Running a member organisation well

Before you start, open these pages: Members / Memberships, Members / Member Contributions, Cash / Shared Funds and Settings / Users and Roles.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

This is the last lesson in the whole catalogue, and the one that is least about software.

The yearly rhythm

Renewals. Watch what is about to run out, and ask before it does. A membership renewed in its last week is routine. One renewed three months after it lapsed is starting again from scratch.

Contributions. Set deadlines you will actually act on. Then act on them early, and gently.

The fund. Go through the pool and the loans at every committee meeting, and show members where it stands regularly.

The register. Archive members who have really gone. Keep everybody else. Your membership history is one of the most valuable things your organisation owns.

Approvals are not about distrust

In an ordinary business, having a second person approve things protects the owner from mistakes.

In a member organisation it protects the person doing the work. From suspicion. From being accused years later. From being the only person who knows what happened.

A treasurer who insists that every movement of the fund is approved by someone else is not being difficult. They are refusing to be the only person who could have done it. That is a reasonable thing to want when the money belongs to your neighbours.

So turn approvals on for the fund. Keep the audit trail. Never delete.

Never share a login

This was said in Essentials and it matters more here.

Every action is recorded against whoever is signed in. A treasurer using the chairperson’s login has made the record wrong in exactly the place it most needs to be right.

What software cannot do

FeePrime records what happened and shows you where things stand.

It will not make a member pay. It will not decide whether to lend to someone who is struggling. And it cannot repair trust once trust is gone.

What it does is take away the excuse of not knowing. No figures pieced together afterwards. No arguments about what was agreed. No position that only one person can explain.

You have finished the catalogue

That is Members and Membership, and the last of the eight courses.

Along the way you covered the ideas that come up everywhere in FeePrime. Records and modules. Approval and audit. Archiving instead of deleting. Quantities belonging to places.

And then each part of a working organisation. The public site, the product list, selling, buying, stock, money, and members.

If you did Essentials and one other course, that was the right amount. Come back for the next one when your job changes.

Keep staging.feeprime.com for anything you want to try before you do it for real.