Timemark magazine - Issue 1

TIMEMARKmagazine

Issue 1 - November 2011

New technologies & Membership Management

How to effectively

communicate with

your members

Making your members visible on the webMobile Revolution

Member Studio

Member Services

Phone App

If there is one sentence that expresses what the main goal of your association is, it is: “To serve the members better”. This defines the essence of what you are there for. So the question is what can you do differ-ently to change the way you manage your members?

We are not an association ourselves. We are a company offering a membership system to associa-tions. Having roots in a software industry, we see your business from a different perspective than you. We are starting this magazine with an idea to open a channel of communication with you and to tell you about our ideas and thoughts, what we see as being important and the right way to go.

We have a lot to say. We are living in a mo-ment of history where technology is rapidly changing and creating impact on yours and all other businesses. We follow the technological changes and also under-stand the new opportunities they bring with them. It is our job to help you benefit from the new opportunities by constantly enhancing our systems and keeping you informed.

By Slava Krnjetin

[email protected] 1.

Editorial..: CONTENT :..

• How to effectively communicate with your members ............page 2

• Making your members visible on the web................................page 7

• Member Studio.................page 13

• Member Services.........page 15

• Phone App...................page 17

• Mobile Revolution. ...............page 19

• Escape to funside.......page 20

• Testimonial..................page 21

How to effectively communicatewith your members I had an interesting call from a client. They have realized that they have too many places where they keep and maintain member contact details on their systems. They have realized the need to establish a standard platform that the company will use for communicating with mem-bers.Here are all the places where they currently keep and maintain contact details of their mem-bers:• Company Intranet. They separately main-tain member’s details there as the Intranet is accessible to everyone in the company.• Company website. As the members login to the website, their details are available on the website. • Membership Management System that uses our Member Studio - this is where they actu-ally manage all their membership data. • Individual keep contact details for some members in Outlook. They keep details of mem-bers whom they contact often as it is easy to use Outlook to send and receive the emails.• Employees keep some contact details on their mbile phones for quick access while they are outside the office.

Every element of it has its use and has some advantages that others don't. But when you put them all together it becomes a complete chaos. They have to maintain members’ contact details on too many places. There should be only one place where member’s contact details should come from. So the question is: what is the most logical system to use as a standard company-wide platform for communicating with the members?There was only one real option to use their cur-rent membership management system for that. We looked at our system with a critical eye and real-ized that we had to upgrade to reach the level of simplicity and provide features that others had. We had to match the easiness of Outlook to deal with e-mails. We have to be able to send SMS messages to members’ mobile phones.So, we have upgraded the membership manage-ment system. We have made it a proper platform to communicate with members. It eliminates the need to use other current tools. Here is what we did:There are many ways to list members in the mem-bership system: to search by various criteria, to list members belonging to groups or mailing lists etc. We have made sure that the lists include e-mail ad-dress and mobile phone columns. You can choose to contact a particular member, all from the list .or to only those who are individually selected.

2. [email protected]

We have developed a form for sending emails to members. This is our emailing tool used through the system. The form has several layout varia-tions depending on how it is used. The following is the email form when opened from the individ-ual member’s form:


E mails

A new Template module is now available in the mem-bership system. The employ-ees can prepare standard messages and save them as templates. Once saved, they can be selected from the email form and it will pro-vide the e-mail text to the form.

We also understood that the messages must have abil-ity to be personalised with the member’s name and other details. The member's name and other details can be embedded in the text of the messages. To make this possible we have introduced replaceable parameters.

PARAMETERS he parameters like @Name, @First Name, @Ad-dress, @Suburb and others can be inserted in the text. The system will replace the parameters with proper values form the member's record.

Emails

TemplatesWe have recognized a need to create templates with standard e-mail messages and save them to the database. The templates can be used by employees to send e-mails to the members.

Many members cannot be easily reached via e-mail. This is espe-cially truth for professions where they are required to be out of their offices. Think of surveyors or architects that are always on sites. The only way to reach them is via mobile phones as they have the mobile phones with them all the time. To provide a tool to contact them via mobile phones we have created a SMS form. Using the form, the SMS messages can now be sent to the members.

