Silverbear Membership Blog

Following on from last week’s blog post about the features of membership software, this week we’ll discuss what the core benefits are and what the important integration points are.

The key benefits of membership management software can be summed up into main points:

Increase membership acquisition and retention Increase financial control over membership subscriptions and activities Engage with members in a more appropriate way Communicate in a more efficient way Manage events more efficiently Provide more value to members Improve membership loyalty Cut costs Increase control and visibility Gather membership intelligence Many of these benefits are reliant on the ability to integrate the membership software with back end office systems and the corporate website.

Linking the corporate website with the membership software improves the level of service to both the organisation and to members. It means that members can interact with the member...

Membership organisations that rely on the acquisition and retention of members are now turning to technology to help manage their members and provide a higher quality service. Membership software can provide huge cost and time savings, but it is vital that it can be integrated into back end systems such as the finance system, CRM and the corporate website. These blog posts discuss the benefits of membership software and the specific benefits provided when it is integrated into key back end office applications.

Part One – The Key Features of Membership Software Many membership organisations are taking advantage of the benefits of technology by employing the use of membership software. Membership software enables member managers to organise, oversee and control their membership base with improved levels of efficiency and visibility. It can help to boost member enrolments and help reduce the number of members that fail to renew their subscription.  More often than not it pays for itself through the increase...

With Microsoft’s launch of Dynamics CRM Online earlier this week, Silverbear have already made this available within Silverbear’s CRM and Membership Management software solutions. This reflects our alignment with Microsoft and the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies.

Our leading edge customer experience management platform now includes:

- Increased visibility of data through new real time dashboarding and advanced visual reporting capabilities - Enhanced customisation to provide individual views tailored to specific roles or teams - Enhanced work flows to provide more control over business processes - Additional onscreen workflow through guided dialog sessions for key business processes

This enhanced Silverbear solution brings together effective CRM, membership and customer database management to efficiently run an organisation in a familiar, intelligent and connected environment.

The on-premises and partner-hosted versions of Microsoft Dynamics...

In the first part of the blog we covered Internal Communication Tools. The second part of this blog post is Membership Web Portal.

A membership management solution that offers you a fully web based portal will allow your members access to their personal information at any time and from any location. Allowing your members to easily log in using their own unique username and password and edit/amend/update their personal information.

Amendments that are made by the member will automatically feed through and update the internal membership system of the record of the member, ensuring the information you have on that member is always accurate. A membership portal which is offered by a membership solution provider will enable each member to access relevant tools and content for each member type, such as blogs/forums/wikis etc encouraging member-to-member interaction and cross interaction between different groups.

Selecting a comprehensive membership software solution will ensure relevant information...

Most membership organisation’s vision is to host and provide information which their members can easily and simply access, being able to provide a platform where membership organisations and members can share knowledge, information and network through the integration of their membership system with the membership database and their website. More and more organisations want to keep members informed and are starting to create specialist-interest online communities which offer services such as forums, blogs, wikis, expert content and file libraries.

The key to a successful online community is really dependent on your internal systems and how you can utilise them efficiently, through the implementation of an online membership management solution you can seamlessly integrate with your website and develop an online network model reflective of your requirements.

So what should your online community offer?

Fresh, dynamic, collaborative, creative and engaging content An intuitive and straight...

In part 1 we covered why social networking is important for membership organisations and examined how effective LinkedIn could be. This post will look at Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook A Facebook page is a customisable presence for an organisation, product or public personality to join the conversation with Facebook users. The page focuses on the flow of content posted by the page administrators.

By influencing the real connections between friends on Facebook, a page lets fans become brand campaigners. Posts by the page will start to appear in News Feeds, giving pages a stronger voice to reach their fans.

Using Facebook as an effective...

As a membership organisation you consistently find yourself surrounded by issues such as retention of existing members and attracting and capturing new members. More conventional methods of marketing such as; direct mail and events are becoming increasingly expensive and therefore more organisations (not just membership ones) are turning to social media and online networking as a platform and channel to communicate with new members and as a means to add and show value to existing members.

Social networking is becoming more important to membership organisations because:

It facilitates engagement with specific targets It can help to amplify knowledge and awareness around various membership campaigns It can encourage...

As a membership organisation you are totally member-led. The key is to keep not only your current members happy but to find ways to grow your membership base. Utilising a web-based and comprehensive membership management software solution can help you maintain and attain your current membership base (increase renewals and subscriptions). I have put together my top ten reason why a membership organisation should invest and implement a membership solution. Clear Communication – Membership software will ensure you collate up to date, clean and accurate data on your members. The communication tool delivers relevant content to relevant members by allowing you to segment and target the appropriate members. Social Media – Communicating with your members is simple. Your membership software interacts with third party social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StubmleUpon etc. The mechanisms can be deployed within existing web sites where required or can dwell within the membership portal allowing...

We have seen from the last post that social media is becoming one of the most popular areas of the Internet. People are using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to communicate with each other and promote ideas and information. So how can membership organisations use social networking sites to communicate with their members? There’s more to sites like Facebook than just creating a business page and updating your status.

Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the Internet. It has more than 400 million active users, more than 5 billion pieces of content (such as web links, news stories, blog posts, photo albums etc) and Facebook pages (pages that are commonly created by businesses) have created more than 5.3 billion fans.

So the power of Facebook is immense. People are used to using it as a platform for communication, and membership organisations are starting to understand the value that lies within in.

The key to Facebook is its ability to communicate different messages and information...