Sadly many associations run their renewals blindly and do not have controls in place to validate their membership data and billings. This blog will show you how to take control of your renewal process with simple iQA Reports.
Causeis is the leader in association and iMIS consulting - helping more associations grow their membership. Here are our tips for improving your renewal process.
It is important that you have some minimum iQA Reports set-up in iMIS to identify bad data before you even attempt to run the renewals. We always recommend these reports at a minimum:
- Members without a join date or join date into the future
- Members without a paid thru date or a paid thru date past the current membership year
- Members with an incorrect status (i.e. Not active)
- Members with a lapsed paid thru date
- Members with an invalid category
To ensure your renewal communication reaches your members then also check this data too:
- Members without an email address - no point emailing those renewals if your members don't have an email address
- Members with a Return to Sender flag on their address
- If you use Informz, check for any recent iBadEmail activities and update those members email addresses
- Mobile phone numbers are in a clean format for SMS communication (ask Causeis about how to SMS via iMIS Staff Sites!)
Once your data for the billing run is clean and updated, then you can now consider the mechanics of the renewal process. Before you run the renewals, you may need to update the pricing rules for next year’s rates, after updating perhaps ask a colleague to proof.
You can also test on a few member records by billing their next year membership fee to validate that the pricing rules are calculating as expected.
Finally prior to running the bulk renewal run, we would suggest that you take a back-up, run the billing out of hours and communicate to staff that this has been run.
To ensure you have the best information stored in iMIS for reporting once renewals are run, we suggest you import an activity to note the renewal date, amount and category. With the power of iQA and iMIS Dashboards, we would encourage you to develop a renewal dashboard for your association to measure its' success.
To learn more about creating iQA reports or Dashboards visit our online Videos via causeis.com.au/videos or contact us today!