Overview

The Australian Medical Association is the peak professional body for doctors in Australia. It promotes and protects the professional interests of doctors while advocating for the healthcare needs of patients and communities.

AMA had historically represented approximately 80–90% of Australian doctors. By the time of the engagement, membership had fallen to closer to 25%. Many doctors no longer saw enough value in the membership, and the experience of engaging with AMA had become harder to navigate across a federated national, State and Territory structure.

Deepend was engaged to help AMA better understand the member experience, identify data and experience gaps affecting acquisition and retention, and shape the foundations for a more personalised, cohesive and scalable digital member experience.

Problem & Insight

AMA's central challenge was not simply digital usability or communications performance. It was a broader relevance problem: many doctors did not clearly perceive the value of membership, even though AMA's advocacy role remained critically important. The work revealed that advocacy was the core but underappreciated product, and that member expectations were shifting - particularly among younger cohorts.

The audience view also needed to become more precise. Deepend focused on stages of practice—medical students and interns, doctors in training, senior medical officers, GPs and specialists—as well as practice settings including public, private, owner-operated and rural or regional contexts. This segmentation helped AMA recognise that a single generic member experience could not serve all doctors equally well.

Strategy & Experience Design

Deepend's strategy was to connect member insight to practical experience and platform decisions. The engagement began by forming a cross-functional AMA-Deepend project team and aligning stakeholders around the priority engagement challenges. Existing documents, research, audience insights and engagement performance data were reviewed to identify what was already known and where the most important knowledge gaps remained.

Hunch workshops, stakeholder interviews and sensemaking activities helped identify priority experiences to map, including sign-up, onboarding and advocacy engagement. The team assessed the experience through functional, emotional and social lenses, then prioritised hot spots and moments of truth where AMA could most improve relevance and ease of engagement.

The output was designed to drive action. Rather than producing a static current-state map, Deepend created artefacts that could guide decisions: hot spot opportunity summaries, segment snapshots, insight platforms, experience demos and a landscape audit. These helped leadership and stakeholders see the member experience more clearly, compare opportunities against best-in-class examples and agree on next steps for a more personalised member engagement experience.

Technology & Delivery

The data stream focused on understanding the existing data landscape and identifying what would be needed to support future-state member engagement. Deepend reviewed likely data sources - including CRM, event attendance, website analytics and email marketing platforms - then assessed the quality, structure and relevance of available data.

The objective was not detailed data cleaning. The focus was to understand data health, identify duplication and completeness issues at a high level, and define data and functional gaps that future technology or platform decisions would need to address. This included requirements relevant to customer data platform or business intelligence platform decisions, as well as the data architecture needed to support personalisation and engagement measurement.

The later website-focused phases translated strategic and research foundations into a concrete delivery pathway: technical solution design, component inventory, hosting and infrastructure design, cybersecurity design, a lightweight functional specification, information architecture, wireframes, UI concept directions and selected desktop and mobile UI designs.

Results

Deepend gave AMA a clearer foundation for member-centred transformation. The work created a shared understanding of current member experience issues, priority cohorts, data gaps, digital requirements and future-state opportunities.

By the end of the design-definition phase, AMA had the foundations for:

• A scalable member-centric website.
• A cohesive design system aligned to member needs.
• State-specific customisation and federal priorities.
• A prioritised scope for Release 1.
• A backlog for future enhancements.
• A roadmap that improved transparency around development effort, timelines and budgets.

Most importantly, the engagement gave AMA a more practical way to connect advocacy, community, professional support and digital experience – establishing the evidence base and design framework needed to improve how doctors discover value, engage with services, participate in advocacy and renew their relationship with AMA over time.