In this technical and informative webinar, Lamees Abourahma - from Webbright Services - explains a step-by-step process to building the ultimate functional membership website for your membership organization.
In this expert webinar, you will learn:
-What are the questions you need to ask in the planning phase of a website project?
-What do you look for in a membership management software?
-What is the process of building a membership website?
-Guidelines to guarantee success
-Examples of highly functional and engaging membership websites
8. What do you struggle with most about your
website?
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Struggle with updating
Struggle training new staff on how to use it
Struggle promoting it to members
Static or outdated
Not mobile-friendly
Not user-friendly
Multiple service providers
Can't make updates
Cost
Other
28. www.webbrightservices.com
• Membership application
and renewal
• Member profile
• Member directory
• Member and contact
database
Membership
Management
• Online calendar
• Upcoming events
• Event registration
• Registration reports
Event
Management
• New Memberships and
renewals
• Event registration
• Sponsorship fees
Online payment
• Built-in CMS
• Add new pages or edit
existing ones
• Insert images, hyperlinks,
and documents
• Hosting
• Member only web pages
Website
management and
hosting
• Pay membership fees
and renewal
• Update member profile
• Register for events
• Access member-only
web pages
Member
services
• Blog
• Forum
• Email blasts and
newsletters
Communication
tools
FEATURES
30. www.webbrightservices.com
6. Website Development Planning
• Sitemap
• Page content
• Domain name
• Membership structure: types, fees, renewal process
• Member profile and membership application
• Membership database
• Payment system
• Images and logo
31. Home
About Us
History
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Directors
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Events
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Events
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benefits
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application
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Become a
sponsor
44. 15 Bright Ideas to Enhance
Your Membership Website
Attract sponsors and engage members with advanced Wild
Apricot customization
www.webbrightservices.com 44
46. www.webbrightservices.com
• Popular Options for Member Management Software
• Key Ingredients of a Friendly Membership WebsiteYour
Association and Mobile-Friendly Websites: What you
need to know
• 5 Key Ideas for a Friendly Membership Website
• How to properly Select a Membership Management Tool
• Presentation for the Board
Resources
Thank you Lori for the introduction and for having me. Excited to be here today. Welcome everyone. I want to start by sharing a story with you.
Fifteen years ago, I was working on my master’s degree at university of waterloo in computer science. Non of our classes were on website design; however, one of our classmates gave a workshop in HTML and building a simple website page. This workshop turned to be the thing I used most from that degree. I went on to teach myself Java, server-side programming, and work on a few website projects. I build my first professional website in 2002 in exchange for website software and a web design book. And I’ve been building professional websites since then.
In 2007, I built the first membership website for a client using Wild Apricot and I became a fan, and a service partner since then.
This picture is from my visit to Wild Apricot headquarter in Toronto last March. I had the pleasure of meeting the apricot team. In the photo are Lori Smith, Lori Holly, and Shiv Narayanan.
Our presentation today is on 10 steps for building a successful membership website.
Before we go over these steps, let’s shift our focus and introduce you, the audience. Who is on the call today?
We asked you the following questions on the registration form, and this is what you told us:
We asked you if you have a website, 94% of you said you do.
Takeaway: almost every organization nowadays has a website, and for a good reason.
In last month’s expert webinar, John Haydon shared this market research finding?
Including social media, newsletter, print, and face-to-face and website, how do people learn about nonprofits?
The number one channel for learning about your organization is your Website.
Followed by social media at 55%.
Takeaway: if you’re not happy with your website, you’re hear because you want to improve your website.
And if you ARE happy with your website, you’re here because you want to learn about best practices for building websites, or maybe you want to earn the CAE credit.
The top three issues organizations seem to face with their website are:
Updating the website
Struggle with promoting the website to members
Website is outdated or static
We will be covering the issues people have with their website during our presentation.
Let’s now move into our steps for building a membership website
In this presentation, We’ll cover the following 10 steps during this presentation.
These are:
Because we’ll be covering a lot of material, I will pause for questions midway our presentation, and then at the end.
When clients approach us to build their website, they typically have to approve the project by a board.
To approve it by a board, they have to have a good reason to justify the effort, time, and cost.
