Jaimyn Mayer

MemberMatters Software

Published 2 years ago
Post preview thumbnail

I was a volunteer at HSBNE Inc. (a hackerspace in Brisbane) for close to 6 years. I took over managing most of their infrastructure and rewrote most systems from scratch so everything could become integrated into a single membership portal. This project is called MemberMatters. Several other makerspaces, including Brisbane Makerspace and a handful of others, now rely on MemberMatters. The majority of the work was completed by me, but several others have also made contributions to the project. I still actively maintain it.

MemberMatters is a membership management system for community groups. It is a web application that allows a group to fully automate their membership lifecycle and billing process. It also acts as a basic CRM; allows members to manage their own billing, membership and personal details; and they can even make payments/donations. It has an integrated RFID swipe card access system that's linked to a members' membership fee payment status, and has a collection of resources and tools for members.

MemberMatters was partially developed in response to my time volunteering as Treasurer at HSBNE Inc. There was a significant number of manual tasks that needed to be completed, and I was able to automate most of them by implementing functionality in MemberMatters (MM). Before MM, the treasurer was required to reconcile membership payments and enable/disable access cards for over 100 members every month. MM uses Stripe billing and webhooks to completely automate this process, saving the treasurer 5-10 hours each month. Members can also signup, pause or cancel their membership themselves. This is a much better UX and saves the treasurer even more time.

There are also various member tools built in, such as being able to make donations, pay for tool/material usage, check your access permissions for each tool/door, and more. Community engagement tools like recent swipes, webcam snapshots and more are also available to members. Members can even assign digital proxies for the organisations meetings, making less work for the secretary and boosted the number of proxies members assign to meetings.

You can access the GitHub project for MemberMatters here and the official website here.