Integrating Technology for Activist Group

January 24, 2021 5:29 PM

Can you help my statewide activist group integrate functions such as membership administration, dues payment, and a newsletter?

I am the communications chair for a group. Our members usually join the group through a JotForm on our website. That information is sent to the membership administrator, who keeps a database and occasionally shares it with the other leaders on our Google Drive.

We recently started charging dues. People usually pay online, through ActBlue. That information goes to the treasurer.

We send a newsletter, at least twice a month. That is done through MailPoet on our WordPress website.

All of these lists must be synced manually.

Is there a better way to handle all of this technology and information? Any solution needs to be either free or low cost.

posted by furtheryet to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

How many people? If it's 50 or less Wild Apricot is free. It gets steeply more expensive after that. They're super nice people though and they have a blog post that has other not-them options. We were also looking into CiviCRM which is open source but my organization decided to go for a paid version of Wild Apricot because we needed/wanted support. I don't know if CiviCRM does some of the stuff you want, but maybe those leads will work for you. I have to say if you do have 49 or fewer members, we've been really happy with WA and it does all the things you need a tool to do.
posted by jessamyn at 5:47 PM on January 24, 2021

Thanks. I should have mentioned that we have about 400 members.
posted by furtheryet at 6:04 PM on January 24, 2021

Thanks! Those ideas are a great help. I plan to give them further review, but one of those platforms should do the job for us.
posted by furtheryet at 5:51 PM on January 26, 2021