Membership renewal made easy with CiviCRM

Wisconsin Nonprofits Association

The Wisconsin Nonprofits Association (WNA) is a statewide membership organization with the mission of strengthening Wisconsin’s nonprofits. The association provides public policy information and advocacy on nonprofit issues, access to education and training opportunities, technical assistance and offers a cost-saving package of benefits to their members. WNA currently has over 100 organizational members as well as many individual and for-profit affiliate members and foundation supporters. With increasing numbers, managing member profiles and renewals was becoming a real challenge. The implementation of CiviCRM and a member portal has streamlined the renewal process for WNA members and centralized contact and member data. Now, instead of spending hours updating Excel spreadsheets, staff can better focus on their mission of helping other nonprofits.

Organizational focus
Education
Legal Advocacy
Organization type
Association
Non Profit

Background

Originally, WNA was tracking their membership using Excel spreadsheets. Many hours were spent updating current membership information, tracking address changes and adding new partners. Membership lists were maintained by three different staff members on three different computers and didn’t always match, especially regarding membership status. The goal was to find a way to streamline memberships and facilitate online renewals. In addition, they also wanted member contact information to auto populate on the renewal form. This solution needed to be installed, configured and integrated with their existing Joomla website. Once CiviCRM was up and going, another objective for WNA was to increase their use of the activities feature in CiviCRM to track interactions with members and other contacts and to increase member engagement.

Challenges

WNA has rolling membership schedules where members can join at any time of the year which can be a challenge to manage. With CiviCRM, they can use scheduled reminder emails which go out several times before a membership expires, and then again after the expiration date, if the membership has not been renewed.

WNA wanted to give access to resources only to members. The challenge was to make sure only members in good standing can access the member portal.

Solution

WNA researched several different options and selected CiviCRM since it is open source, “easy to use, intuitive and the customization is excellent."

Functionality

Membership (including member portal and membership online directory), Activities, Contacts, Email Marketing.
When the membership is expired, the member is automatically redirected to the membership renewal page and can't login into the member portal.

 

Developed by

Cividesk

Cividesk provides affordable CiviCRM services for nonprofit organizations including implementation, training, data import, hosting, maintenance and support.  We are headquartered in Denver but also have a presence in India in order to best support our customers in various time zones and to answer our customer’s needs for software development and customizations.

Cividesk was founded in 2011 on the premises that CiviCRM users will need on-going support and best practices sharing to fully realize the potential of this incredibly rich software. Over the years Cividesk has grown to become one of the leading Software-as-a-Service providers for CiviCRM. We do have customers in more than 25 countries or states around the world, spanning all types of nonprofit organizations – charitable, humanitarian, advocacy, religious, political, governmental and trade-oriented.

We provide you with a fully configured CiviCRM, take care of all the technology behind the scenes, and are always available to answer any questions you might have. No surprises: hosting, maintenance, mentoring and unlimited customer support are bundled into a fixed monthly subscription so you can budget your expenses in advance.