Club Membership Software

YorkshireTraveller

Can the forum recommend any Club Membership Software that is either free or at reasonable cost (say less than £100).

Software will be used for Club membership (about 200 members) renewals and printing envelopes/labels for bi monthly magazine.

Preferably compatible with Microsoft Word as this is what is currently used to print our current renewal letters.

Any advice much appreciated.

johnmc

Excel or Access will do the job.

Depends whether you have anyone who can maintain it.

YorkshireTraveller

johnmc wrote: »

Excel or Access will do the job.

Depends whether you have anyone who can maintain it.

Unfortunately I'm not sure that I or other possible future membership secretaries would be comfortable with Excel or Access (we're all silver surfers!). I'm looking for a standalone program.

A google search comes up with Club Master which looks as though it would be appropriate and within our budget.

Has anyone any experience of using this programme?

bluesnake

The free LibreOffice will do it too

adouglasmhor

Yorkshire_Traveller wrote: »

Unfortunately I'm not sure that I or other possible future membership secretaries would be comfortable with Excel or Access (we're all silver surfers!). I'm looking for a standalone program.

A google search comes up with Club Master which looks as though it would be appropriate and within our budget.

Has anyone any experience of using this programme?

They are both capable of standalone and if you have MS word you probably have MS office suite which will have at least one of them.

YorkshireTraveller

Thanks for the suggestions, although I'm comfortable (ish!) with Word and Excel, having just phoned around possible future Membership Secretaries not everyone else is.

I think it's best we go with a standalone program, So any thoughts on Club Master or any alternatives?

Thanks for everyones help and advice.

adouglasmhor

I doesn't look particularly easier than excell and it's a subscription service so you will be apying out for it year on year.
If you are as you say comfortable with excell you could make an ecell template for future secretaries to use.

YorkshireTraveller

adouglasmhor wrote: »

I doesn't look particularly easier than excell and it's a subscription service so you will be apying out for it year on year.
If you are as you say comfortable with excell you could make an ecell template for future secretaries to use.

I think that it's a one-of payment unless you want a continuous support contact. For us it would be £75 + VAT for a Club of up to 400 members.

I take you point about Excel but it does seem to frighten some of our potential membership Secretaries!

bluesnake

with word, you are able to insert pictures and do your own format, letter headings etc, Would guess Clubmaster was not as flexible.

Word would allow you to add extra fields of your choice and content into your mail merge in the future, Clubmaster will charge.

Clubmaster bring a closed system, and should you encounter difficulties or corruption, most likely you will have to pay clubmaster to get it going. If it is a club with many members it is worth paying the £95 a year support.

Obviously you will have to back up which ever one you buy.

skivenov

You don't really need to do anything complex by the sounds of it. Just store a list of names and addresses and generate letters and labels (known as a "Mail Merge" in the trade) from that?

The easiest thing to do would be use a spreadsheet like Excel, not as a spreadsheet, but just as a load of boxes. Ignore all the complex stuff. Set your headings, Name, Address Line 1, Address Line 2, Postcode, etc, in the first row and just type addresses in or delete it them out as you need to.

There's a really good wizard in Word for doing mail merges, but if you get any problems, feel free to shoot me a PM and I should be able to knock something up for you pretty quickly.

YorkshireTraveller

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I'll take this to our next Committee meeting and see what others have to say.