SourceForge recently spoke with Mitch Colleran, CEO and founder of membership management solution Join It to discuss the growing platform, available features, and how membership groups can foster community.
Q: First of all, can you give us an overview of Join It? Why did you create this platform?
A: Join It helps organizations operate more effectively and efficiently. We connect their membership database with communication tools, accounting tools, events, and member status tracking. Join It was inspired by a few different things, though mostly through my interactions with groups like Meteor Chef and Nomad List. My interactions with these groups were increasingly siloed and I spent a lot of time moving from channel to channel. I wanted to make that experience less disconnected.
Personally, I think that it’s where we spend the spare time we have that makes us who we are. Work and responsibilities are necessary, but when we finally have a minute, are we spending time with communities who matter to us? It doesn’t matter what kind of organization or community we’re talking about here, whether it’s a neighborhood gardening club or a national professional association, there are going to be headaches involved, and we want to do our part to reduce those headaches. Everyone involved in a membership group, especially the leaders, should be able to spend their time with their community, not updating email lists and troubleshooting websites. That’s why I started Join It.
Q: What kind of organizations do you primarily work with?
A: It varies! We primarily work with nonprofit organizations, but we also work with professional associations, booster clubs, music venues, university groups, and more. Join It is a flexible tool that can work for most any membership-based association or organization, whether it functions mostly online, mostly offline, or a hybrid of the two.
Q: What problem do you solve, and what are some benefits Join It can provide to membership groups?
We save time for organizations, create a more seamless experience for members, and make membership management more effective. Specifically, the organization dashboard is adjustable to match the needs of any given association. Organizations can easily manage financial configurations like invoicing, managing local currencies, updating financial policies, and more, as well as creating multiple membership types right from the dashboard. Organizations can also see how engaged a given member is by looking at the member timeline to see their logged events including payments, event attendance, and email list additions. This makes it easier to reach out to members who may be interested in other ways to engage with an organization or help those who maybe aren’t as integrated as they want to be.
Q: What features do you offer? Do you integrate with tools that teams might already be using?
A: In addition to handling all your payment processing, failed payment notifications, and membership renewals, we do integrate with quite a few tools! Some favorites among our users include Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, MailChimp, Slack, Stripe, Zapier, and Emma. We’re always looking for additional services that our users find to be essential to their business so we can add integrations to our roadmap.
Q: What support do you have available for teams who need assistance with integration?
We have a stellar customer service team at the ready for both chat and email support, as well as a robust library of support documentation for everything from setting up new accounts and troubleshooting to integrating new features.
Q: Looking into the future, what are some trends you see on the rise for membership groups?
A: While the current climate certainly lends itself well to online interactions for groups of all sorts, we do hope that communities around the world will establish themselves and continue to grow.
About Join It
Join It is a membership management service that enables organizations to effectively keep track, manage, and grow their community. At our core, we provide a simple database and dashboard interface for organization leaders to monitor developments in their membership. We then integrate this database context with best in class service providers to automate other essential components of an organization, like payment processing, email communication, and event organization.
Features:
- Multiple membership tiers
- Multiple currencies and tax
- Automated renewal reminder
- Failed payment notifications
- Multi-user access
- Email marketing integrations
- Payment collection and processing
- Member surveys
- Event ticketing and management