Software for Club Membership Management

Amputee Marksman

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I am working with some people in WSA to migrate our membership software to something much better. Probably will be cloud based but that is not a requirement.

Looking for something that can manage club membership, send emails to all club members, track dues and renewal status etc. Also must be able to have members renew and pay online and then email out membership cards etc.

Would also like to run registration pages for club events and be able to collect payment online.

We current process payments using Stripe. Not a problem migrating to a new payment processor but if we could stay with Stripe that would make the migration easier.

Ideally we could tie this into our card entry system for access control but not sure how feasible that would be. Our current software does not interface into the security system so we are used to managing multiple systems.

Looking for suggestions and also interested in what your club might be using. If you send me suggestions for something you're using let me know what the strengths and weaknesses are.
 
We use "helloclub.com" at Hopkinton.com. It includes Stripe integration, and we are very happy with it. We haven't been using it for event registration but I believe it has such features. The company is not as big as Apricot, but has enough customers that I expect it would be bought out if the founders died. Also very responsive support.

Cloud based should definitely be a requirement. It avoids any need of a "data handover" when you change the staff that maintains the membership data.

If you want full integration, you might have to buy an all in one system where one vendor handles both (Helloclub.com works with one obscure system that I am not familiar with). The issue is getting direct access to the access system database which may or may not be easy. Helloclub.com has a nice to fetch member data as json objects (it uses Mongo rather than SQL). Am API that allowed us to access all membership

I put together a utility that access both the Mongo data from Helloclub and the access control data to generate reports like "cards in the access system not in the database", "members in the database not in the access system", "persons with more than one access card", "people with access cards whose membership expired", etc. This would have to be rewritten to work with another access control system database, but isn't really that hard for a moderately competent programmer. We don't modify the access control database. We could, but I decided that was too risky and the last thing I want to tell the vendor is "I modified your database tables but that's not the problem, I tell you". It does substantially reduce the difficulty of keeping the two systems in sync. What access system are you using now? We're using Kerisys at Hopkinton.

This is the screen for the program we use at Hopkinton to keep access control and membership data in sync. If you want an online demo, PM me. You're welcome to the source code, but the access control database access would need to be changed to work with your system. Plus you would have to promise not to ridicule my midnight hackery on NES.

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Along the same lines, does anyone use a service, maybe Google or Microsoft, for their email management? Everyone at the club has their own email address and it needs to be standardized and the club leadership should have access should an officer leave.
 
Along the same lines, does anyone use a service, maybe Google or Microsoft, for their email management? Everyone at the club has their own email address and it needs to be standardized and the club leadership should have access should an officer leave.

You can host it yourself pretty easily and cheap. I've been using mailcow on docker running on OVH. $20 a month for a server, $4 a year for a domain name, a days' work, and you can have unlimited mailboxes and unilateral control.

If you want something extra fancy and expensive to manage the club salesforce will certainly do it.
 
If you want something extra fancy and expensive to manage the club salesforce will certainly do it.

Salesforce will cost you. Most clubs are not going to pay the $ for Salesforce.

If you talk numbers it costs us several thousands of dollars to do a yearly renewal cycle.

Print and mail out renewal notices.
Process returns. This is a combination of checks and cards.
Print and mail out new membership cards and badge inserts.
We have a paid employee to process all of the above work. During the renewal cycle the employee works extra hours.

Ideally the cost of system is going to be less to or equal to the expense of the mostly manual system we now have.

Some additional requirements I forgot.

1. Must be able to handle "work hours. If a member works 7 hours in a year then they get a 50% reduction in dues. This would be as easy as checking a box of work hours are done.
2. Track new member status.
  • Application completed including sponsor
  • Membership fee paid
  • First Reading
  • Bylaw and Range rules class
  • Range Orientation
  • Work hours completed
  • 1st year dues paid
  • Second Reading
  • Vote by membership to approve new member
 

is amazing if you can build a lamp stack and write php. Basically open source salesforce, a fork of sugarcrm when they went closed source. based on an absolutely beautiful php framework, everything is modular and named well 'sales_tax_calculator()' and it's very easy to add javascript as well. you put all your modifications into a module that's super easy to manage, basically an XML file that filters the current config. Makes it really easy to make and publish your own modules, all upgrade safe.

The list of things you can do with this software is astounding. It's basically legos for php devs. You start with a contact form, with someone's personal info. Then you have 'projects', things that involve that person, if they watered their lawn, how much water did we measure, when did they turn their lights off at night. Then you have 'documents', which allows you to generate documents on the fly. Town worker pulls up your contact record, hits documents, and 'water usage fine' and the software will automatically grab data from related records, and make a ticket from a template that has all the logos and static data already. Customizable work flows.

Native HTML5 support, works on a smartphone.

