NEMFs Virtual Mushroom Conference this Friday and Saturday
November 30, 20212022 business meeting recording
February 9, 2022We’re excited to announce that we finally have a 21st Century automated membership system. Why is this such a big deal? After all, the club has done fine for the last 60 years entering names into a ledger, or, more recently, into a spreadsheet.
This method worked fine back in the day when the club had 200 or 300 members but in the last couple of years the Club’s membership has ballooned (or dare I say, mushroomed) to over 1,500 members. Data entry and membership management fell to our Secretary and Treasurer, both of whom spent many hours every week trying to keep pace with the flood of applications. A frustrating and thankless task for our officers, and sometimes a frustrating experience for members who didn’t always get an immediate response or confirmation.
But all that has changed. Thanks to the work of Elan Trybuch, our new Secretary, who also happens to be an experienced software engineer, we now have an automated system that makes onboarding members a breeze. For our members, it bring a whole basket of new benefits:
- Membership applications are confirmed the moment the $20 membership dues hit our PayPal, triggering a welcome email with lots of info and useful resources.
- Members can now manage their membership themselves, changing their address, adding social media handles and even add a household member for free.
- Once logged on, they have access to members-only content like information on walks, and ID sessions as well as lecture recordings. This makes it easy to stay on top of the many events that NYMS organizes year-round.
- Memberships are now for 365 days instead of just to the end of the calendar year.
- We will now be sending out reminder emails when memberships are about to expire, so no more accidental unenrollments or lapsed memberships!
Best of all for our team, we can now focus on the fun stuff, and spend more time in the forest and less time in front of our computers.
We thank our members for their patience while we were piloting the system and hope you enjoy the new benefits as much as we do.