If you’re running a club or society, or indeed a business and maybe offer a subscription pack of Essential Oils, the right software can make a big difference to how easy and successful that task is. As a quick aside you can find some great oils from companies such as Quinessence. But when it comes to dealing with organisations that have large numbers of individuals, like a charity or professional institution, there are lots of membership management systems available, these can be used for a variety of different purposes depending on the need of the business. So how do you make sure you get one that’s right for your needs, and what are the key things to look for?
Enabling self-service
Thanks to the internet, people are increasingly willing to do things for themselves online. In choosing a membership system therefore it’s important to adopt the self-service trend by offering a web portal.
Self-service doesn’t only benefit your members, it’s good for running your organisation too. If members can renew, pay subscriptions, buy merchandise and register for events themselves it reduces the workload on the administrative staff and can reduce costs too.
Communication
The other benefit of the internet age is communication. Email has become an important tool for communicating information and is often the preferred medium. However, other routes are becoming more common too, these include SMS messaging, blogs and social networks. It’s vital that your membership management tool provides you a range of communication options including more traditional routes like newsletters for members who have yet to embrace the digital age.
Reports and integration
In any organisation you can only be truly successful if you understand what’s going on and can spot trends. Any membership system therefore needs to make it easy to generate reports and extract up to date information about finances and other activities. If you have to wait weeks to get a report, the information will be out of date and not worth acting on.
Another aspect of this is that you need to be able to integrate with existing systems such as those used for accounts. It maybe that you also have a customer relationship management (CRM) system and this too will hold useful data. By sharing information across the organisation, management will have a greater understanding of the business and be able to spot and react to trends.