The remaining features, including the price you'll pay, will fall into line. What answers do you need that your current system doesn't provide enough of? Identify those major pain points and find the solution that eases those first.
Your first step is to figure out what is causing your association the most trouble given your current management system (which may be a spreadsheet, a box of index cards, or an unwieldly pile of papers). But, before you decide which one will work best for your club, organization, athletic facility, or camp, you'll need to prioritize the tasks you want completed and define a budget. In this review roundup, we take a look at 10 membership management services-360Alumni, aMember Pro, ChamberMaster, ClubExpress, MemberPlanet, NationBuilder, StarChapter, Sumac, Wild Apricot, and Zen Planner-and introduce key concepts to help ease your buying decision. Today, the cloud-based membership management software services available would have made this task a snap.
Once per year, we printed (yes, printed, on paper!) our membership database so we could find one another-assuming one could find the directory booklet itself. Though we wrote a number of spreadsheet macros to help with this task, ultimately our treasurer had to resort to reading through the entire database-line by line-to make sure nobody had been missed. Where we got bogged down was in the billing date for each member's annual dues and determining when we had to drop a member for non-payment. Key pieces of information we had to track included the obvious such as name, address, phone number, and email address. As chapter president, I relied on our treasurer to maintain the membership rolls, which he accomplished by using a fairly primitive spreadsheet. The tool could even build your website, helping you customize the look, feel, and user experience (UX) for administrators and members who are using the website.īack in the mid-1980s, I (Theresa) was the president of a local chapter of a national computer consultants association. The tool could help you run your online storefront, manage documents, and conduct member polls and online surveys. To collect donations, dues, and fees, and to process payments, you also need some bits of accounting software thrown in.īeyond the basics, and depending on the organization you're running, your admin dashboard or membership command center may also sport a number of other features. On a basic level, membership management requires the ability to track basic membership information, communicate with members and prospects, and plan events. The analog days are over: You don't need to run your entire organization's member information and programs through mountains of paper in file cabinets or the same Microsoft Excel spreadsheet you've been using since the 1990s. This review roundup will explain the types of tools available and the features they offer, the factors you should consider when investing in a membership management platform, and how the type of audience and level of customization you require can make all the difference. Unlike most types of SaaS products that aim to provide a universal set of tools, membership management software is often specialized to handle just the needs of particular types of organizations.īefore you can choose the membership management solution that's right for your organization, you need to have a clear idea of what tasks you need this platform to oversee and facilitate. Depending on the product and audience, these platforms combine a host of different functionality including member database management, document management, e-commerce, email marketing, website building, a content management system (CMS), donation collection and payment processing, event planning and management, and a host of other functions. These cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools are designed to satisfy specific data and people management needs of clubs, associations, and other organizations.