Mail MergeBeing able to create the mail merge documents is a standard feature that every system must have. Our membership system is not an ex-ception. We already had the mail merge facility. This has now been upgraded to a tool available in many places through the system. It fol-lows the same rules as the emailing tool: you can mail merge all items from the list of members, just to the selected ones, or to the current member only.


SMS

The following is a layout of the Mail Merge tool:

The mail merge is a feature of Microsoft’s Office products. We use Word to create mail merge documents. The Word uses its own templates and they have to be created and stored in a particular folder for the tool to be able to use them. The Word documents created with mail merge are often formal documents like invoices or certificates.

Please note that in order to use the SMS facility, the association has to sign a contract with the mobile provider. As this sends the SMS messages to mobile phones, usual contract is required.


From time to time the association will have to extract some data from the database. There can be various reasons for that. One reason is to send member addresses to printing company to print labels to mail periodicals to the members.

The following four icons are used to select the tools mentioned so far. The icons can be seen in various places, like on member’s form, on members’ lists, members’ groups list and Note form. This makes the tools integrated in every part of the system.

Extracting

We already had a tool for that and it looks like:

Mobile PhonesSo far we have provided several tools to communicate with members sitting in the office and using the mem-bership system. The last 'missing' element was abil-ity to access the member's contact details outside of the office. It is important to contact the members via mobile phones. Fortunately, we already had our Phone App designed exactly for that purpose. It accesses the membership database and provides ability to login, search for members and display member’s details on the mobile phone.

As it works on the mobile phone, it offers several phone features includ-ing the ability to call the member, send SMS mes-sage and view the mem-ber’s address on map.

The employees can select fields to export from the field list and the resulting data will be displayed in the Excel file.

You have noticed that at the bottom of the form, most of the tools have a choice to select to log the message. This saves a Note record with the message text so that details about the message are preserved and is linked to the members’ records.

O ther toolsOnce we have established the membership system as the communication platform, we can go back to the tools previously used by the association for communicating with members. We have looked whether we could incorporate some of them into our concept and make it more powerful.The first step was to look into Outlook. The Outlook is a useful tool for sending and receiving emails. We have decided to inte-grate Outlook in our solution. We have put a button on the Email form that allows an employee to open the Outlook. The data from the form pre-populates the Outlook, the e-mail addresses, subject and message texts all display on the Outlook. With this feature, the Outlook can be still used, but there is no need to maintain member’s de-tails in the Outlook anymore. What about the member’s lists on Intranet? The Intranet has its place in the company’s environment ...


... and is a useful tool available to every employee. The decision to maintain the members using the membership system made this easier. All what has to be done is to access the membership database and list contact details from there. The association’s website still needs to be able to provide logins to members, to ver-ify and display some of their data. There is only one place to access this data, the membership database. All data is central-ly maintained there and other systems can access and read the data if required.With one upgrade to the existing member-ship system we have managed to establish our Member Studio as a company-wide platform for communicating with mem-bers. We have provided tools to send mass e-mails, SMS messages to member’s mo-bile phones, create mail merge documents and export data whenever required. We have also established the membership da-tabase as the source of member’s data for use on Intranet and association’s web site.

There are various types of member-ship associations. Most of them deal with members that run their own busi-nesses. Do your members fit into that category? If they do, then it is your duty to promote their businesses and help them to be found on the web. As a minimum, you have to provide a search facility on your website so that public can use the same to locate the member and see their contact details. But is that all it is? The reality is not so simple and the searching and display-ing are only scratching the surface. This article paints the larger picture of the task you are up to.The first thing to have in mind is that the members compete one against an-other. They all chase the same clients and ability to be ahead of competition is critical. They need to stand out and differentiate their business from oth-ers. This can be done in one way only: have bigger presence on your site, have more texts, put logos and images, add maps and put a video. You can see right away that this has gone much beyond a simple search and displaying of some contact infor-mation. There is much more that you are required to do. But this is not a bad news. It is your chance to provide a better service and along the way earn some extra money.

