A simple system to help small non-profit organisations manage membership renewals

If your non-profit organisation is a registered society, most of your members are likely to be ordinary members -which means that their subscriptions will need to be renewed on an annual basis. And if your organisation does not have any paid staff to help out with secretariat matters, the job of managing membership renewals is likely to fall to the office bearers.

Without a proper reminder and management system in place, things could get quite chaotic. Members are likely to have forgotten when they joined, and/or when they should renew their subscriptions. The office bearers are not likely to remember either, so when the Annual General Meeting rolls around, they might be unpleasantly surprised to find that almost all of the members are no longer members.. as their memberships have already lapsed!:-)

The above scenario can be avoided by creating and implementing 3 easy-to-implement standard operating procedures (SOPs):

1) An SOP to admit and record new members
I've outlined a SOP for this part in more detail, in an earlier post. To recap, firstly, a membership form should be designed for new members to fill in and submit to the secretariat along with their payment. This could be a printed form, or an online PDF which members can fill in by hand, sign, scan and email back to the secretariat. The form should contain key information fields such as name, NRIC number, residential address and contact details - email address & cellphone number. The member could either make payment in cash to one of the office bearers or, make an online or ATM transfer to the registered society's bank account. If this is the preferred payment method, the member should also email a scanned copy of the bank in slip, or the online transfer reference number, to the office bearer in charge. You could then create a simple spreadsheet in which to key in the details of the new member, populating it with the same fields as the membership form. Make sure to include a column to indicate when the new member's membership will lapse. This document can be referred to as the Register of Members.

2) An SOP to prompt members whose memberships are expiring, to renew
Set up a reminder on an online calendar service to prompt you to check the Register of Members once at the end of every month. If you see that a membership is about to lapse in the coming month, send a reminder email, watsapp message or SMS to the member, inviting them to renew their membership. The communication should include brief instructions on how to renew, ie. the bank in slip or online payment reference number needs to be communicated to the secretariat as well as date of payment and details of the member (unless the member wishes to make a cash payment).

3) An SOP to record renewed members
Once the member has confirmed that he or she wishes to renew for another year, and the society's bank statement reflects that the online/ATM transfer came through, or once the cash received has been banked in, you can now update the Register of Members to reflect that the member has renewed his/her membership and also record the next renewal date (which should be 1 year from the date of earlier renewal).

Hopefully, the above simple tips will help your non-profit organisation manage its membership renewal process more easily. Questions or suggestions for future topics, email me at spiral1701@gmail.com.