TidyConnect Case Study
44 clubs. Every state. One national body keeping them connected.
How the Australian Multiple Birth Association replaced spray-and-pray email with targeted communication, governance visibility, and shared tools across their entire national network.
The organisation
The Australian Multiple Birth Association has been supporting families expecting or raising twins, triplets, and higher-order multiples since 1974. Their purpose is simple: provide support from those who know.
AMBA operates as a national federation — a central body coordinating over 40 local multiple birth associations spread across every Australian state and territory. More than 35 are connected through TidyConnect, collectively representing over 19,000 families. Each local club is independently run by volunteers, providing expectant parent groups, playgroups, social events, and peer support in their community. The national body handles advocacy, policy, shared resources, and coordination.
It's a structure familiar to anyone in the community sector: a small national team trying to support dozens of autonomous local groups, each with their own committees, their own challenges, and their own capacity. Sixty-one percent of parents of multiples report experiencing mental health challenges in their first year. The work AMBA's volunteers do matters — and the admin that gets in their way costs real impact.
“Can I express how good this is? My heart is lighting up. The targeting alone — I used to manually fish out the Victorian clubs from our email list every time I had something state-specific. That's just gone now.”
The challenge
Running a national federation of 44 volunteer-run clubs creates a coordination problem that email was never designed to solve. AMBA's national board members were sending communications from their personal Outlook accounts to hundreds of email addresses — with no way to know who read what, no way to target by state or topic, and no audit trail when someone claimed they never received a message.
The information itself was a mix: governance updates that required action, ATO changes that only affected certain states, member benefit deals, convention announcements, board updates. All of it went into the same long newsletter to the same long email list. Club volunteers — parents of multiples who are already time-poor — had to read everything to find the one thing relevant to them.
Governance visibility was another gap. AMBA had no way to know which clubs had active committees and which were quietly falling behind. A club might have 13 listed administrators but only one logging in. That's a governance risk that only surfaces when it's already a crisis — a club folding, a handover failing, families losing their local support network.
Meanwhile, day-to-day club communication was happening on Facebook — convenient but uncontrolled. No way to know who was in the group, no privacy guarantees for families in sensitive situations, and no record that survived a committee changeover.
What wasn't working
Spray and pray
National communications went out as bulk emails — five different people sending from five different Outlook accounts. No visibility into who read what.
Volunteer turnover
Committee members rotate constantly. When someone leaves, the knowledge of what was sent, agreed, or owed walks out with them.
Privacy on Facebook
Club communications happened in Facebook groups with no control over who was in or out — a privacy risk for families in vulnerable situations.
No governance visibility
No way to know which clubs were active, which committees were engaged, or which administrators hadn't logged in for months.
The approach
TidyConnect sits above AMBA's 44 clubs as a federation layer — giving the national body visibility and communication tools without overriding each club's autonomy. The design principle: respect constitutional boundaries. Clubs manage their own members, their own committees, their own events. AMBA coordinates, supports, and monitors from above.
The key shift was separating two types of communication. Roughly 70–80% of what a governing body sends to its clubs are things clubs should know — policy updates, member benefit deals, event announcements. The other 20–30% are things clubs must do — affiliation requirements, AGM deadlines, compliance tasks. These need different tools.
For things clubs must do, AMBA uses TidyHQ's projects and tasks — trackable, with deadlines and completion status. For things clubs should know, they now use announcements — categorised, targeted, and tracked without requiring action.
Board members who had been sending emails from personal accounts and hoping for the best suddenly had a system that told them exactly who saw what, and the ability to send finance updates only to treasurers, or state-specific news only to Queensland clubs.
“Everything I do goes through TidyHQ. Every conversation, every decision — it's all there. If I fall over tomorrow, the next person logs in and picks up where I left off. I call it my drop-dead rule.”
What changed
Four TidyConnect capabilities that shifted how AMBA works with their clubs.
Targeted announcements
AMBA can now send communications by state, by category, and by role — so the treasurer gets the finance updates and the events coordinator gets the events. No more blasting every volunteer in the country with everything.
“We used to send everything to everyone and hope the right person saw it. Now I send finance updates to treasurers, Victorian news to Victorian clubs, and member benefits to the people who actually manage them. It's night and day.”
Administration monitoring
A traffic-light dashboard shows which clubs have active administrators and which are at governance risk — before it becomes a crisis. AMBA can see that a club has 13 committee members but only one has logged in recently.
“We've never had this kind of visibility. A club could have been struggling for months and we wouldn't know until they stopped answering emails altogether.”
Usage intelligence
National-level reports show how clubs are using the platform — events run, meetings held, engagement rates. Real data to present to the board instead of anecdotes.
“This data is genuinely important for us. We've never had evidence of how our clubs are actually operating across the country. Now we can take real numbers to the board.”
Shared meeting templates
AMBA creates standardised AGM, EGM, and committee meeting templates and shares them to all 44 clubs. Every club gets a professional starting point instead of reinventing the wheel each year.
