Managing membership for a small organization?

February 28, 2014 6:08 AM

A friend runs a small professional organization with about 60-80 members, and is looking for a way to more easily manage membership. She is hoping to find software or a web service designed to do these things:

• Most importantly: allow members to pay an annual membership fee online. She also needs to be able to look up who has paid and who hasn't.
• Allow members to log in and update contact information and other info (such as number of accredited hours).
• Email all members, download a list of members, and so on.

Right now members are paying by cheque through the mail, and it's a lot of paperwork. I imagine there is an inexpensive web service out there that would be perfect for this. Can you recommend anything? We're in Canada, if it matters. Thanks!
posted by oulipian to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: I should note that I am aware of CiviCRM, which seems promising, but is a bit complex for my friend's requirements.
posted by oulipian at 6:41 AM on February 28, 2014

Zoho CRM is a bit more managable in my experience. Worth exploring in any case.
posted by cessair at 6:57 AM on February 28, 2014

A local bike club uses ClubExpress and seems to find that it works well.

Definitely not CiviCRM for this use case. For a larger organization, I hear raves about Salesforce, but like CiviCRM it is just overkill and far too involved for a small org. Something like ClubExpress is a bit more pre-fab and doesn't require extensive customization or setup (though do expect a significant amount of customization and setup whichever system you go with! But something like ClubExpress is probably a few orders of magnitude less than CiviCRM or Salesforce.)
posted by flug at 7:07 AM on February 28, 2014

if you don't need a full-blown CRM, what about meetup.com ? I run a couple of groups through there and it does all of the things you mention your friend needs.
posted by xbonesgt at 10:34 AM on February 28, 2014

I've heard of Neon CRM - they market themselves as a CRM for non-profits and they can deal with dues.
posted by barnone at 12:26 AM on March 2, 2014