aMember Pro - Can it work for you?

[Travis Ralston - ENTS Edmonton]

Hello all,

I'm new to this group, so I should probably introduce myself: I'm Travis from the Edmonton New Technology Society (ENTS). That's pretty much it.

In kulps' recent post "what are you bad at?" he mentioned aMember Pro being our solution for tracking memberships around our space. At ENTS we've had issues knowing who was paying, for how long, and whether or not they use the space. aMember Pro is a membership/subscription tracking system with some added goodies like accounting reports, basic statistics, and a fairly strong library of plugins to extend functionality - all of which helps us answer some of our issues right away. AMP has a strong focus around subscription-modeled products and that works really well for our membership model ($75/month, $750/year, $50/month or $150/semester as a student) but not so well for some of our other things we wanted to track like consumables (or "one time" purchases with no subscription duration).

So far we're happy with aMember Pro and what we've managed to get out of it. Simply knowing how much money we're taking in each month, what members are active, and how many members we know about helps us for planning and budgeting overall. As mentioned, we are having some difficulties being able to track those "one time" purchases, but we're looking to possibly use a credit-based system (a $60 plugin for aMember Pro) or the alternative proposed by the support team (making it a "lifetime" subscription and no renewal date). Although aMember Pro has an official support channel, their public forums (which are monitored by support staff) are fairly active as well. In the few posts we've made on the forums (mostly about development challenges) we've always received a reply within 24 hours. 

The transition for our members that normally pay through PayPal went a little rough, as with any transition process. Because aMember Pro requires an invoice number as part of the PayPal transaction, our members had to cancel their existing recurring payment in PayPal and set up a new one in aMember Pro. Some of our members didn't understand the reasoning behind this and some didn't understand the process - but this is all to be expected when dealing with any kind of user base.

Currently we do have a custom module that manages our specific edge cases not handled directly by aMember Pro or the available paid plugins. For us that means the following:

• Having the fob number (a custom field from aMember Pro on the member's profile) sent to our door system, MasterControl, to let people in based on their current paid membership
• Having the member's email automatically added to our distribution lists so they receive our communications
• Additional linking code to Moodle alongside the Moodle integration plugin for our certification/training system
• Moodle is an eLearning suite we are planing on using to train our members the basic skills required to use certain machines, such as our Metal Lathe or Mill. We are planning on having an additional in-person "training session" for some tools, but the basic safety (PPE, attire, etc) will be covered in a prerequisite course on Moodle.
• This linking code just allows us to better determine which members are "certified" as well as define the prerequisites for aMember Pro to be aware of when showing this information to the member.
• Additional email communication to directors for new members being added
• Streamlined forms for directors to use to perform basic tasks (accept cash payment, add new member, etc)

In all though, the best thing we get out of aMember Pro is being able to say we have 59 members, 34 of which are active, and we brought in $1800 last month - something we haven't been able to say in a long time.

If you have any questions, please let me know - I'd be glad to answer them! 

Thanks,

Travis Ralston, ENTS Director

[Jodi Stark]

Thanks for this detailed descriptions. I'm from the Vancouver Community Laboratory and we've been dealing with some growing pains and trying to make some decisions on how to manage our members. I also saw the post about aMember Pro. It seemed too good to be true at the price of 179$ for a lifetime membership! Thanks for giving us the run down of your experience with it.

We have different levels of membership which it appears the software can handle.
But, similarly, we have these one-time payments that should be included. Did you find a way to handle this?

What type of fob system do you use? We were looking for a membership software that's connected to a scannable card - like a gym or library. Does your fob/AMP combo do the trick?

Thanks for your help!

[Byron Hynes]

Hi Jodi.

Welcome to the group.

With software there are basically two choices: Off-the-shelf (aMemberPro) and custom (like my.protospace.ca). Custom can also be called Bespoke or in-house or Line-of-Business (LoB) and a few other names (some names for custom software are four-letter words, too. :-) )

There is a grey area in between with products like PeopleSoft and MSDynamics that are off-the-shelf but highly customized, usually by integrators. Those of us that write custom software usually see those as having all the costs of custom with all the limitations of off-the-shelf.

