In our latest blog series dedicated to starting and running membership programs we established that memberships could be extremely beneficial for all not-for-profits, whether it is a charity, church or community group. Memberships allow your organisation to build a stronger community that supports your cause and can help with raising awareness of your work, while also providing stable recurring revenue for your projects and initiatives.
To run a successful membership, it is also important to have a set of reliable tools. However, it could be time-consuming, inefficient and overall challenging to maintain several different systems. This is why this week we continue our series with explaining how you can manage and support your members with just one tool – infoodle.
infoodle is a complete community management system, designed to fit the needs of nonprofits of all sectors and sizes, and in today’s post we’d like to discuss various ways membership management can be achieved with infoodle, as well as point you to a set of features that are especially helpful for doing it effectively without sacrificing more time or effort.
CRM Package
In infoodle, the most common way to manage a membership is through the CRM package. As we mentioned in the previous post, having a secure cloud-based CRM tool is paramount as it helps collect and store all your data. Anytime and anywhere it can give you with a complete picture of each of your members. You can access their contact details, communication history and any other information added via Private Notes.
In addition, every person’s profile page has a tab called Involvement.
This provides invaluable information on the engagement level of your members, their commitment to your organisation, membership type, origin, and such. Membership Fields under the Involvement tab, as well as the name of the tab itself, can be changed depending on the type of your organisation or membership program, and more fields can be added. Most importantly, this feature informs you whether the membership is active, not active or about to expire, which allows you to quickly follow up with the member by sending a reminder to renew.
As for other relevant features, infoodle Forms can be used to get new registrations, renew memberships, or to conduct regular surveys and collect feedback from your members. Using these features allows you to look after your members better, so no one would fall through the cracks. infoodle Groups are an excellent way of managing different tiers or types of members, such as new members, life members, fee-paying members, or volunteers. Finally, infoodle Contact feature allows you to send emails and text messages to communicate with your members (or certain groups of members) consistently, informing them of any news, changes, or developments.
All of these, ultimately, keep your members happy and your program effective and successful.
Finance Package
For more complex membership programs that require advanced features, the infoodle Finance package could be a great tool. In addition to all of the features listed above that are provided by our CRM package, the Finance package gives insight into the financial history of an individual and keeps record of all transactions, which is extremely useful for paid membership programs.
The Memberships area of the Finance package allows you to assign membership codes or add custom fields with information. You can run a membership report on these fields as well as on the finance fields. If you add a membership end date, you can run a report and quickly find out if a member is about to lapse and send them a reminder and an invoices.
According to our client, Coastguard Lake Taupo, they were pleasantly surprised to be able to get around 20% of lost income from the past and getting their lapsed members back into their system as financial members just by sending them timely communication with the help of infoodle.
Integrations with leading payment processing solutions like Stripe or Ezidebit, as well a fully automated integration with Xero allow you to easily collect membership fees, which can be done through an infoodle form linked to your preferred payment gateway. Xero automatically issues invoices, while infoodle can help with producing receipts for the transactions and generating financial reports. This can help avoid missed payments or lapsed memberships.
As seen from this post, infoodle offers a complete suite of tools that can support your organisation in running a membership program. We would love to help you manage your membership programs more effectively even further. If you have any questions or would like more information, please get in touch with our team!