Membee A Year In Review

Posted on December 13, 2017 in Feature Updates, General

This week we go over all of the big and small feature updates and releases of 2017! It was quite a big year with lots of exciting stuff, come make sure you didn’t miss anything!

2017 was quite a year for Membee with a lot of exciting updates being made to further eliminate administrative work for our Users! The first few updates we are going to go over in this post are the major ones, including updates to Membee’s Profile Feature, New Member Signup Widget and the changes to Automations. Further down are the smaller, but just as exciting updates we wouldn’t want you to miss!

Profile Feature Upgrades – April

Membee’s Profile feature received a major upgrade back in April. There were upgrades for you guys, the administrators, as well as for your members! Meaning the widget, as well as the admin side, have been improved! Below we have quickly summed up this upgrade, for more information check out these two blog posts; PROFILE PART I: FEATURES FOR ADMINISTRATORS, and PROFILE PART II: FEATURES FOR MEMBERS.

Move & Rearrange Sections

Having the ability to arrange the sections of Profiles from most used at the top, and least used at the bottom will save a lot of scrolling time! The most used sections being front and center makes updating things in Profile that much easier.

Specify Number of Contact People Allowed

You will now be able to limit the number of contact people your members add, and link to, in their profiles. This can save administrators and staff valuable time as they will no longer have to weed through an unnecessary amount of contacts.
- Ex.) If your bylaws limit the contact people from a member organization just adjust the number of “Additional Contacts Allowed”

Create New Sections

You now have the ability to create any new sections you would like. This feature allows you to contain a parameter in the new section and create custom fields. For example, below shows a new section titled “Professional Credentials”. In this section, you can give your members the ability to upload any or all of their files proving their professional credentials, ie. current license, letters of reference etc. Once you create the custom field, text directing the members to “Use the file upload link below” will appear.

View Payment History

Members now have access to their payment and transaction history. This makes it super easy for your members to login and be able to view everything and anything they would need to! Below are some examples of what they can view;
- View their upcoming balances and view any previous invoices
- Print their paid invoices as receipts
- Pay outstanding invoices right from their profile
- Charitable Receipts

Stronger File Upload Capability

If members need to regularly provide you with key documentation in order to maintain their membership, you now have the option to turn on a “File Upload” section in your member profiles:
1. Members can upload their credentials right from their profile.
2. Members can upload multiple files to be stored on their profile.

View Participation History

When you activate the Participation History section in the Profile widget, members will be able to view their participation history directly in their profile.Key details regarding each event are also visible to the member in this section of their member profile. The Future Events area shows members the upcoming events they have registered for. Note that the member can have Membee email them a copy of the event’s itinerary right from their participation history.You can now also activate the Committee Meeting area and the member can see their meeting participation history including which meetings they attended, and which ones they did not.

Person Members Can Change Their Employer

If your membership stays with the person as they change employers, this feature will save you and your member a ton of time. You can permit your members to “remove” or “change” the employers listed on their profile.

Add New Employees

If your members are mainly companies, organizations, and institutions, you can now permit them to add new employees and :
- You decide in the widget’s configuration if new employees should receive a link to setup their login
- Member organizations can create a directory listing for the new employee
- Member organizations can assign a specific Status to a new employee
- Members can add an email address to an existing contact and based on how you’ve set the widget, that person could automatically receive an email to setup their login

Add Directory Listing From Profile

You can now turn on the ability for your members to add a directory listing. If activated, members will see the section dedicated to adding a directory listing. This new listing will appear in the members profile and on the members record in Membee where you can edit the listing if need be.

Members Can Designate Contact Types

Organization members are now able to go into their profiles and update contact types for their contact people without needing a Membee User to go in and do it for them – further eliminating administrative work for Membee users. You decide if updating a contact presents the option to change the person’s Contact Type setting.