“I was literally drafting a document to tell all our clubs how to lay out their meeting minutes and agendas. Turns out I can just build the template in Tidy and share it directly.”
Meetings that don't crash at halftime
Rob Kinghorn's local club was one of the first to adopt TidyHQ's collaborative meeting minutes. Multiple committee members scribing at the same time. Auto-saving. No more losing an hour of meeting notes when a browser crashes — something that had happened before and cost the club significant detail.
For the national body, the real power is template sharing. AMBA can create a standardised AGM template — with the right agenda items, the right governance structure, the right reporting sections — and push it to all 44 clubs in one action. Every club gets a professional starting point. When the ATO changes reporting requirements, AMBA updates the template centrally and every club's next treasurer's report reflects it.
The board is already planning to run their own national AGM through the platform — with live collaborative minutes that can be shared with attendees the moment the meeting closes, rather than weeks later.
“Now we can actually see who's opened it and read it. No more "oh, I didn't know." The excuse is gone.”
Governance without overreach
The tension in any federation is the line between support and control. AMBA's clubs are independent associations — each with their own constitution, their own committee, their own way of doing things. Some have elaborate role structures. Some have three people wearing every hat.
TidyConnect gives AMBA visibility without overstepping. The national body can see that a club has 13 listed administrators but only one has been active in the last 30 days — a risk they can now address proactively rather than discovering it when the club stops responding to emails. They can see how many events clubs are running, how many meetings are being held, how engaged the volunteer base is across the country.
But they can't edit a club's member records. They can't change a club's roles. The constitutional boundary is respected by design. When Maria noticed a club with incomplete contact information, the answer was clear: that's for the club to update. The national body provides the tools and the templates. The clubs run themselves.
The network
35+ local multiple birth associations connected through TidyConnect — from Cairns to Hobart, covering every state and territory.
New South Wales
- Eastern Suburbs MBA
- Illawarra South Coast MBA
- Inner West MBA
- Knox MBA
- Nepean MBA
- Newcastle Multiple Birth Club
- North Shore Sydney MBA
- North West Sydney MBA
- Northern Beaches Multiple Birth Club
- Southern Sydney MBA
Victoria
- Ballarat & Districts MBA
- Camberwell Area MBA (CAMBA)
- Casey & District MBA
- Diamond Valley MBA
- Eastern Area MBA
- Frankston Peninsula MBA
- Geelong Area MBA
- Hume Riverina MBA
- NIMBA
- North West Multiple Birth Club
- Northern & Inner MBA
- South Eastern MBA
- SunRanges Twins Plus
- Waverley MBA
- Westgate MBA
- Wyndham Twins Plus
Queensland
- Brisbane Southside MBA
- Brisbane Westside MBA
- FNQ MBA
- Gold Coast MBA
- Ipswich MBA
- North Queensland MBA
- Rockhampton MBA
- Sunshine Coast MBA
- Toowoomba & District MBA
South Australia
- Multiple Birth SA
Western Australia
- AMBA WA
- Multinet MBA
Australian Capital Territory
- Canberra & Region MBA
Tasmania
- Tasmanian MBA
Northern Territory
- Northern Territory Multiple Birth Club
The results
300,000+ emails sent through the platform — every one tracked, targeted, and auditable
2,700+ events run by clubs nationally — from expectant parent groups to fundraisers
860+ meetings held with collaborative minutes — 80% of clubs adopted the tool
89% of clubs run their events through TidyHQ, up from scattered Facebook posts and email threads
Board members can see read receipts and engagement — no more "I didn't know"
Governance risk is visible before it becomes a crisis — active admin monitoring across every connected club
Standardised meeting templates shared nationally — every club starts with best practice
All communications moved off Facebook and personal email into a privacy-compliant, auditable system
What the board says
Jade McGrath runs both her local North Queensland club and sits on the AMBA national board. She uses TidyHQ for everything — every email to members, every task, every meeting, every event. “We stay away from Gmail entirely. Every email, even if someone sends it to me personally, I send the reply through Tidy. Then I have a record. If everything else collapses, the record is there.”
Maria takes this further. She calls it her “drop-dead rule” — a blunt name for a serious governance principle. “If I fall over tomorrow, someone knows what I've done. Every conversation, every decision. The next person logs in and picks up where I left off.” For a volunteer organisation where committee members come and go, that continuity isn't a nice-to-have — it's what keeps a club from collapsing when a key person leaves.
Rob Kinghorn's local club was using TidyHQ before AMBA adopted it nationally. His committee ran one of the first collaborative meeting sessions — multiple people scribing at the same time, real-time editing, auto-save. “We've been burned before when the old system crashed halfway through and we lost everything. Having something that auto-saves and lets multiple people contribute at once — that alone was worth the switch.”
The board is already planning to move their monthly board updates and national AGM onto the platform. “For the first time, we'll actually know who on the board has read the update,” says Jade. “And the communications we've been putting through our Facebook page — they should all go through here instead. It's tracked, it's private, and it doesn't depend on who happens to be in the group.”
TidyHQ features used
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Your clubs deserve better than email blasts
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