Club membership admin software

Originally posted by Late starter In terms of duties, we're still in the dark ages and tend to spend ages at the start of each season agonising over the duty rota's, ie trying to match members to duties they are qualified for, trying to match family members to duties at the same time, and trying to get a balance of experienced and inexperienced members on duty together to effect some knowledge transfer.  There's probably a better way of doing this, its always a pain in the neck to do.

You mean you're not using dutyman? You can set people up at levels relevant to their experience (OOD, AOD, Saferty Boat, safety boat helper etc) and it then makes sure the 'roster is full' and you have enough AOD to OOD etc. Duty swaps easy for the members to carry out etc. Not quite sure how it handles 'family' rostering but it obviously does...

Originally posted by Late starter One of the most useful technology areas we've found though is providing the ability for members to pay for subs, socials etc via the website, eg through Paypal. This has been incredibly popular.

Funny - I reckon that's ahead of most clubs, but is a great idea...

Anyone know how you get Dutyman to cope with family memberships?

Eg. In our club every member over 16 has to do a duty. As a family of 4 we have to do 4 duties. As only 2 of us sail we do duties for the other 2. We need to have our duties credited to us as a family not as individuals.

 

This is all very interesting to me as a member of the Medusa and DutyMan development teams!

We're a small paper and spreadsheet club but for duties we have one good system. A blank sheet of all the years' duties is taken to the AGM and everyone attending gets to sign up for their choice of dates. It gets the AGM attendance up considerably! The duties officer then contacts the rest of the members and fills in the blanks. Duties are then held on a website database that I put together and it's easily updated by the duties officer and visible to all on the web. With the buy-in from choosing your own date there are far less swaps than at other clubs.

While I wouldn't disagree with Richard's comment that nobody is going to get rich on the annual licence charged for Medusa/Dutyman, and it provides good functionlaity for the cost, I would dispute that 'bought' software has a longer supported life that open source software.  There is a lot of published evidence (e.g. Easterbrook et al.)  that open source software has just as good support as purchased software - indeed there a number of national infrastructure organisations in Europe and the USA that positively discrimnate in favour of open source to avoid the problems of commercial organisation "just moving on".  Indeed the last time I looked at the research the most likely reason that commercial products don't get supported long term is that they were not making enough profit!.

I use both open source and bought software tools in my professional life and without exception the level of support I get from the 'users' of open source software is at a higher level than the bought software.

Some clubs will feel happier with bought software and some clubs will feel happier having open source software with no license costs and support from a users group at the cost of needing members with some software skills .  Membership software is not exactly rocket science and there will be many clubs who have members with skills perfectly able to install, maintain and locally customise this type of software.

Clubs should be able to use the approach that best fits there own circumstance - if a spreadsheet works why change.  Similarly there should be a place for open source and commercial solutions.

Mark