Allow Members to Update Person Status

This allows member organizations to be able to change their contact people’s Status. This is used in organizations using Membee who have other organizations as their members and the member organization’s dues amount is based on their number of contact people with a specific status. For example, the number of contact people associated to that member organization with the Status of “Basic Member”.

New Member Signup Widget Update – June

Earlier in 2017 Membee updated already in place features in the New Member Signup Widget, as well as implemented some new features! These updates, like the Profile updates, benefited both he administrator and the member.

Assign UDF Values on Signup

Users are now able to categorize an inbound new member in the Category field and/or the user defined field (UDFs). This will allow your organization to now use a new form to:
- Gather different Info
- Trigger a different Workflow
  - Welcome Emails
  - Status
  - Etc.

Control of Welcome Emails

Having control of welcome emails allows you to choose what email to send to people signing up. For example, You may wish to send a welcome email that includes the ability for the main contact to set up their login but send a different email without login to additional contacts. This can be helpful for an organization who likes to keep control in one area with one Main Contact.

Access Roles & Profile Maintenance Rights

The access roles and profile maintenance rights only come into play if you are sending a welcome email that allows the person receiving it to set up their own login. This update allows for it to now be separated so that you could give someone like a main contact access to more member only features than you do for the additional contacts.

Setup Free Days for Members

You will now be able to setup a “Free Days” option for Anniversary based Memberships!

Ability to Sell a “Lifetime” or “One Time Only Fee” Membership

The concept of these memberships is for the ability for the member to pay once and be a member for life. This is common for larger associations who prefer to charge a large upfront fee (tax deductible to the member) in exchange for membership for life.

Changes to Membee’s Automations – October 2017

These updates do not affect any of the automations you already have set up. If you find something in this update that you think is worth adjusting, that’s great! But if your automations are working flawlessly and you don’t want to touch them, that’s fine too!

When Automations Run

Automations will now run every day, instead of beginning and end of the month ranges. Meaning the user can now set when an automation should run based on days. Currently, this is either by date (1st of each month) or a range (1 – 30 days). For example:

True Anniversary Billing

Before this update, true anniversary billing was not possible. Automations would group everything by either the beginning or last day of the month, or based on a range. With this update, you can set Membee to post and send invoices exactly 30 days (or however many you choose) prior to each member’s renewal date!

Active Automations Page

The Active Automations page calendar will now have a “Daily” link. Clicking on this link will open a list of the automations set to run that day. You can click on an automation to edit it just as you could do before. Daily Automations will also be added to the Active Automations sidebar for easy access.

Staff Notifications

The time frame for how far ahead an automation is to notify selected staff members will no longer be set by the user. Instead, Membee will now send 2 weekly summary emails for each automation. Membee makes sure that you’re alerted of any actions that you may need to take ensuring all members receive their dues invoices. If there are actions that you need to take, then “ACTION REQUIRED” will be included in the email subject line. “ACTION REQUIRED” in an email subject could be there for a few different reasons including:
- Missed Invoices
- Members with potential billing issues
- Invoices that can’t be sent to Members set to receive their invoices via email
- Invoices that will need to be printed
- etc.

July Maintenence Upgrades

In July we did a fairly large maintenance build/update resulting in some pretty cool things for our users! Below we list a couple of smaller upgrades that will further simplify not only your life but your member’s lives! You wouldn’t want to miss this…

Member/Non-Member Price Comparison for Your Event Registrations

When setting up your event items with member/non-member pricing, you can now activate a feature that will display a message to a member, letting them know how much money they saved by being a member and to a non-member, letting them know how much money they would save by becoming a member.

The Expiry/Renewal Dates Can Now be Displayed in Profile

The expiry or renewal date for a member’s membership can now be displayed in Profile widget.We added this for those members who want to see when their membership expires easier and quicker! They previously had to scroll to the “Financials” section in their profile, which was in some cases hard to find especially for new members. This update makes it more obvious and easy to find!

Send the Event Itinerary to Attendees From Record

You can now send the Event Itinerary to attendees from their record in Membee. We did this to provide additional convenience for our users making printing and sending itineraries that much easier.

