HETI has operated since 1974 with members in over 45 countries, 18 international congresses held to date, and a peer-reviewed journal with three decades of published research. By any conventional measure, it's a well-established global membership organization.
It's also an organization that spent years assuming English-language delivery was enough for a worldwide audience, underestimated the structural demands of digital operations, and discovered that some members can't access tools like Google or YouTube due to country-level restrictions.
Věra Lantelme-Faisan, HETI's current president and a pediatric physiotherapist from the Czech Republic, joined MemberFix Radio to talk about what holding an organization like this together actually requires. Her answers cover what she and HETI underestimated about running a membership digitally, what they're changing, and what they're still figuring out.
What HETI Does
The Federation of Horses in Education and Therapy International AISBL (HETI) connects practitioners, researchers, and organizations working in equine-assisted services. Members include physiotherapists, educators, psychologists, and national associations from over 45 countries.
What members get access to: webinars, the HETI Journal (an annual peer-reviewed scientific publication with a 30-year archive), an international newsletter called Global Galop, specialist task forces where members collaborate on specific topics driven by community needs, and access to regional professional networks.
Four regional networks currently operate: Latin America (primarily Spanish and Portuguese speaking), Asia-Pacific, the European Network for Equine Assisted Therapy, and a newly forming Balkan network.
HETI's motto is simple: connect, communicate, and collaborate. They don't replace national associations. They connect them and help them grow responsibly.
Fifty Years Offline, Ten Years Online
HETI has existed since 1974. Its digital presence is maybe ten years old.
That gap tells you something. The organization built its reputation, relationships, and knowledge base through in-person congresses, printed journals, and face-to-face collaboration across decades. When they moved delivery online, they brought decades of institutional knowledge and very little digital operations experience.
The result was what Věra described as underestimation. They underestimated how much they wanted to do online, and they didn't have the structure in place to support the volume. Enrolling members in online webinars, coordinating international events, communicating across time zones – all of it was harder than anyone anticipated.
For any organization that built its value around in-person interaction – congresses, regional meetings, printed publications – the shift to digital means rethinking delivery, not just moving it online. HETI is still working through this, and the honesty about underestimating the structural demands is itself a useful data point for anyone facing the same transition.
The Consistency Problem at Scale
When your members span 45+ countries, consistency becomes the hardest operational problem you'll face.
Different countries train practitioners differently. Different cultures define safety differently. Different regulatory environments impose different requirements. HETI's job is to hold all of these together under a shared set of professional values while respecting that the systems themselves will never be identical.
“The biggest gap is always inconsistency,” Věra says. “Different training levels, different requirements for competency and demands for ethics and safety.”
Her framing of the solution clarifies where a global membership organization should spend its energy. Systems can be different – regulations, training pathways, cultural contexts. Values cannot. Ethics and professionalism have to be aligned even when everything else varies.
You can't enforce identical processes across 45 countries. But you can enforce shared principles. And those principles become the foundation that makes everything else functional – the webinars, the task forces, the congresses, the regional networks. Without that baseline, every interaction starts with alignment instead of progress.
Věra takes this further with a line that applies well beyond her field: “Passion is not enough and the good intentions are not enough. The competencies build the trust.”
For any membership organization that certifies, accredits, or represents professionals, this is a clear standard: competence, not enthusiasm. The trust members place in the organization depends on knowing that everyone in the network meets a real baseline – not just a motivated one.
The Language Barrier They Didn't See Coming
For years, HETI communicated exclusively in English. The reasoning felt solid: English is the international standard, it works for congresses, it works for the journal. One language simplifies everything.
Věra's assessment is direct: English is not as widely spoken as international organizations tend to assume. HETI had been communicating in English as a default for years, and it took time to recognize that this was a barrier, not just an inconvenience.
Věra described this as HETI's most underestimated challenge. The assumption had been in place for years before the organization recognized it as a barrier and began addressing it.
HETI's response was to build a regional ambassador program. Ambassadors in each region communicate with members in their native language. It's a structural change, not a surface fix – it requires identifying the right people in each region, supporting them, and integrating their perspective into organizational planning.
If you're running any membership or community with international reach, or even regional reach across language boundaries, HETI's experience is a useful reminder to test whether your default communication language is actually working for all of your members – not just the ones you hear from most.