In the first step, you want to identify what your current website challenges.
Here are some of the possible challenges.
The website is static and outdated.
This is one of the most common problems organizations are likely to have with their website, based on our experience and based on what you told us in the registration form.
You built a website for your organization a while ago, and the site content and look have hardly changed since it was first created. You are not giving your members a reason to visit the website.
Susie Schweigert is the VP of the Midwest Association for Translators and Interpreters. She approached us to redesign their website a couple of years ago, and I love how she articulated their website challenge.. She said: “the website is atrocious in too many ways to count… just look at it”.
Now after updating their website design, and functionality, they were able to more than double their membership size, increase their event registration, and provide business opportunity to their members with a well-functioning member directory.
We have a great case study for this project and an awesome interview with their wonderful president Christina Green that you can find on our website.
We know that most of you have a website. How long do you expect your website to last before you need to update it again?
In my opinion, you need to be updating your content on the website as often as information change for your organization.
However, the fact is, technology is one of the fastest things that change in our lives, and website trends are changing on annual basis. What was cutting-edge in website design two years ago, is now outdated.
In my experience, you’ll need to update your website design every 2-3 years.
Talking about technology and website trends..
Another common issue with a website is that it’s not responsive of mobile friendly. What does it mean for a website to be responsive or responsive? This has to do with the way the website looks on your mobile phone.
If a website is non-responsive, the entire website resizes to fit into the small screen of your phone. The text becomes too small that you need to zoom into each area you want to read. The navigation menu is stretched along the screen and you need to scroll side-to-side and top-to-bottom to find the information you’re looking for.
It does not lead to a good user experience.
In a responsive website, on the other hand, the website changes to fit into your small phone screen in a way that makes it easier to see the content. For example, the menu changes to show three small lines, when you click on, you’ll see the navigation items stack on top of each other. Similarly, all content will stack and you can view text by simply scrolling down the screen.
Why is important to have a responsive website? Two reasons, first, it gives your users a better experience when accessing your website on mobile devices. Second, Google recently announced that they will be giving higher ranking to sites that are optimized for mobile devices.
So a responsive website will make it easier for people to find your website and view it on mobile devices.
Is this important to you or not? This depends on your organization and your members.
If you like to know more about responsive websites and even test to see if your website is mobile friendly, we have a good post our our blog at webbrightservices.com with more information. I will have the link for you at the end of the presentation.
Not user-friendly. Your site is hard to navigate. Your visitors can't easily find information on the site.
Not administrator-friendly. This is is also common and you might have this issue with your organization.
We worked with a great group here in Richmond, the Virginia Veterinary Medical Association, that have more than a thousand members. VVMA have a small staff that manage their active membership and organize two large annual events and a few smaller events throughout the year. Before we moved them to Wild Apricot, their membership management system consisted of 3 different tools including the platform’s backend, an Excel spreadsheet, and a cumbersome ring binder packed with hard copies of the records. In addition, the organization had to use a completely separate system to keep up with event registrations since the other software wasn’t equipped to handle it.
After moving their website to an all-integrated solution, VVMA now cut their membership management work by 1/3.
There is a good case study on our website on this project that I like to invite you to review for more information.
You know you have problems with your website. You want to do something about it.
In the next step, you define what it is you want from a website solution.
You want your website to be functional. You want it to support your various activities: signing up new members, allowing your members to register for events, promoting your organization.
You also want your website to be integrated. Just like we saw with VVMA, you want one platform with all or most of the functionality.
You want it to be affordable. Most small membership groups are running on a very limited budget. You want something that looks good, that works well, and that doesn’t cost you an arm-and-a-leg. Luckily with modern technology and with competition, there are affordable solutions for you.
We will cover software features and cost in more details in the next steps.
What else do you want from a website solution?
You want it to be flexible. What do I mean by flexible? It needs to accommodate your unique requirements.
Your membership application is unique to your organization. The information you collect from your members and the way you use it or share it among members is unique to you. Your event registration types, fees, process.
When you’re looking for a website solution, you want something that would tailor to your unique requirements.
