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Membership Management Software vs. CRM
Saturday, March 24, 2007
By:
Michael Stein
What is the
difference between CRM and Membership
Management? Isn't the latter just CRM for a
member-based organization?
The answer is: not
really. Membership is where CRM meets
Business Process Management. Typically we find
that Membership is the part of
our system that needs to be customized most
intensively for an organization in
order to meet the complex business rules in
place governing the membership
plans.
We have found that
the business rules governing membership
tend to be more complex and less easy to
generalize than in other areas of
non-profit operations. It wasn't rocket
science, for example, to create a
structure that allows users to set up
virtually any sort of discount scheme for
their order entry and sales operations. It's
way harder to generalize
membership logic.
There are three
sorts of business processes users want to
incorporate into a Membership
module:
- Dues
Amount
Calculation
- Dues
Billing and
Accounting
- Membership
Application Process.
Because of the
centrality of these processes to the life of
a membership organization, they tend to vary
widely between organizations, to
grow in complexity as time goes on, and to
change relatively frequently as the
board debates better ways to attract, retain,
and serve members. Indeed,
membership business process rules can reach
what I consider the breaking point
of complexity: where users are confounded by
the behavior of the system because
the rules are too complex to keep in mind.
When this starts to occur, it is
time to simplify.
Simplification can
occur in two ways.
One is
simplification of the business
process.
- Minimize
the number of different member types.
- Use a
uniform billing process across all your
members.
- Simplify
the algorithm for computing dues.
- Eliminate
programs that support tiny numbers of
members.
The other
is simplification of the
software.
Don't require the system to handle cases that are really exceptions affecting very few members. For example, allowing the dues amounts in special cases to be entered by hand may eliminate a number of formulate for dues calculations that are used only in a few cases each. The tendency -- if the budget is available -- is to try to automate the full complexity of the board's mandated membership process. You may make everyone's life easier if you just say no.