The Platform Access Problem
Most organizations pick their communication and delivery tools based on what works for their team. Familiar platforms, good integrations, reasonable pricing.
HETI discovered a constraint that most single-country memberships never encounter: not all platforms are accessible in every country. Věra specifically mentioned that Google and YouTube are not available everywhere – meaning content hosted on those platforms simply doesn't reach certain members.
When your membership spans 45+ countries, tool selection stops being a preference question and becomes a distribution problem. A webinar platform that works in one country might be restricted in another. A video host you've relied on for years might not load for members in certain regions.
HETI is still working through this. Věra described their current goal as finding communication tools that are acceptable – politically acceptable – across all member countries. There's no clean, permanent solution because the constraints shift as membership expands and country-level policies change.
For membership operators with smaller geographic footprints, the principle scales down but doesn't disappear. Your members' experience isn't defined by what you see on your end. It's defined by what loads on theirs. If you've never asked your members whether they can actually access the tools you use for delivery, HETI's experience suggests it's worth checking.
The Member Engagement Ladder
HETI's member journey follows a clear progression, though they don't use that terminology for it.
A practitioner discovers HETI online or at a conference. They join and start accessing webinars and the HETI Journal. They read Global Galop, the international newsletter. They join a task force – a specialist working group where members collaborate on a specific topic identified by the community. They collaborate with international colleagues. Eventually, they bring knowledge and expertise back to their own country's practice.
The payoff Věra describes at the end of that progression is the real value proposition. Members realize they don't need to reinvent what's already been developed elsewhere. A practitioner in one country facing a specific challenge can access the experience of colleagues in dozens of other countries who've already worked through the same problem.
And underneath the practical value, there's an emotional one. Members discover they're not isolated – not in their country, not in their region, and not in their professional challenges. That sense of belonging to something larger than a local practice is what Věra points to as the core benefit of membership.
The content – webinars, journals, task forces – is the mechanism. But the retention driver is the professional community itself. Any organization can build a content library. The ones that retain members over years are usually the ones delivering community alongside content. The resources get people in. The connections keep them.
When Growth Becomes a Risk
Most membership organizations treat growth as a straightforward positive. More members, more revenue, more reach, more influence.
HETI's president flags the opposite concern: “If the field grows faster than education and ethical frameworks, we risk losing credibility.”
Growth that outpaces your quality infrastructure – in HETI's case, education standards and ethical frameworks – doesn't just create temporary strain. It actively damages the credibility you spent years building.
HETI's position is to support growth, but only when it aligns with their capacity for responsible delivery. That means investing in infrastructure before scaling, not scrambling to build it after.
For membership operators, the parallel is direct. A successful launch that overwhelms your onboarding. A new tier released before delivery is solid. A community that scales faster than your capacity to maintain its quality. Věra's framing is worth borrowing: support growth, but make sure it's aligned with responsibility.
What Membership Operators Can Take From This
Věra Lantelme-Faisan doesn't run a typical membership site. She runs a 50-year-old international not-for-profit with members across 45+ countries, four regional networks, a peer-reviewed journal, specialist task forces, and 18 international congresses behind them. The scale and complexity are unusual. The operational problems are not.
Three things transfer directly:
Test your language and access assumptions before your engagement data forces you to. If you serve an international or multilingual audience – even partially – “everyone speaks English” is a guess, not a verified fact. And “everyone can access our tools” is another guess. Survey your members. Check engagement data by region. An ambassador or translation program costs less than losing a segment of your membership to a barrier you could have identified early.
Audit your delivery infrastructure from your members' perspective, not yours. You know what works on your end. Do you know what actually works on theirs? Platform access, time zones, bandwidth, device preferences, language – these aren't edge cases. They're the gap between content delivered and content engaged with. The question isn't which tools your team prefers. It's which tools your members can actually use.
Match your growth to your operational readiness. Adding members is the easy part. Maintaining quality of experience for every one of them while adding more is the real work. If your onboarding, support, community quality, or content standards degrade as you scale, the growth is costing you more than it's producing. Professional communities are built on trust, and trust compounds slower than membership revenue.
Learn more about Věra Lantelme-Faisan and her work here: https://hetifederation.org/
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