We’re currently moving an organization to Wild Apricot from a platform that only allowed them up to 15 fields for their membership records. They were very restricted by the information they collect from their members. One of the things we helped them with is redefine their membership database and be strategic about their member data.
You want the website solution to be scalable. We had the pleasure of working with national and international organizations that have growth plans of adding chapters and supporting members in the U.S. and worldwide. If your organization has growth plans, make sure the membership solution is scalable and will be able to grow with your organization.
You want the website to be responsive, because like we’ve seen earlier, being responsive make it easier for members to find you online and have a better user experience when viewing your website on their mobile phone.
In step 2 we covered website requirements. In the next step we’re focused on your audience.
When I started this presentation, we said that the number one channel people use to know about your organization is your website, right?
Yet, have you thought about your website as a marketing channel?
In marketing, we talk about the 3 Cs: customer, competition, and company. Customer is your target audience. You want to understand who they are and what they want.
For a membership organization your target audience is your members, you might have different type of members. Your sponsors, these are likely who are providing the most funding for your organization. And non-members, this is the public audience including potential members that you want to attract to your organization.
Online presence: find out what social networks your audience are likely to visit online.
Why is it important to know all this about your audience? It will help you decide how to promote to them, how to design your website to their taste, what functionality they care about, and so forth.
Once you understand who your audience is, you need to define your website objectives: what is it you’re trying to accomplish by having a website
Resource: Provides information (white paper, articles, webinars) for your industry and site visitors.
E-commerce: Sells products and/or services to your site visitors.
Social Network: Connects your site visitor and community together.
Differentiator: Sets you a part from your competitors.
Credibility: Establishes your organization and your members as thought-leaders in your field/industry.
Lead generator: Recruits members and attract sponsors to your website.
Entertainment: Provides entertainment to your site visitors.
Your website doesn’t have to have just one objective, it can have multiple. I suggest you limit you objectives to top 3 and rank them by priority. This will help you focus your solution.
We are less than half way into our steps for building a membership website, I want to quickly recap the first four and pause to take any questions from the audience.
A quick recap, here are the first 4 steps again.
Now, you’re ready to find a vendor to help you with a membership solution.
As a disclaimer, Webbright is a value-added wild apricot service provider. Our solutions are exclusively built on the Wild Apricot software.
However, there are other membership software and website developers that might work for your organization.
We are not going to review website vendors here. This is something for you to research. However, we just published a blog post this week on popular options for member management software including MemberClicks, Wild Apricot, StarChapter, MemberPlanet, Sumac. You can find overview of each, pros, cons and price information.
For those of you who are familiar with WordPress and like its content management system, you can possibly implement a website solution from WordPress using plugins.
What we want to cover here is the features you want to look for in a membership management solution.
You want an integrated solution, preferably a cloud solution that you can be accessed online, that has the following functionality:
You decided on a vendor in step 5. In step 7 you’re moving into execution, but before you do, in step 6 you need to plan for the work.
When we work with our clients, we have a worksheet for website development planning.
Once you have your ducks in a row, you can move into the implantation.
Here are some of the items that you need to start your implantation:
Sitemap: this is some sort of a systematic representation of your site structures: parent pages at the top level, child pages at the second level and so forth. This is very relevant to the user experience and how easy it is for your site users to find information on the website. If you’re moving or updating an existing website, this would be a good opportunity to revisit your sitemap. In many cases as organizations grow and evolve people start adding content and pages to the website in a less intuitive way making site navigation confusing.
Page content. Similar to the sitemap, it is useful to visit your website content on scheduled basis and make any required changes. In some cases, once a year might be a good schedule for content updates, in others it could be more or less frequent.
Domain name. You will need access to your domain name to point it to your website server. If you’re signing up a new domain name you can use one of the more well-known domain name registrars like GoDaddy and Network Solutions. If you have an existing website and will be moving from one website platform to another, you will need to access and point the domain to the new website server. This is surprisingly sometimes one of the most challenging pieces that we have to work with when we move websites over to a new platform because people need to figure out who has access to the domain name and once they find that person it could take time to make contact with him or her and get access to the domain.