With off the shelf or packaged software you invariably have to bend your processes to fit your software. Sometimes that's minor and sometimes the "new way" is better. Usually a package doesn't do everything you wanted.

With custom software you get exactly what you want -- but it takes time and money. My.protospsce.ca probably has about $20-30,000 worth of dev time into it, and it's not done.

So, for $179 dollars. And something that can be running in a week? Maybe a day? If it does 95% of what you'd want-- or even 75%, it's any easy thing to try. If we had found it a bit earlier than we did, we might well have gone just to that.

When I worked for MS, we did several studies that all basically showed that the choice of platform hardly mattered. What mattered was choosing a platform and USING it. So specifically for a makerspace, if say it almost doesn't matter. Find one you like or one your people know or one you can get free/cheap advice about and start using it. Insist people do.

That will work wonders in getting on top of the membership tracking.

Generally, if you have member info in system A, it is not terribly hard to migrate it into system B later (I said generally, I'm sure that there are exceptions).

Right now, we maintain our door separately (it's on a Pi) from the membership database. Yes, it's an extra step, but that integration needs more time and new hardware and hadn't happened yet. I'll let ENTS speak to their door system.

I believe Janet (formerly of us now of you) has been putting some of your people in touch with me and Kevin about our RFID door.

Happy to discuss this stuff in more detail if it helps.

Byron
Calgary Protospace

[Ninety Nein]

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[Ninety Nein]

Hey Jodi,

Great to hear the CoLab is still doing well!  Come hit up the VHS guys.  We have a system we wrote that uses RFID cards for door access and lock outs on some of the tools.  It might be worth chatting to the developers.  Tuesdays are open house nights.  PM me if you want specific contacts.

Cheers,
Tyson

[Jodi Stark]

Thanks Byron.  That's super helpful.

Yes, Janet has joined us.  Glad she's helping sort out the door situation.  She's solid - we're glad to have her join us.

And thanks Tyson - it would be good to talk to the developers at VHS.

We're pretty analogue at the CoLab - so the less development work involved the better.  I like that you said 'Byron', if it does 95% of what you'd want-- or even 75%, it's any easy thing to try.  And at $200, it's pretty low risk!

Thanks guys!

Jodi

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If you have a penny and I have a penny, and we trade pennies, then we each have a penny. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we trade ideas, we each have two ideas.

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[Jodi Stark]

What do you guys use for payment?  We currently use PayPal, but are wondering if there's an option that's cheaper than the 2.9% we get dinged with them, but that's still secure and easy to use.

Thanks in advance!

J

[Derek Jacoby]

We currently use paypal in Victoria, but are slowly switching over to beanstream. They are nicer to deal with than paypal and a bit cheaper (although I don't remember the exact rate at the moment.) They work with aMember pro.

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[Byron Hynes]

Any card processor is going to cost you between 2.6 and 3.0 percent. :(  [Unless you have a high-volume sponsor who can run payments for you, but that is complicated and may violate their agreements.]

Paypal is free if the member uses a one-time payment from a balance or bank account, but subscriptions and credit cards get hit with the fee. 

We also use square (2.75%) for credit at the facility, and dream payments for credit (2.9%) and interac debit (25 cents each). 

We take bank email transfers (but not tangerine's five-day no-tracking nonsense), cash and cheque. 

The advantage to us of Paypal is that their IPN automatically updates our database.  Apparently Stripe has a similar system but can include on-site swipes, so we are looking at that. 

We do enough volume with Paypal that our rate dropped to 2.65%. 

Mobile: big fingers, little buttons, and don't get me started about autocorrect. 

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[Jodi Stark]

You guys are awesome!  Thanks!

To those using aMember, is there a way to manually update members fees if they pay by cheque, cash or do an email transfer?

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If you have a penny and I have a penny, and we trade pennies, then we each have a penny. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we trade ideas, we each have two ideas.

[Michael Kulpa]

Yep, you can enter an offline payment and apply it to their account. 

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Michael Kulpa

Edmonton New Technology Society

www.ENTS.ca