Power Up Your Student Club With Website Convenience
From high school through college and beyond, student clubs provide opportunities for shared enjoyment of important activities that range from performance arts to community engagement. Regardless of the interests that bring students together, a well-run organization makes it easier for them to benefit from their affinity for camaraderie and self-expression.
But how do you ensure that your student club runs smoothly, especially when it comes to administrative tasks? Ideally, your best help can come from intuitive, powerful membership management website software, especially from a package designed specifically for organizations such as yours. While you’re evaluating the offerings from a variety of providers, look for these features and conveniences to help you distinguish among software options.
Secure online payment processing eases administrative tasks
Students of all ages join clubs based on shared interests and affinities. To make your club a financial success, you need an easy, secure way to collect dues and fees from your members. Even if your club’s finances are simple and straightforward, with only a few dues items, you don’t want to waste time on manual payment procedures – or risk forgoing revenue because you don’t offer members an easy way to pay you. Secure online payments provide the convenience that members know and expect from online shopping and more.
Registration and ticketing for member events
Most student clubs run a variety of events, some of them on a small scale and others much more complex, with activities that can span multiple days. From performances to fairs, all these events need support for registration and ticketing—and the ability to limit attendance to members or open it to the public.
Whether you sell tickets for in-person events or simply log registrations so you can track attendee head counts for free gatherings, you need a unified, easy-to-use system that can process all this attendee information, share it with your student club members, and sign up an audience efficiently every time.
Along with full-scale events, you probably also hold meetings—recurring or not—and track calendar milestones. You want all this information organized and presented on your website so club members stay up to date.
Live chat promotes onsite member communication
Many student clubs rely on social media sites for communications among members. That approach comes with several drawbacks. First, members must leave the student club website for another venue just to have a conversation, which pulls them away from your message. Second, these third-party sites rarely offer the kind of customization that can make them look and feel like part of your own website. Third, some members may prefer not to sign up for memberships on these websites, which in turn limits their ability to participate. Finally, your student club is at the mercy of the rules, regulations, and security practices of a third-party company to determine how well protected your private communications actually are.
The solution to this combination of disadvantages is fairly simple, if your student club uses a membership website software provider that offers the features you need to host these communications channels yourself. With a built-in private chat feature, your members can converse securely, and never need to leave your website to do so.
Newsfeed timeline keeps members up to date
No student club administrator enjoys the process of attempting to keep an entire membership up to date on the latest news, especially not when it involves a combination of phone calls, e-mail messages and even word of mouth. Ideally, what you want is an integrated newsfeed that’s part of your website, one that accepts pinned posts so important information remains at the top of the list, and that enables administrators to determine whether members can comment on posts or whether the entire feed remains read only.
In-depth help and support for ease of use
You want a website for your organization. That doesn’t mean you want to turn into a web developer. You’re looking for an easy-to-use student club website software package that balances feature power with intuitive convenience. You also want multiple types and levels of support to answer questions and ease the path toward site creation. Depending on what you’re trying to learn to do and how you want to learn it, you may prefer one or more of a combination of help system resources.
The classic paradigm—the online Frequently Asked Questions section, with a modular structure organized by topics—walks you through both simple and complex procedures one step at a time, with every possible choice, control, and option spelled out and itemized. This resource is a necessity for people who want a complete presentation of every detail, rather than a summary or a more-superficial treatment of the subject.
Help videos present specific procedures and processes with onscreen attention to specific details, along with a narrative voiceover that reinforces the message and the information. For visual learners, this type of presentation is ideal.
Between these two opposite ends of the support material continuum, the illustrated resource guide combines some of the specifics of a FAQ section with the visual appeal of a more highly illustrated approach.
Along with these types of help resources, you also want access to support professionals to whom you can send specific questions for which other materials don’t seem to provide a full answer. Better still, you want to work your way through the initial onboarding and setup process with the aid of an experienced professional who steps you through these procedures so you build your skills and your website together.
The ideal combination
How do we know that these options and essentials are integral to success in student club website creation? At Membershine, we’ve helped countless organizations set up their online presence to showcase their organizations and support their administrative functions. We know the value of these features because we build them into our own software. To see this combination for yourself, sign up for completely free 14-day trial, experience the value of what we offer, and see how a Membershine website can enhance the success of your student club.