Membership structure: types, fees, renewal process – you will need this information to setup your new membership software
Member profile and membership application
Membership database – this is typically an export of your member data in an excel sheet. You will need to import this data into your membership software
Payment system – in order to process credit cards you will have to have what’s called a merchant account through an online payment service. In case this sounded gibberish to you, PayPal, BluePay and Authorize.net are some of the popular online payment services.
Images and logo – some of the more typical items needed for a website are images, logo, and any branding elements that you like incorporated into the site design
Here is an example of a sitemap created with the SmartArt tool in Microsoft Word.
You can also simply use a bullet point to list the pages. Whatever tool you use, the point is to see a visual representation of your website structure.
The previous step, development planning, was all about the technical, functional aspects of the website.
How about how the website look-and-feel? The website design?
Most website development software provide what’s called website themes.
These are standard templates that you can apply to your website.
WordPress has built-in themes and a theme marketplace where you can buy very inexpensive themes.
Wild Apricot offers dozens of free, responsive themes that you can easily apply to your website.
When you work with a website theme, you customize it by adding your logo, image and content to make the site unique to you.
As an example, here are a few website themes available from the Wild Apricot software.
These are included with your software subscription and will not cost you any additional money to apply to your website.
As an added bonus, Wild Apricot switched all their website themes to be responsive as of July 2nd of this year. So your website will automatically be responsive when you use one of these themes.
Link to our web page: http://www.webbrightservices.com/responsive-theme-customization
While the majority of our clients are satisfied with the standard themes, there are others who want more branded website.
A branded website would be custom designed by a professional graphic designer to incorporate the organization’s logo, color theme, content and layout.
This website is one of my favorite client website. I had the pleasure of working with Fredrique Irwin, the president of Her Corner last year and she did an outstanding job in communicating her organization’s culture, vision, and values through a strong online brand.
We also have a great case study of this organization on our website.
Now that you have all your ducks in a row, you should be ready to move into the next step, step eight, is site development.
At this stage you’re setting up the membership software, the membership application, the membership database, the website pages and design, the online payment system.
Depending on how well you did with your previous homework of website planning, this phase can take a couple of weeks to up to 4 or 8 weeks. This also depends on who is doing the work. For some membership software, website setup is provided by the software vendor and is done by experts who are familiar with the software and can do the work faster. For other do-it-yourself software like Wild Apricot or WordPress, it could take you longer to learn the software before you can use it effectively.
Reference: membership software comparison
The next step, step nine, is critical. This is the step between implementing your solution and taking it live. We call this in software development, beta testing.
This is when you take your website and membership software for a test drive and fix all the kinks.
Before you are at this step, find volunteers to do the testing
Ask your volunteers to evaluate the design and the functionality
Collect feedback and make changes as needed
This phase can take as little as a day, and as long as a few weeks.
One of my favorite beta testing was done by a client who asked their members during their annual event to sit down and test the membership application and online payment system. He could observe the members as they were going through the process and clearly see the issues they were having with the system.
And now, finally you’re ready to take your site live, or launch the site.
What does it mean to take a site live? What does it take to launch a new site?
This depends on the software and the process.
For example, when we move clients to Wild Apricot, making the new website live simply means re-directing their existing domain name to the Wild Apricot server from the previous one, and terminating the old hosting plans.
From a technical perspective, site launch for the small membership website is not a major technical step.
When launching a new website, you mainly wan to work on your communication.
This is what we suggest to clients:
Send email communication to members
Include link to your new website
Provide instructions on new website features, member-only content
Include action items (e.g., update your profile, renew your membership, setup your new password, etc)
And, congratulations, you’ve completed the ten steps for building your membership website.
A quick recap, here are these 10 steps again.
Our presentation for today covers 10 steps for building a successful membership website. Here is a quick overview of these steps.
Ask Lori to share the last 2 resources from Wild Apricot
http://www.webbrightservices.com/the-association-blog/key-ways-to-increase-members-online-engagement
http://www.webbrightservices.com/the-association-blog/your-association-and-mobile-friendly-websites-what-you-need-to-know
http://trial.wildapricot.com/lp/How-to-Properly-Choose-Membership-Management-Software
http://knowledge.wildapricot.com/display/technology/Presenting+Wild+Apricot+To+Your+Board