I suppose that the basic listing should be free. This is after all your duty to provide. All extra is something that should be payable. You must have seen this with Yellow Pages. The basic list-ing is free, but if you want your name to be bold and want to add a picture etc., this all costs. This is where you can charge and where the members will be happy to pay. So you need a proper system that will help you offer all that. Here is what we have built into our Member Services system to provide the directory listing to members.


Making your members visible on the web

It displays an initial image or logo, member contact details and has ability list all locations and people they want to expose. At this point you don’t want to favour anyone. They are all your members. The real difference comes once you click to view member details. This is where members can distinguish their company from others.


The member search page on our system looks:

The following are two examples of detail pages the members can have:

And also:


As you can see from the examples above, the pages can have a very rich content. They can display on the page various elements containing texts in different formats, individual images or galleries of images, videos, and show their location on a map. So the point of difference between the members is quantity and quality of information that they put on the page.


There are ques-tions that you may want to

ask: What should the members be charged for and what should be the fee? How will members pay for the elements they want to put on the page? We have come to a simple idea that works perfectly well:• Everything costs and they have to pay for every element they put on the page• You will decide on cost of every element• You can set a cost of an element to zero, to make the element freeThis gives you a total control of what should be paid for, how much and what will be free.There is an issue not visible at the first sight. It is impossible to charge a member for putting an image on the page if this for instance costs $50 cents. They can’t pay such amount by credit card. Also you don’t want to make them pay by the credit card every time

they come to their page and want to add something new.That’s why we have developed a system of credits. The members pay in credits instead of the real mon-ey. Here is how it goes:When a member signs in for the first time they get certain amounts of credits. In the same way, renew-ing subscription puts certain number of credits to their account. They will use the credits to build their presence on your site: to put texts, images etc. on their pages. The amount of credits that you give them should be enough to create a standard page: a bit of text, one image and maybe some more. If they want to add more to the page and run out of credits, they can purchase a new quantity of credits this time with real money by the credit card. In that way, the members decide by themselves how far they want to go and

The members can monitor their accounting details and all payments on My Account form:

The most important thing of all is that the members are able to manage their pages by themselves. There is an admin area on the Member Services website for every member to login and add texts, down-load images, videos and set up a layout of the page. This gives them the power and tools to manage their space on the web and implement their ideas how to present themselves.


The following is the admin view of uploaded images:

The directly listing is just one of the services that you can offer to your members. Others include online subscription, ability to book events, advertise job vacancies and man-age their contact details online. The same payment mechanism by using credits applies to all other services. It is up to you to define what you want to change for those services and how much. One thing is for sure. By having a proper directory listing, you will provide a valuable service to the members and will make them happier to pay your fees. Maybe some extra, to stand out from the crowd.


We are offering a complete set of tools to manage your membership base. Our offer consists of three elements integrated into one solution and using the same membership database.

Member Studio – is our main product. It is a modern state-of-the-art membership management system. It is an in-house system used by employees to manage the membership base.

Member Services - provides online access to members to register, renew subscription, book events, post job offerings and manage their directory listing page. It also offers access for general public to search member’s directory listing, view job offering and purchase souvenirs from your online shop.

Phone App - provides mobile access to member's data. There are several versions of the product, including one where employees can view member’s data, and one for gen-eral public to search directory listing etc.

Member StudioA POWERFUL MEMBERSHIP SYSTEM


Member Studio is an in-house mem-bership management system made for employees of an association to manage their membership base. It is a modern system built to embrace the latest Internet advancements. The system is currently used by an association with more than 60 em-ployees.The Member Studio will help you manage members, process fee pay-ments, provide help desk support to members and engage in marketing. It is intuitive and easy to use. Users like its familiar Office look and feel. It runs like an internal website and users interface via a browser.

The system is built with a number of interrelated modules, with each module providing tools for managing its own specific area. When put together, the resulting system is powerful, sleek, highly customizable and adjustable to each client’s needs.

