RCU Forums - View Single Post - How does your club handle membership renewals?
Old 03-13-2014, 06:17 PM
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Hemikiller
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Originally Posted by Psully
Our club membership is done strictly by mail, which seems archaic. Members have to send in a check (which is sometimes made out wrong), also fill out a form (which is sometimes filled in wrong), and they have to send in a SASE (which is sometimes missing, or not stamped).

I imagine that some clubs renew their members online, and I'd like to start this at my club. Is there a simple and efficient way of doing this? We are an AMA club, so AMA membership needs to be verified before members can become active. A paypal account seems obvious here, but I'd rather not get bogged down with people having to scan in, and email their AMA cards or something like that. In other words, I'd like to for our members to be able to apply for renewals (or new memberships) on one online form with payment, and AMA verification.
As the Treasurer of a 150+ member club, I can say there is no one solution that fits all your members. Moving some of them into the latter half of the 20th century is near impossible, never mind the 21st. finally have gotten them to stop dropping renewals off at the LHS, which is a half hour drive for me - think about that for a minute! We discontinued mailing paper renewals a couple years ago and simply email the forms. However, I still have the 12-odd members that "don't do email" and decided to digress and simply mail them their form. 70% of our members mail their renewals with a check, 25% pay at the meetings and the balance email the form and pay via Paypal.

We require forms every year as a means of error checking, as most will never inform the club of a move or email address change and then somehow it's your fault that they didn't get notifications or emails. No joke, happens every year. You can't imagine the grumbling about filling out a form with name, address, email, AMA# and their DOB....

Our renewal process flows as such...

Renewal forms mailed/emailed @ Oct 15th +/-
Member completes form, sends in with payment (snail mail or electronic)
Club receives form, checks form against Excel spreadsheet, marks member as paid
Club checks member's AMA status, marks in Excel spreadsheet
If member is good on both, club mails member current year sticker for badge

I developed a solution to the incorrectly filled out checks and forms: send them back with a blank form and a quick note that it cannot be processed since the form is incomplete/incorrect/illegible etc I do the same thing with checks for incorrect amounts, etc. I don't call, email or contact in any way, simply drop it in the mail, please try again. Doing anything but that turns into a huge hassle for the person doing the processing because now you have another issue you need to keep tabs on.

I also would love to hear from other clubs how they handle this process, finding an easier and more efficient way would make my year!