[OSMF-membership] Managing OSMF membership using CiviCRM

[Jonathan Harley]

Thanks Frederik, that's a good list for us to start with.

One thing I note that isn't on your list, is a requirement for a free, 
open source, self-hostable system. Are those generally a requirement of 
the board? Or has the board discussed having a policy about that in the 
past, to your knowledge?

I'm not trying to pre-judge the issue here; it may be that a proprietary 
system might not be possible for technical, or legal, or financial 
reasons. But on the other hand, if a proprietary membership solution 
existed and was suitable, it would solve the "key man getting hit by a 
bus" problem and allow us to get on with the next steps - avoiding the 
"opportunity cost" and ongoing maintenance effort of self hosting.

So if the board has a policy about FOSS/self-hosting, that's something 
we should know about.

Thanks - Jon


On 06/01/15 16:32, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
>     I'm here and listening but OSMF board members being on too many
> working groups is a thing that has been criticised in the past, and
> rightfully so - hence my plan was to limit myself to be here as the OSMF
> treasurer, supplying the necessary PayPal interaction or explaining
> things from the money side.
>
> As far as I can see, some things we would like to have but haven't got
> at the moment:
>
> * Linking incoming payments to memberships is a manual process that
> takes time; unfortunately it is even done twice, once by Henk who needs
> to mark the membership as renewed in his private database, and then a
> second time by our accountant who needs to guess if something is a
> donation or a membership fee - it seems that this is not always
> immediately obvious. (It is relative obvious if the payment is £15
> exactly but due to bank fees or conversion rates it need not always be.)
>
> * People currently do not have a way of checking their membership status
> (current, in arrears, kicked out, never been a member?) without emailing
> Henk.
>
> * Henk, in turn, has to semi-manually send out reminders to people whose
> membership has ended and ask them to renew.
>
> * There's no auto-renew mechanism - PayPal can do recurrent payments but
> to us they look just like normal payments and have to be linked to the
> membership account by hand.
>
> * We don't have a way to poll the OSMF membership in a secure fashion;
> we have ask them to send emails and count those after verifying with the
> register, or rely on 3rd party solutions like "opavote".
>
> * Member signup is not "self service" but has to go through a manual
> process.
>
> * The OSMF board does not have direct access to the database held by
> Henk; instead, monthly reports/exports have to be made available by Henk
> which adds manual work.
>
> * There is no public membership list, not even one where people could
> "opt in".
>
> As for my vision for this working group - and I don't want to impress
> anything upon you here, this is just my personal view - I'd hope to
> first see a purely technical solution to the above issues, and later I
> would hope that this working group could spend some time thinking about
> what we want from our members and what our members want from us, and
> make it easier for each to get what they want, and for us to grow the
> membership base (even thinking about how to attract people from outside
> our normal recruiting areas). This might, down the line, even lead to
> stuff like membership cards, a member newsletter, a members-only private
> forum, special-topic outreach campaigns, or other things, and might
> overlap with what Communications Working Group does but that is all
> stuff for the future, and mostly stuff that requires a solid technical
> footing for the membership database in the first place.
>
> It seems to me that CiviCRM is a good way to go and I have no
> reservations against that.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>


-- 
Dr Jonathan Harley   :    Managing Director    :   SpiffyMap Ltd

jon at spiffymap.net     mobile: 07590 024028     www.spiffymap.com
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