Program Features
Features are important. If you're going to move from spiral notebooks and spreadsheets to software solution, you need more than just an address book. Whether you choose MemberTies or MemberTies Professional, you will discover that tracking the basics is just the beginning. Our software is specifically designed based on hundreds of user-requests and comments to help you organize and take control of your data in ways you never thought possible...
- Contact Information - We'll get the basics out of the way first. Contact information, including name, photograph, company name, alternate name, address, email, telephone, website, occupation/job title, reference, etc. is readily available and visible. In addition, MemberTies Professional allows for unlimited addresses per membership record, and even lets you specify when each address is valid. (No more sending a winter newsletter to a summer address by accident!
- Friends & Family - Of course, we know that members may not be individuals. They may have spouses, children, or non-member friends you need to know about. Children may be able to use facilities under the parent's ID, for example, or friends may be able to attend events at a discount. Creating Friends/Family records for these people enables them to check in/out of activities, while letting you restrict mailings and dues to the primary member record.
- 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 to get you started, and you can add more, change, or delete them as you wish. So regardless of whether your group 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, a little extra setup work will let the system automatically move members from one status to another as their memberships expire. Never worry about who is active and inactive again!
- Dues Payments - MemberTies enables you to enter any number of dues payments for each
membership record. You can also use the Dues Calculator to figure the amount of dues
owed for a given status, prorated if necessary. Credit card information can also be stored per member for one or more cards.
The Professional version expands the dues functionality to give you individual dues "accounts" to which you can post both debit and credit entries. The pro version also provides automated interest posting on past-due accounts, and mass dues-posting to help with those, "once a year everybody owes us the same amount" tasks. MemberTies will even post a dues charge when the End Date arrives on a member's record, so all you need to do is post the payment when it arrives.
Additional reports are also included to help check balances, daily postings, and to print account statements. Finally, donations are tracked seperately from dues, allowing you to "zero balance" a dues account when paid in full without affecting a growing total of donations. - Roles & Achievements - If your group 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. 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 add a comment indicating the year they were in office. Items and Item Categories can be used very creatively!
- To Do Lists - Every busy organization has things that need to be done. Sometimes the To Do Item is related to a specific member, and other times it is more generic. Sometimes you (the user of MemberTies) needs a reminder just for yourself. The To Do List feature in MemberTies enables you to track To Do items for any membership or group record, or for yourself. You can print an open ToDo list, display future items, and of course, mark them as completed.
- Sub-Groups - MemberTies enables you to assign members to any number of sub-groups within your organization. That means you can actually keep track of the members of committees, chapters, or whatever other subdivision might apply, all in the same database! Then when you need to contact everyone on the "XYZ Committee" you can just select that group and send out an email!
- Activities - Every organization does things, whether a business meeting, a movie party, a camping trip, or a huge festival. MemberTies lets you track those activities, where they take place, times, dates, and general notes. The Professional version takes it a step further and enables you to associate members and their guests to the activities, and assign them a role and status (i.e., "Guest Speaker", "Invited"), when they checked-in or out, and track associated income.
- Reporting - No membership system is complete without reports, so we provide
a complete set of predefined reports, including rosters, mailing labels, dues, donations, activities, statistics, birthday lists,
contact lists, individual member and group reports, and more.
MemberTies Professional expands the report functionality with the ability to create your own multi-column reports, mailing labels, rosters, name cards, post cards, business cards, photo IDs, and more. Choose from any available membership, group, or activity field, lay out the report by setting the column order, sorting, alignment, headings, titles, fonts, etc., then save it. The new report will act just like it came with the original program. - Form Letters/Documents - The professional version also includes a full-featured word-processor that enables
you to create and format documents using embedded fields from the database (i.e., "Dear <
>"), as well as images, tables, bullets & numbering, paragraph styles, and more. - Email - MemberTies Professional includes an integrated email system that works with any SMTP email server to which you have access. Send email to any of your members, sub-groups, or the attendees of any activity. You can even create an "email merge" by formatting your email message with fields from the database.
- Multiple Users/Networking - If you need multiple people to access the database at the same time, additional seats may be purchased for your license. After that, all you need is TCP/IP support on the "server" computer, and setting up additional users is a simple process. The "server" can be your home computer with a fast internet connection, or you can have us host your database here on our dedicated database servers.
- Help - Complete online help is provided using the standard Windows help system. Help includes a table of contents, a complete searchable index, and step by step procedures for using all available features. The entire Help system is also available online (see site menu on the left) and as a (large) printable PDF document.