By
Jyoti Tejpal
Suits remote teams Keep in touch Collaborate efficiently Best for clubs alumni non-profits interest groups chambers of commerce online communities Private social networking with discussions and decisions over ideas sharing
Online management tool Helps running group, organization or association with lot of ease Increases productivity Saves time Combines great tools and platform Built to save Most valuable for asset and time Controls in most efficient way possible
Educational Institutions Schools Colleges Universities Associations Enterprise Corporate Professional training and organizations Helps educational institutions in auto-updating alumni database with higher education Connection with former staff
Association Management Software helps in automating management functions having event management, fundraising, membership, and various operations. The software packages generally provide varied features for empowering and informing association members. They also offer to administer and provide business processing tools for association managers.
Associations use these application software for communicating with their constituents, sharing resources, promoting events, collecting fees, and recruiting new members. Association management software is related with membership management software.
The primary and basic advantage of Association Management Software is how you stay on top of the administrative duties which are related to controlling and managing any association by using a centralized tool. For example, using the tool helps you to control and manage the website, email list, newsletter, member list, payments, event registration, eCommerce, and reporting, with others in a very all in one integrated system.
Membership management: Tracking personal information of individuals and families using a member database. The member database is the heart of the organization, and most of the features are related to this one, so the feature is critical for association management software.
Member directory: Accessing an online or printable list of members for external use, so members can get a network and value out of the connections the organization provides to them.
Event management: Scheduling and managing the logistics of activities and many other gatherings. They help in planning, managing, and hosting events and act as a provider that can be one of the most heavy lifter for an association. It helps in having a system to help them with the streamlining of the process.
Financial management: Providing a comprehensive overview of an organization’s finances which may look like a no-brainer, at times without money, the organization will not be able to provide much value for members. Therefore, it is necessary to get a strong sense of the budget, income, and expenses.
Website management: Managing website updates like member profiles, news, and event information. The website is one of the most wonderful communication tools for the association, and also a central information pool for members to get benefited from.
Email marketing: Creating and sending email blasts and campaigns. Email marketing is one of the critical device to provide member value, helping with the retention, and sending out reminders about membership renewals.
Most products in the market are priced on a monthly basis. Many sellers may also charge a startup or initiation fee, which is not included earlier, in the monthly prices listed by the company. Pricing can be divided into three tiers based on their starting price.
If you are managing an association, with a software in place to offer you take care of everything from one centralized system, it can be life-changing. After this being said, knowing the type of software you require can be difficult to access. For example, do you require membership management software or association management software? You may have to do a little more research to learn about the differences between the two.
Membership management software tends to have many overlaps with association management software. One key difference is that association management software typically has many more features than membership management software.
As you can now see, association management software generally permits for much more functionality than membership management software. Membership management software typically have the following features:
Membership management Event management
Website management eCommerce
Email marketing Financial management
With the advent of free social media networks such as LinkedIn which are free professional development content, the access to paid association memberships are overall on the decline which means it is more crucial than ever to ensure you are proving the value of the association to the members. You can look for new ways to innovate and provide tangible benefits above and beyond what the members can get for free on the internet by streamlining various operations with an association management software system. For example, sharing a directory that permits the members to easily network within the organization and being able to quickly spotlight members on the given website on a monthly basis, or they can even start making it easy to share updates or changes to events swiftly is important for offering value and enhancing the membership.
As many association organization leaders have day jobs, they even look to third-party association management firms to help with the day-to-day administrative jobs and duties. They can focus on the value-add aspects through the software. However, it is considered a best practice to still have software in place for the management firm for the purpose of keeping and managing costs down. As many organizations operate on shoestring budgets in order to try to maximize the amount of funding which can go towards events or conferences, this can be important to achieving success for the association.