Directory Widget – Control Number of Search Results

You will now find a setting in the directory widget allowing you to set the number of search results appearing when a visitor searches your directory. This allows you to specify the maximum number of listings that are listed on a single page of search results.This can help keep pages smaller, cleaner, and easier to manage. So list them all or have multiple pages of search results, it’s up to you

“Save & Add Another” When Setting Up Event Items

The event item window includes a “Save and Add Another” link to expedite the process of adding event items to events. This simple update will save you precious time.

Aged Receivables Report Now Includes the Item Name

The membership or event items on an outstanding invoice will now be displayed on the aged receivables report and be included in the export.

Stored Credit Card Now Saved if Records are Merged

Stored credit cards used with Card Vault are now stored correctly if duplicate records (such as two records for the same person or two records for the same organization) are merged together.

The eBill Widget Can Now default to a Secondary Language

This new language option allows you to default the display of the eBilling widget to a secondary language. If you have a secondary language set up in your System Settings, you can select which language your eBilling widget should be displayed in. You can select “English”, “French”, or “Allow the member to choose”.

Event Facebook Like & Share Options

Facebook Like and Share options are now included in the events widget. Get more traffic to your event by having your members be able to share and like your events!

Thank You for Renewing Email

Come set up an Automation with Membee to thank your members for you! Not only does this increase member satisfaction, it will increase sales and referrals!

Members need to feel a certain amount of gratitude no matter what they’re purchasing. When aiming for someone’s loyalty it’s especially important for them to feel valued. Additionally, financial benefits will occur if more of your members feel personally thanked, and will, in turn, develop a strong feeling of loyalty.

For the steps on how to setup your “thank you” emails check out this blog post: Why “Thank You” Can Help Your Bottom Line

All Widgets Now Use a Responsive Design

All of Membee’s widgets now have a responsive design! This means that once you turn on the responsive design in your admin copy of Membee all of your members will be able to signup, registar for events, and search your site with ease!

Don’t have a responsive site? If you’re interested in learning a little bit more shoot us an email at websites@membee.com

Check out these blogs post covering Responsive Design and SEO importance:

GET PAID FASTER WITH RESPONSIVE DESIGN UPDATE TO EBILLING

NEW MEMBERS CAN JOIN FROM THEIR SMARTPHONE

TIPS AND TRICKS TO INCREASE YOUR SEO RATING

MAKE SURE YOU’RE GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR SITE

Stripe Now in New Zealand

Businesses in New Zealand can now sign up instantly and start accepting payments in minutes with 135+ currencies from customers around the world. You’re in good company. Join 100,000+ businesses on Stripe!

Stripe Supports Membee’s Card Vault! As you know, Card Vault provides the ability for Membee to store member credit card information making future checkouts and even membership renewal so much easier for your members.

Wix Now Supports Membee Widgets

A recent upgrade in Wix now allows Membee’s widgets to run! Meaning Wix is now an awesome affordable option for smaller organizations, and has easy to use customizable templates.

Wix is a very affordable option for smaller organizations. Wix offers easy drag and drop, designer-made templates, beautiful galleries, mobile optimized, domains, huge image collection, secure hosting, SEO, 24/7 full support and more – all wrapped up in one free website builder.

User Group 2017

The Annual Membee Users Group Conference took place June 1st & 2nd in Burlington Ontario. We had 17 Membee users attend representing 13 different organizations., and they were joined by Membee team members!

The attendees enjoy a jam-packed two days of discussion, training, brainstorming, and networking! They, of course, leave a bit of room for some fun and enjoy an (optional) group dinner on Thursday, and enjoy the Waterfront Hotel’s; pool, hot tub, and fitness center!

Check out the blog post which covering this years meeting to hear what participants had to share about their experiences! Membee Users Group Conference 2017

If your interested in how this conference is structured check out this year’s Agenda

Click here to join Membee’s Users Group!