We’ve been using google sheets, and forms, and email bcc for the last few years, but our club has grown to almost 350 paid members and it’s becoming a pain to manage all this stuff manually.
Do any clubs use membership management software?
We are looking at http://groupspaces.com/, it seems to have everything we need. Hard to know for sure until you start using it though…
What kind of digital services are your clubs using to make life easier for the leaders?
Currently, we use siteground.com to manage our wordpress website. It saves a lot of time when something goes wrong with the website (hackers, goes down, etc…) since they fix it for us.
Ya I can’t imagine collecting cash for membership anymore. That club money needs to stay as far away from personal bank accounts as possible.
We have been collecting membership money online using bigcartel and stripe. It’s been working fine, but it’s not designed to track members, just sell things.
We use a Google Group for club-wide email distribution. You can set members’ level of access so for example, only officers can send club-wide emails. It’s working very well, one email to the club Group address from an authorized person gets forwarded to everyone. PayPal for dues invoicing, which is connected to our club’s checking account. The Cavemen in the club still pay with cash. Facebook is our message board. We hover around 80-90 members. All our memberships are on a Jan-Dec calendar year. For new members, they pay a little more than the annual dues the first year, but that gets them the rest of that year plus the following year.
Paypal transfers is how we started, but that led to having to maintain a big spreadsheet. I’m trying to get away from the big spreadsheet since it’s becoming a pain to maintain now that we have grown so much. Having to Copy-Paste 300+ emails into gmail is messy, and I know one of my directors will forget to bcc one time, and people will be upset.
I’m looking for some kind of solution that will register and accept payment from members, track their status in a database, email newsletters to them for us, send them a welcome email when they join, maybe a digital membership card too, and maybe a few more things like sell our merch, etc…
It sounds to me like you’re looking for something that will cost $$$ and potentially take at least as much time maintaining as you currently spend. I did look around for membership software solutions, driven mostly by email management, but ended up deciding that the cost was ridiculous.
We also use a simple Google Sheet for our roster. Because all of our memberships renew at the same time, we do not have much to maintain. Invoices go out once a year, in late November or early December, which our Treasurer and I use as an excuse to get together with a few beers and pizza. Sort the spreadsheet by Member Type (Single, Couple, Spouse), then bulk copy and paste email addresses from the sheet into a PayPal invoice 20 or so at a time. Singles and Couples get invoiced for different amounts, and Spouses don’t get invoiced at all. This literally takes us less than an hour once a year. Then we check back in about February, see who has paid with PayPal (or cash/check directly to the Treasurer), and update the Year Paid column on the spreadsheet. A couple more beers and another pizza. If there are stragglers who haven’t paid, it is a simple matter to sort the Sheet by Year Paid and send a reminder email by copying and pasting email addresses in bulk.
New members require a little bit of manual work: adding them to the roster spreadsheet, adding them to the Google Group, and if they request it, approving their access to the Members Only page of our web site and our FaceBook Group.
The biggest hassle we had was managing our email distribution list. We were using various Comcast email accounts with forwarding filters set up. That got way out of hand maintaining multiple filters to add/edit/delete people’s addresses as they came and went.
The solution was the Google Group. Set it and forget it. Enter addresses once as people join. Then whoever you want to set with the authority to send club-wide emails, has only to send one email to the Group address and it goes out to everyone. No one gets accidentally left off.
We have membership card capability by creating a PDF with two editable fields (Name, and Year). It is uploaded to the Members Only page of our web site which requires a login to access. (It is a Google Site linked to our domain.) I honestly don’t know if anyone actually uses it, the only purpose of which would be to get a discount at one of several area homebrew shops. But they all honor our club discount without the need for a card.
I realize this is old, but ran across it and thought I would share.
We used Memberplanet.com in the past. good at $$ collections (minimal fee)
I have recently switched to tidyhq.com, but they have limits in membership numbers if you want it FREE.
Would love to use wildapricot.com, but too expensive and they will not work with us in trying to offer a free version (I have tried twice)
As an aside, we use a Facebook Groups for member communication, sharing resources, announcements, events, etc. (in place of the old forum we used to have) FREE
And we use mailchimp for emailing members and contacts (FREE)
We also use eztexting.com for sending out short texts to members (FREE)
