How to Find the Right Membership Website Builder for Your Organization
You set up a membership-based group to attract people who share your interests. Now you want to build a website that will offer broad appeal and include the functionality you need to expand the reach and effectiveness of your organization. Along with specific types of features, you’re also looking for a modern, up-to-date code base and snappy responsiveness, both in terms of performance and in support for mobile devices.
Before you can build a website, of course, you have to decide exactly which features are must-haves for you and your organization. To assess what your group really needs, you’ll have to talk with your members and survey their preferences. Of course, the moment you do that, you run headlong into one of the most-requested features on membership-based websites: communication facilitation.
Do you really want to be stuck relying on a combination of phone calls, e-mail, and even snail mail to find out what your members think about important issues, let alone to take a vote on these things? Of course not: You want to be able to take a poll without wasting a week or more on old-school communication media.
You probably also want to eliminate manual methods from the processes of invoicing and collecting membership dues and assessing any fees. Who wants to chase members around the block to collect payments? The more assertive you have to be to collect the money that’s due, the more members resent paying dues in the first place, even if they freely acknowledge that these payments are a bona fide aspect of membership.
But if you’ve looked into what’s involved in setting up a website on your own, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that you’re either going to need to learn a lot about contact management systems or hire a professional to take care of the process for you. Either way, the process can cost you time or money—or both. Ask yourself whether you really want to spend weekends learning WordPress, researching plug-ins, figuring out cascading style sheets, and wrestling with all the convoluted issues involved in accepting online payments.
For that matter, just about everything that involves collecting money gets complicated online. The moment that money changes hands, you need a secure intermediary to handle the transaction. They’re called payment processors, and they can charge a hefty fee for providing this necessary service, taking a noticeable percentage of each payment they collect for you.
The moment you start evaluating payment processors, you’ll find yourself inundated with e-mail messages offering you all sorts of deals and pricing. Some of them can be very persistent. Some of them are fraudulent. It’s tough to sort them out—and the entire process of setting up online payments can become so frustrating and confusing that many membership groups either give up on it or try to find another way to accomplish it.
If you want to put together an attractive, modern website based on up-to-date code with continuous updates, one that comes with a long list of standard features at an entirely reasonable price, your search for the right alternative can become confusing. Some groups abandon their quest for an optimal membership website builder and decide to make do with a presence on social media as a way of communicating with members and publicizing activities. That takes care of some aspects of the process, but it fails to offer any meaningful ability to customize your online presence, and limits the extent to which you can secure your communications or anything else.
When it comes to dedicated membership website builder platforms, you’ll find a lot of alternatives, but many of them quickly price their way out of your ability to afford them. Their limited standard feature sets may not include all the capabilities you expect, and to supplement them with other features, you’ll have to pay additional fees. In no time, you’re looking at a substantial monthly cost for less than you need in terms of features.
In short, if you really want a website that conveys the spirit of your organization, takes care of all its online needs, supports and extends your communication with members, and makes it easy to implement built-in invoicing and online payments, you soon may begin to think you’re asking for more than you’re going to find in one membership website builder platform.
But that’s where we come in. We’re Membershine, and we’ve built a member-based website software alternative that takes into consideration everything we’ve learned through years of working with groups and associations—and puts that feature set into our standard offering. No more tiered lists of features: We give you our entire roster of features regardless of how small or large your group may be, and we base our pricing solely on the size of your group.
Before you spend a penny on your website, however, take advantage of our 30-day free trial to set up a site, experiment with our features, try out our professionally designed website page templates, and involve your entire group in the process of customization. We’re confident that once you see how easy our platform is to use, you’ll make your Membershine site the permanent online home of your organization.
Why do we do this? As you can imagine, we’re certain that we offer you the best member-based website alternative, and we’re confident that once you experience our platform firsthand, you’ll know that you’ve found the right solution. Beyond our confidence in the value of what we offer, however, we’re also sure that the only way to make an informed decision about website platforms is through hands-on experience. You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive or a house without an inspection. By the same token, you deserve an opportunity to find out for yourself how easy or software is to use, how quickly you can build a custom site through our website builder—and how much your members will love using it. Our free trial gives you the chance to find out why Membershine should be your membership website builder.
