Your list/database is beginning to grow. Planning today about the type of information you wish to keep will allow much more flexibility to grow your Friends Group.
In my last post, I spoke about names and addresses and how it can get a bit complicated. Additional communication data to collect:
Phone number - many of us have more than one phone number. There is the home number, work number, fax number, cell number. Think about how you will contact your member and plan which phone numbers to obtain.
Email address - it seems hard to find someone without an email address yet there are a few folks that haven't made the technology jump. The same comment above about phone numbers goes for email addresses. If you are not using email to communicate at this time, still collect the address. You may wish to email a new member to verify that their email address is valid.
I will take a moment about collecting information from your members and privacy. While privacy laws generally are associated with identifying numbers, such as a social security number, your Friends Board should consider their own privacy policy. Will you sell or lend your membership list or will you keep it private? If you decide that you may wish to open the list to anyone outside of your organization, you will need to give the member to opt out. Whatever your policy, make sure your members can get a copy of your policy.
Moving on to membership related fields. A list of names and addresses is a great start yet we need to maintain information that will assist us in knowing our members. When we do membership, keeping records and some statistics will be important. Many of those statistics may be related to the following types of information.
ID Number - once your list begins to grow, having some type of ID number is great. I prefer using a number vs. an alpha combination. I suggest that you begin your numbering system at 1000. Start numbering your list from the top. Remember, it is more of an identifier and a sorting tool.
Membership Level - All of our Friends Groups have varying levels of membership. We have some type of basic level and then increasing levels after that. Knowing what level the member is giving at allows the membership committee to understand the member a little more. This field should be limited to your levels, again it is to keep the information consistent.
Date Joined - This is great piece of information. As time goes on, you can reward the member for their loyalty. If you don't have that information, then start with a date, example the first day of the membership year for anyone that is a member. This could make a separation in your list, those what were members currently and those that had not renewed in the last year. While some members have been with your organization longer, you can later explain that it is from when the new record system took place.
As you can see, you can begin to get an understanding of how valuable the information can be in knowing your members. I'm planning on a third Tips post in a few days. Keep an eye out. What are you doing with your list?
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