The system covers several key ar-eas required to manage the mem-bership base:

• Member Management stores all de-tails about your members. It allows you to profile the members and collect details that can later be used in company marketing. You can enter multiple persons and address re-cords per member. • Contact Management helps record all contacts with members. Each contact is re-corded as a new Note linked to the member. E-mails, SMS messages and faxes can be sent directly from the Contact Management. • Task Management provides tasking facility to your employees. It manages tasks and links them to members. It supports task allocation, follow-ups etc. • Accounting manages payment of membership subscriptions. It handles various types of payments such as: payroll deduction, direct debit and cash, credit card, and cheque payments. The user can see the member's status at a glance on member's form.

• Document Management stores and manages various electronic documents and links them to members, tasks etc. The docu-ments are internally stored in the File System. • List Management and Marketing ena-bles creating mailing lists with members. Us-ing the lists you can send e-mails, SMS mes-sages and letters to members. It supports mail merge. • User Dashboard is user’s home page. It displays all user relevant information: tasks, recently updated members etc. The user can also see all the activities displayed in calen-dar mode. • Role–based Security is the internal se-curity mechanism that controls overall user’s access. It defines what menu items the user will see and what the user can do with the data.

The system is scalable and aims at organizations that manage from small to large membership bases.


The Member Studio provides you with several key benefits:

• You will have a modern and a pow erful system to manage your mem bers.• You will have all data in one place and number of tools to manage it: their details, records of contacts with the members, notes, tasks and electronic documents linked to them etc.• It has familiar ‘Office’ look and feel. Users find it intuitive and easy to use. • It will help you jump on the tech nology band wagon and put your organization in the main stream of the new technological revolution.

Member Studio works in Windows environment.

The member Studio is the main element of our membership management system offer. The other parts provide members access and offer various online services to the members and also provide mobile ac-cess to the member’s data.

Member Services ON-LINE SERVICES TO MEMBERS With our Member Services you can offer several online services to your members. The idea is to empower the members by giving them right tools and at the same time let them do the work for you. The Member Services product is a website made specifically to be accessed by members and other users via Internet.


Your members can now login and do many jobs for you:

• Update their contact and address details online • Subscribe or renew subscription to the membership • Manage their directory listing • Enrol to the seminars or other events • Publish job vacancies • Pay on-line for the subscription, enrolment to seminars etc • View account details • Monitor and analyse number of user clicks on direct listing or job offer pages

The site can be accessed by public users:

• Search directory listing to find the member and view their offerings • Register to become members • View and apply to job posting • Enrol to the seminars or other events if made public

This is the place for any other future feature that requires access by your members. It is one of im-portant elements of our overall solution. It uses the member’s database, so a change in the contact and address data modi-fies the member’s record, payment gets recorded in the accounting mod-ule etc. They are all inte-grated and work together.

Users from the web will access individual services by following links that you will add to your existing web site. It is important that all Member Services pages have the same style as your existing website. For that reason the Mem-ber Services can be easily restyled to assume look and feel of your website.


The Member Services provides you with several key benefits:

• Yourmemberswillbeabletoservethemselves• Thiswilltakepressureoffyourownpeople• Costofmanagingyourmemberswillbereducedsubstantially• Youwillbeabletoofferservicesthatyoucouldn'tbefore

The Member Services product is developed with the latest Microsoft Internet technology. Our Member Services product offers you an efficient way to expand your business and engage your members in your day-to-day operation. They feel empowered as they can process their own transactions but at the same time they do the job for you reducing the number of people that


MOBILE ACCESS TO DATA Mobile phones are nowadays everywhere. They are the fully operational computers with integrated network and everybody has one all the time. The potential is huge and difficult to comprehend. A platform like this has never existed before. It is una-voidable that one day they will become an important part of your data processing.It was expected that our clients would come to us with requests to have a phone app for mobile access to their data. The smart phones are everywhere and it is un-avoidable to want to integrate them with the business. To answer that need we have developed the Phone App, an app for mo-bile phones to access data from the mem-bership database.

