Tracking Membership and Retention

[Craig]

How do you track your membership and especially your retention from beginner classes on through introductory classes and full monthly/yearly memberships?

Craig

[Fencergrl]

A good database is the answer.

I have created and maintained databases for several companies and a variety of needs.

The first thing you do, is figure out all the things you need from your database. What information will you need to sort.

Will you ever sort by postal/ zip codes? Will you sort by age, by weapon type, if they compete or just fencing for recreation?

Now look at why you want to how you will want to contact people. Mail, e-mail, phone etc....

Once you have a clear idea of all your needs and perhaps some of your possible future needs it's time to look at programs.

For simple databases, Excel or Lotus spreadsheets work fine. If you are familar with some of their advanced functions I recommend you start with a spreadsheet program. You can easily export it into a database later, should you need to. You can also do mail merge with Word or Wordperfect template.

We use a company that allows our members to sign up online. The company accepts the credit card payment, sends us the money and allows us download the data in either xls or txt format. So I only have to enter the data from those who choose to pay by cheque.

I'll be honest.... the worse part about setting up a database is the initial set-up and data entry.

If you decide to go with a database program such as ACT, Goldmine, or Maximizer or whatever... look carefully as to what each program does and pick the one that best suits your needs.

When setting up the program, enter in a few names and play with the program a little. Many of them link to e-mail and word processing packages allowing you to send off bulk e-mails or letters. If you prefer the phone approach, phone lists can be created.... get a good feeling of what this program will and can do before you enter in all your data.

By playing with the program you always get new ideas on your marketing and database use. At this is the point, you might want to fine tuning your data and database layout.

Now begin the task of entering the data and filling your database. If you expect to a lot of data entry I highly recommend that you do a web form and have your members sign up online. This will need to be exported into your database on a regular basis.

For many of you, I don't think you need to make things very complicated. I am currently running a two small databases of less than 500 members on an Excel spreadsheet.

In previous jobs I have set-up databases of 2000 to 10,000 people on database programs with automated processes for spitting out letters, e-mails and sending reminders to various people with my organizations to call certain clients.

Databases are lots of fun to play with... but then again I'm funny that way.