on the experience we’re giving our members.

Rebecca Radley Head of Marketing and Member Engagement, BEVA

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