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MemberTies is designed to do much more than track basic contact information. It is a powerful database system that will help you take control of all the information that is critical to the operation of your organization. For example:
•Membership Types - Most organizations are made up of many members, and each member is assigned a particular status that designates the type of membership the person holds. MemberTies ships with a predefined set of statuses, but also allows you to add to them, or delete them all and define your own. So regardless of whether your organization has statuses like Family and Single or more generic terms like Prospect and Regular, MemberTies will let you set up exactly what you need. In addition, the system will automatically migrate members from one status to another (for example, from active to alumni) using "expiration behaviors" (i.e., when the End Date is reached).
•Dues Payments - Though not designed as a complete accounting package, you are able to track dues payment information for your membership. With the standard version, you can enter any number of dues payments for each membership record, including the amount and date paid, the membership status purchased, a check/payment number, and additional comments. Once you have set up your dues information, you can also use the Dues Calculator to figure the amount of dues owed for a given status for a given month.
If you are using MemberTies Professional, you have many additional dues features, including automatic posting of interest charges or other scheduled fees, mass posting or deleting of dues amounts, and the ability to create debit or credit dues "posting types" such as "payment", or "interest" or more specific types, like "T-Shirt" or "Bar Sales." Several additional reports are available in the professional version as well.
MemberTies Professional also provides a separate Donations tracking area for each member by adding a Donations tab next to the Dues tab. Posting types (as mentioned above) are identified as specific to donation or dues entries, and are only available on the appropriate page. This enables you to keep your donations entries separate from dues entries, making it easy to "zero balance" the dues account while letting a member's donations total continue to grow.
•Associated Members and Groups - If you need to remember that a link of some kind exists between two different records, you can track it on the Associated tab. Associated members are might be golf partners, mentors, referring members, and spouses who are also members. Associated Groups might be committees, book clubs, or softball teams.
•Friends and Family Members - These records are not "members" of the organization, but instead are considered "part of" or subordinate to a main member record. These would be children, non-member spouses, friends who are guests occasionally, etc. It is possible for Friend/Family members to be checked-in to an activity, and they can have their own ID number if you do not want them to share the number of the main member record.
•Assigned Items - If your organization recognizes members for their achievements, tracks offices or positions held, or just needs to know when someone was involved in a particular type of activity, you can record it using membership or group Items. Items are used as a generic way of describing all of the things your members can be involved in (i.e., roles and achievements). You can create distinct item categories, such as Member Achievements or, Offices, and then assign items to those. For example, in the Offices category, you might create items of President and Vice President. Then you could assign the Offices/President item to the person who held that position, and use date and comment fields to indicate the year they were in office, etc. Items and Item Categories can be used very creatively! We refer to them as "one to many" records, meaning one member can have the same Item many times.
•Activities - Most organizations would not exist without activities. An activity might be a business meeting, a movie review, a sporting event, a fund-raising event, a committee, or anything else that involves member participation. The software enables you to create any number of activities, complete with start and end date and time, comments, description, and location.
The professional version expands on activities by enabling you to assign members as attendees, track associated activity income and expenses, check members in and out, and more.
•To Do Lists - Every organization has things that need to be done. Sometimes the To Do is related to a specific member; other times it is more generic. Sometimes you (the user of MemberTies) needs a reminder just for yourself. The To Do List feature enables you to track To Do items for any member or group record, or for yourself. You can print your outstanding To Do list, display future items, and of course, mark them as done as you complete them.
•Groups - A group is simply a sub-division of your membership. Members can belong to any number of groups. A group could be a committee, another organization, a team, a list of sponsors, or anything that multiple members have in common. Groups also make it easy to run reports based on group membership, or email everyone in the group (with the professional version).
•Reporting - No membership system is complete without reports, so MemberTies provides a full suite of predefined reports, including rosters, mailing labels, dues payments, statistics, birthday lists, contact lists, individual member and group reports, and more. Many reports can be customized to show only certain membership statuses, dates, assigned item, etc., or can be restricted to limit membership records to those assigned to a specific group. Reports always remember the last search criteria that was used, and you can also save searches for easy reloading in the future.
•Importing Data - To help you transition from your old system, MemberTies enables you to import existing information. Just save your existing data to a delimited text file, and you're ready to map each of your existing fields to fields in MemberTies! All data to be imported is displayed for you before it is sent to the database, so you will know exactly what is about to happen.
•Protecting Your Data - All data is stored in the database, and full backup and restore options are included within the program using the Database Toolkit. MemberTies will automatically prompt you to backup the database at the interval you specify, or leave you alone to do it manually.
If your organization needs even more flexibility, consider upgrading your installation to the Professional version.
For instructions on the best way to get started using MemberTies, please see Initial Setup . This section will walk you through the basic setup of default values, statuses, and other information.
This help is available from any window in the program by pressing the F1 key.