Back to Main
Member Jungle Hints - 1Date:
Category:
General Updates
I am sure by now everyone is aware of the decision to introduce Member Jungle to our club. The primary reason for this was to automate the new member and membership renewal process. The old process, which included updating multiple spreadsheets, producing individual membership cards and many cut and paste operations, was time consuming and further complicated by missing or incorrect membership forms and payments. A clean renewal, without errors took around 7 minutes per member, which becomes significant when multiplied by up to 400! Ongoing weekly maintenance adds to the total task and with not too many hands up for the position of Membership Officer and Treasurer, I went looking for member automation applications. Member Jungle was chosen for several reasons. They are Australian based (Newcastle), have been in business for over 18 years and offer services in membership management along with hosting and domain registration. Over 1,500 organisations are using Member Jungle with clients from sporting clubs, car and bike groups, associations and societies, community groups, licenced clubs and animal clubs to name a few.
Friday 20th January was planned to be our cutover day following weeks of trial activity by a band of 20 “early adopters” however a small problem was created by word getting around that the system was ready on the 19th. A few rushed emails did see us going live on the 19th with the successful import process of 350 members completed within a few hours.
Some immediate feedback from the first two days of operation is that there is zero overhead to renew memberships, especially if a member chooses to process a payment through our payment gateway as opposed to direct deposit. We still cater for direct deposit, noting that your funds will need to be visible in the club account prior to completing the membership renewal process. Our payment gateway is hosted in Australia and carries the highest level of payment certification in the payments industry. This is what is known as PCI Service Provider Level 1. Your card details are encrypted from your device to the gateway, only used for the moment of the transaction, and then deleted. Over 40 members have renewed through the payment gateway and a couple via direct deposit. This remains your choice. 40 renewals via Member Jungle is an immediate saving of over 5 hours of administrative work under the old system! Renewing members get an email receipt, updated membership expiry date, and an updated membership card, all automatically.
In addition to membership automation is the range of other features offered by Member Jungle and this is what is immediately visible to all our members via the web interface or mobile application. I refer to this as having the “club in your pocket” given that nearly everything you need to do in relation to our club including, activity (event) management, news items, business directory, photos, membership card, and chat, is immediately available.
Over coming weeks event leaders and others will take the opportunity to help with hints and tips and address any questions relating to the use of the application. I will explain a couple of the immediate features that are visible to you as soon as you login to the mobile application. My Account
Noting that all users are also able to login into their accounts via our website https://nrbc.memberjungle.com/
The difference with logging on to the website is that you can also change your username. The initial username was allocated to try and help transition everyone quickly and you are welcome to change this to whatever suits you. Events The Events icon will take you to the list of upcoming club activities and give you a range of options around each these. We have agreed to have the word RIDE, WALK, KAYAK, Abseil, Qigong or NRBC. This helps you quickly move through to the events that you are interested in, whilst also showing what else the club is doing around that point in time. There is a significant difference if you logon via the website and look at Events. You will be able to filter to just look at Walks, or any combination of events, however only the mobile application allows you to see the other members who have registered for events. This information is not publicly visible, you have to be a member of the club.
Within Events you can do, and see the following:
Some interesting statistics for the first 2 days. 350 members imported to Member Jungle, over 240 event registrations, Events page visited over 1,000 times, the new website Home page visited 1,360 times and 124 visits were made to the News page. The most popular event was the Goonengerry Waterfalls walk with 20 registrations and 98 visits to the event listing. Noting that there are other events with large registrations, however this is just focused on the 2 days since going live. Our membership is now on a Rolling 12-month basis, meaning that a new member joining in July 23 will be current until July 24. A few members have asked about the cost to the club for this application. Our first-year cost amounts to approximately $7 per member, based on 350 members. This includes a one-time setup fee that will not be charged again if we continue with Member Jungle into the future. A final point about the mobile application – there is no need to logout! The application does not timeout and it will be far faster each time you use it to not have to login again. If you do have a login issue with your password or username, I can fix this remotely. Just call, text, email or try the Forgot Password button below where you enter your username and password on the application. I too am learning a lot as I try to answer the questions that are coming through and the best learning for me has been to try all the features that are available to us. . |