7 Key Considerations When Choosing a New Membership System
Are you looking for a new system to support business growth, future-proof existing processes, and use automation to reduce friction? Now it's a great time to evaluate your current processes and systems and consider improvements.
Here are 7 reasons why a new membership system could benefit your organisation and community:
1. Gain back control of your time
Managing a sport, charity or any kind of member organisation may sound all fun and games until you reach a point where you’re overloaded with paperwork and missing crucial data.
If you’re doing everything manually, record-keeping can be complicated at best and a security issue at worst. Keeping track of everything can be a real hassle, and sharing records across your team could lead to the use of unsecured, outdated data. On average, how much paperwork do you have to deal with when onboarding a new member?
Even if you are using a membership system, consider the following: Does it give you a single view of your data? Does it automatically renew outdated records? Does it allow for seamless sharing between team members, whilst ensuring data security? Does it give your members direct access to their own data, so that they can update their own information in real-time?
If you’re working in a larger organisation (i.e. a National Governing Body), you’re constantly required to share data across departments. You might require membership data to fill out event attendee information and vice versa. With lots of members to take care of, your work can easily pile up if not done efficiently.
This new year, take the time to question your existing practices and whether you’re making the best use of your time.
Actionable tip: Sit down with your team to discuss whether it’s difficult to keep track of documents and stay aligned on your processes. Are there things that could be done differently to save more time?
2. Use a unified system
Are you using multiple systems for your organisational needs? Are you capturing data, collecting payments, processing event tickets, and communicating with members across four different systems?
In this day and age, using multiple systems for your basic organisational needs truly is an unwarranted cost and hassle. Multiple systems make it harder to connect discrete information. You might even lose important data due to your processes being all over the place.
Especially when it comes to peak season, like membership renewal periods, a unified system can simplify your administrative efforts and bring your community together on the same page.
If you’re a part of a larger organisation, a unified system makes governance remarkably easier. You will be able to create a multi-tiered administration structure (with different admin layers for the local, regional, and national levels), bringing your entire community into a single and secure shared system. This helps both you and your organisation in keeping everything organised, consolidating processes and ensuring transparency across the region.
Actionable tip: Consider how much easier it would be to have a single centralised system across all your activities and throughout your community. Learn more about how JustGo can be used with a multi-tiered approach here.
3. Build a solid brand image
Regardless of how small or large your organisation is, a branded digital shop window is crucial to establish credibility and expertise.
As any marketing professional will tell you, branded elements, such as a branded membership portal, a branded website and branded emails help differentiate your organisation from others. It also evokes a sense of community and loyalty amongst members—which is a great way to strengthen the glue of your community.
A branded digital shop window ensures new and prospective members are impressed at first sight, giving your organisation the official appearance it deserves. In a competitive landscape, a strong brand image can give you a distinct advantage.
Actionable tip: When considering a new membership system, evaluate its branding capabilities. Consider not only if it offers you all of your required administrative needs but also if it offers you the branding possibilities to provide the best member experience possible.
4. Incorporate integrations and partnerships
A good membership management system is never stagnant, it will continually evolve and help you grow. It will hold your organisation’s best interests at heart, thus bringing exciting new features and integration opportunities to help optimise the way you work.
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With the right team by your side, you should be open to embracing newer technology and processes that simplify your work and benefit you in the long run. A good system should not hold you back when it comes to enhancing your service or starting out new ventures.
Actionable tip: Discuss with your team- does your current membership management system offer the integration capability you need to help streamline your processes? And are there other integration opportunities with some of the existing systems that you’ve never considered before or been able to accommodate? Maybe your competition or finance system needs a helping hand, would an integration possibly make things easier?
5. A tangible proof of membership
If you want an affordable and efficient way to keep members coming back for more, you should look into upgrading to digital membership cards. Not only do they provide up-to-date proof of member identity and carry important live information, but they also create a sense of community and belonging among your members.
As physical membership cards can be costly and resource-intensive, digital membership cards are a great alternative. They’re always available to your members, downloadable straight into the Google or Apple wallet, can be automatically synced with the latest information, and have no space restrictions, so you can include all relevant information without compromising the card’s design and style.
In addition to these benefits, digital membership cards can also be an essential way to establish credibility for coaches and officials. Digital cards can make safeguarding checks easier and validate members in charge, all at no additional cost to you. Plus, they can even double as event passes, eliminating the need for physical tickets for your events.
Actionable tip: Consider how you could incorporate membership cards and passes in your organisation. How could they help with your unique organisational needs? As these passes are open to lots of configuration, it could be the next step to simplify your admin!
6. Create better analytics and reports
As much as some of us avoid data and numbers like the plague, they can be your absolute best friend when it comes to helping your community prosper. If you are reporting to your stakeholders, the right reports can help you paint an accurate picture of how well your organisation and community are performing.
A prime example of where the right membership system can help in this instance is being able to run a report against a recent event you’ve hosted and being able to identify which of the attendees were members and which were not. On the back of this data you can plan your next communication, which by the way, could also be sent from the same system if you’re considering JustGo.
Your organisation’s data and insights should always be available in real time, letting you experiment with different metrics and quickly find the right data.
Actionable tip: Take some time to consider how strong your reporting capabilities are. Can you derive good insights about your organisation? Is there more you could do to enhance your reports?
7. Grow your community
Understanding member behaviour is the first step in enhancing your members’ experience. When onboarding new members, are you collecting information about health restrictions, athletic ambitions, interests and such? Collecting insights will help you understand your members, allowing you to serve them better and retain them in the long run.
As paying members of your community, your members can and will expect a personalised touch. Make sure your membership system supports the ability to collect whatever additional information you need and then easily report on it to make informed decisions about your products and services.
You can use this information to recommend personalised events, courses, services—and even create campaigns for members or event ticket bookers with common interests. All of this will boost member engagement, leading more and more members to actively participate within your organisation and ultimately support your growth.
Actionable tip: Take a look at your existing member journey. How personalised is it? How well are you taking care of existing members once you onboard them? What kind of information could you ask them to share so you could serve them better?
Investing in good membership software can really help your organisation grow and prosper. It can lead to more people signing up for events and becoming members, which is great news because it means more revenue for your organisation to work with! Plus, your investment in a software like JustGo will be earned back 10 times over just through the time and efficiency savings alone. So, it’s a win-win situation for sure!
With fresh beginnings right around the corner, a new membership system might just transform your organisation for the better. With 20 years of experience under our belt, the JustGo team continuously gleans insights into the latest membership practices and we develop our software to simplify it all. We understand that every organisation has its unique challenges, and there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to software. If you would like to discuss your administrative needs or would like a free demo of our intuitive membership software, simply ‘Book a Demo’ using the button below or contact us at sales@justgo.com. Our community experts are always happy to help!