Membership Management

The Problem

Processing memberships used to be a relatively in-depth multi-step process.   To get members into our systems we needed to manually create accounts and set them up in a not-so-easy to use system. Once accounts were set up we manually composed membership materials including personalised welcome packs and letters. We also manually processed payments, created invoices and sent membership certificates.

Membership processing occurs relatively consistently throughout the year and we estimate that we were spending 4 hours per week on administration for membership processing.

The Solution

Member Manager has significantly streamlined our membership renewal operations. The only administration task that we are left with is creating and sending Certificates of Membership.

We are now spending only around 30 minutes per week processing memberships.

We no longer print and send a welcome pack for each new member which saves costs on both stamps and stationary and we have also eliminated the commission fees we used to have to pay for payment processing.

There are a number of other, possibly more valuable benefits that we have experienced but these are much more difficult to quantify.

We now have much greater control over our membership data because we now have a central data repository that not only keeps membership related data, but also member details.  We can de-centralise the maintenance of the data (e.g. by allowing members to update their own details) and at the same time be sure that information regarding their membership period is secure. When a membership is about to expire the system notifies us, but also the member, and we know that their details are up to date when they renew with very minimal manual administration by us. We can also use the database for regular cost effective outbound communications and we can extract segments of the database whenever we need.

Conservatively we estimate that this saves us around 225 person hours.