I converted a factory that ran on AS/400 to SugarCRM. Every customer, order, requisition, build sheet, production binder, QC process, shipping manifest, postage stamp, and bill was produced with that software. Whole factory went from a monochrome DOS window application to running on a smartphone. That training was fun, the old guys hated it.

Also have converted excel sheets, act data, quickbooks data, if it can be formatted to UTF8 it will fit in Sugar/Suite. It can grab data from google documents, basically any modern database, and batch import and transform. One time I had a client with a borland database formatted in ascii. The carriage returns broke all the exported tables. Nobody else would take this job, it was shelved for years. I was able to convert all the carriage returns to control characters "{'$0x9999$''$CR$'$'}" or something, then write a module that told PHP to override CSS to never render that character, and added a little javascript to convert the control character back to a carriage return post processing. 1M records, 100 users, dual high availability and load balancer, ~500 hours $15k in hardware.

So yeah, super easy to get up and running. The customization and custom coding is where the time is, and scummy companies will rape you on maintenance costs and upgrade compliance requirements.
 
is amazing if you can build a lamp stack and write php. Basically open source salesforce,

I can totally do that and a lot more. The reality is if I do that then I own it for years to come and I am not going to commit to that. Maybe if I was younger and planned to stay in the area I would but not now. I'm looking at retirement anytime now and I'm looking to shed long term commitments not add them. I'm still working now so I can bank my paychecks but if something goes wrong at work or they piss me off then I'm done.
 
I can totally do that and a lot more. The reality is if I do that then I own it for years to come and I am not going to commit to that. Maybe if I was younger and planned to stay in the area I would but not now. I'm looking at retirement anytime now and I'm looking to shed long term commitments not add them. I'm still working now so I can bank my paychecks but if something goes wrong at work or they piss me off then I'm done.
+1

Just look at the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth with the changes required to go from Python 2 to Python 3 when the former was rendered obsolete (and no, P3 was not a backwards compatible upgrade).
 
Along the same lines, does anyone use a service, maybe Google or Microsoft, for their email management? Everyone at the club has their own email address and it needs to be standardized and the club leadership should have access should an officer leave.
Both can do that. I’ve setup Google for our PTO and you can make a Google Group that is an email like [email protected] You can log in and see the group emails and multiple users can respond.
 
We use Wild Apricot. It meets our needs. Memebership renewal is so much easier being able to use credit cards. MS Teams is a great tool for group activities.
 
Salesforce will cost you. Most clubs are not going to pay the $ for Salesforce.

If you talk numbers it costs us several thousands of dollars to do a yearly renewal cycle.

Print and mail out renewal notices.
Process returns. This is a combination of checks and cards.
Print and mail out new membership cards and badge inserts.
We have a paid employee to process all of the above work. During the renewal cycle the employee works extra hours.

Ideally the cost of system is going to be less to or equal to the expense of the mostly manual system we now have.

Some additional requirements I forgot.

1. Must be able to handle "work hours. If a member works 7 hours in a year then they get a 50% reduction in dues. This would be as easy as checking a box of work hours are done.
2. Track new member status.
  • Application completed including sponsor
  • Membership fee paid
  • First Reading
  • Bylaw and Range rules class
  • Range Orientation
  • Work hours completed
  • 1st year dues paid
  • Second Reading
  • Vote by membership to approve new member
Did you ever come to a resolution on this? My club is also looking to get away from paper applications and renewals and go to an online solution (we have 2000 members). We don't have anyone with IT skills volunteering to help so we are fumbling about here.
 
There is a company based out of Hudson, Ma. I'm getting on a Webinar they are having today with NRA affiliated Gun Clubs. Will report back.

Home | AssociationSphere: Your all-in-one solution
Attended their Webinar. About a half hour. Fast paced but needed to cover a lot. Offering 6 months free with NRA discount. Club must be NRA affiliated.

  • Cloud Based
  • Unlimited users and different access levels
  • Auto eMail reminders
  • Payment links to bank, Venmo, PayPal, ApplePay
  • Web Site Builder (we still need a provider)
  • Sell merchandise
  • Event Tickets and Pricing
  • Raffles
  • Training Classes and scheduling. Example: A Hunter Ed class would register on line. Payment on Line. Check in with a QR code on day of class. And Certificate can be emailed out.
  • Add people to Committees
  • Send Newsletters and Membership reminders.
  • Elections on line (with applicable Club Bylaws)
  • Members could log in, renew membership, print certificates, register for classes, or events and pay on line.
  • New applications can be taken. And CC information entered but card is not charged until applicant is approve.
  • Different levels of membership such as Senior, Junior, Associate etc.
  • Link to Quickbooks.
  • Payments can be made via CC, Wire Transfer or paper check.
 
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