case study 2 - professional and examning body

The Challenge
As a busy professional I whole heartedly support my professional organisation, I sit on various committees which plan our future, when we reviewed our membership lists we realised that we needed to collect our annual subscription income on time and chase up the slower members. We need to keep our membership lists up do date and collect the member's annual fees on time.

Without the membership fee income coming in on time we would soon cease to be a supportive professional and examination body.

One of our significant costs is the production of our professional journal, which is based on our current membership list, if this is not up to date, new members will not receive the journal and those that have not paid will receive it, this does not provide a professional image of our association.

Project Details
We started a search for a suitable tool to achieve these key objectives, we had other requirements as well, but key is the maintenance of the list and the fees due. Our organisation is worldwide with the membership population based in Europe, the Americas and Far East. With this geographic spread we determined that the organisation management should have access to the membership details at anytime, this strongly influenced the decision to go for a web based solution.

We performed the usual research on the web, asked a number of other groups how they managed their membership and renewals. This was disappointing, basically we wanted a low cost solution and most of those available came with a price tag more than we could afford.

We contacted Objective Internet to see how their system worked, first and foremost it immediately met our primary criteria being web based, it also allowed us to have many membership fee categories (we have a least eight) also a number of features came with the package where other systems charged not insignificant amounts. Even better is the pricing, apart from a modest set up charge the fee is based on the number of members we have. Also we can integrate this system with our existing website.

After the initial research we required some extras, which are simple an extract of the members who are current and paid up for the Journal, the Journal is published by a major publisher and requires the output in a particular format, this was easily achieved by use of the extract module.

Even today some of our membership is not on email, the way the system provides a mailing label for those backward members solves one of our persistent headaches, trying to ensure that no one gets left out on communications. Better still from our point of view is the fact we have a communications audit trail of messages sent to all members.

The events system gives us the opportunity to have different local chapters on other continents, although we meet as a large group once every two years its important to know and to follow the events organised in different parts of the world, we can now see these more readily and also put our names down to attend if we are local or just
visiting.

Conclusion
We require an out of the box professional website solution for our membership management, we wanted to pay basically what we could afford with our number of members. We had a list of essential features such as web based with online payments, this is provided along with Transaction Central as the card processing and collection
service.

We also looked at the ways we can maintain contact with our members, clearly the events pages will help with their diaries, and the ability to email them from the system was another and forums being the third. These features would not on their own make it attractive to us but the combination of all these features in a web based
solution made the offering irresistible.

Basically after much research we have a solution that provides us with control over the fee income, global presence available to the management committee and membership, and a solution that most importantly meets our budget.

In conclusion we have a management tool that is affordable for us and is now our main and only method of maintaining contact with the Professional Membership.

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