Re: Membership decrease

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Here is what I have been doing for our local aquarium society.  IF Jack
would like to do this, I can easily set everything up for the AGA
membership as well:

We used to have our membership database in Microsoft Access and kept by
one person.  This was a pain because that one person was responsible for
printing out the labels every month, and it had to be the same person who
did the treasury.  When he turned over the treasury to another person, the
new guy didn't even have a computer of his own.

So I set up a web-based database.  I put it on a password-protected web
site, and transferred all the records from the old format into SQL, and
wrote some very rudimentary glue code (to hold everything together).  Now
when the treasurer gets a renewal, he logs into the website (usually from
work), brings up the person's account, makes the change, and submits the
change.  Then the guy who has to print out the labels (that'd be me) once
a month goes to a "create labels" program also on the website, which spits
out a printable page of labels (which include the expiration date, and
optionally "LAST ISSUE").  The labels could be sorted or filtered in a
variety of ways, including a run of "about-to-expire" labels.  In fact, as
I said before, this could be done by a totally different person than the
one doing the membership.

The one weak link in this (up to now) is that I always spit out the label
pages as postscript, because I have access to a postscript printer.  One
way I could get around this is to convert to PDF on the fly, which
everyone can print from.  Recently I tried out stamps.com to print the
postage directly onto postcards.  A few quick modifications to the label
creating program created files of addresses that the stamps.com program
could import and print.  I suspect it'd be just as easy to spit it out in
a format that Jack can print out as well.

A free side-perks of this system is that everyone who is given access to
the special site now can correct spelling mistakes, renew members, print
labels, etc. It's accessable from conventions, airports, work.  Another
perk is that if the club ever decides it wants some special members-only
things on the website, it can be easily determined who's a member,
automatically.

Anyway, it's worked very well for our club over the last year and a half.
And it always seems kind of funny to me when I print out our labels every
month that they "magically" have been updated.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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