There are three main versions of the product. It provides the following:

• Access by employees. You employ-ees will login to the app to search your members and view their data. They can view contact details, addresses and notes about the member. • Access by members. A member can login and access only their data in the da-tabase.• Access by public. Using our Mem-ber Services you may offer various servic-es to public: to search directory listing of your members, view and apply for job of-fering, purchase goods from your on-line store, book events or register for member-ship. One of the services is now available from mobile phones: the public can search members’ directory listing, view your members’ contact details and their offer-ing. The other services will be available on the Phone App soon

EmployeesMembersPublic

Phone App

Once you find the member’s data you can easily phone, email and SMS directly from the phone screen using details on the screen.

T he following actions will work on your mobile as well:


• Touching client's email address will open the phone's e-mail screen with the email ad-dress already populated.• Touching phone number will open phone's call screen with the phone number already there. You can phone or SMS from the screen.• Touching web address will open the client's web site• Touching View Map link will open a map showing the cli-ent location

Phone App works with all of major mobile phone platforms: iPhone,Android and Windows 7. Our Phone App provides a simple and efficient way to access your data while you are out of the of-fice. There are various scenarios that you can implement with the Phone App, including access by your employees, access by mem-bers to manage their data and by general public. It will allow you to use the power of the modern mo-bile technology to help you run your business more efficiently.

T he Phone App provides you with several key benefits:• Your employees will be able to access data while on move• Your can provide access to your members to view their data• The general public will be able to search and view your member's contact details and their offering.• You will embrace the lat-est mobile technology


Few of us could imagine how far the mobile technolo-gy would go. It was just a phone at the beginning. Then it got a camera. Then suddenly the things started to change very fast. So fast that most of us still can’t get with terms of what is happening. In order to under-stand how we came to this point we have to look at in-dividual elements that made those changes possible.It actually is very simple and we all had it in front of us all the time. Only if we managed to look at this in a right way!Mobile phones are computers. We knew that, didn’t we? And we also knew that the computers have pro-grams that can do everything. All those applications that make whole echo systems around mobile phones are just programs. So we knew that they would come. Somehow they still caught us by surprise. Mobiles are linked into a network. Offcourse, they are phones after all. So why have the apps that bring whether details, sky map, news, videos etc. surprised us so much? We do have already most of that on our home computers, don’t we?Everybody carries mobile all the time. We have such a powerful tool in our pockets. It is natural that it had evolved into something that we can’t live without. Just wait until they become the only way to pay at stores and supermarkets, to unlock our cars and houses, to control our TVs and appliances. Where will the end be?Now the question is: will this impact your business? You can bet that it will. It already has. Here are some details:Do your members sit in their offices during the day? Many don’t. But they all have mobile phones. The mo-biles are the only way you can reach them. So having ability to text them from your management system is critical than communicating with them for business purposeHow can you reach your members when you are out of the office? Do you carry a little phone directory book-let in your pocket? Do you have their contact details

stored on your mobile? For thousands of member? The only right way to get contact details while out of office is to access your membership database via your mobile phone. And for that you need a Phone App, like one we do.Nowadays everyone is used to search for information on mobile. Can they find your member’s details in that way? You may provide a directory listing service on your association’s website, but what about on mobile phones?We know one thing for sure, this is just the beginning. It will go far from this point on. We can see several of the next steps it will take, but after that, nobody can. It may not look like that now, but soon this will become critical for your business. It is important embrace the new mobile technology and implement as part of pro-cessing. The later you come to the party, the more dif-ficult and costly it will be.

Mobile Revolution

Escape to FunSide

Go to http://www.funside.net


While developing ‘serious’ soft-ware for busineses, sometimes

we just wanted to have fun. Hence our FinSide website.

Serve your members better

www.timemark-membership.com

We have used Slava and timemark for many years, in relation to many projects that we have comlleted over time.

I have always found slava’s ability to understand my require-ments second to none and the quality and speed with which the work is completed and delivered is always excellent.

I would highly recommend Timemark to any business.

Mark Finn Managing DirectorFinn Foster APBPhone +61 2 9957 2544Email: [email protected]


finn foster apbProviding Insurance Solutions for the New Millennium

Testimonial

Timemark magazine - Issue 1

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