That’s right. This is a story about a very small membership organization that was cut off from its primary source of revenue: membership dues.
I was put in contact with this organization late in 2019, and told that they were in some pretty dire straits. They couldn’t use their old online payment system anymore and needed some help figuring out a new way. I had never dealt with such problems before, and it’s unusual for me to take on a membership organization as a client, but I did it anyway.
I met with their executive team over bagels and as we talked, a solution to their problems came to mind. I use an online accounting platform that allows you to set up a payment page for any product/service that your organization offers. I figured this would work perfectly fine for an organization of their very small size.
So, I got them set up on the platform, and created a page on their WordPress site with links to payment pages for each of their membership types. This looked great for them, so we decided to launch it and they were able to start accepting payments right away!
This was a great experience. At the start, they couldn’t accept any membership dues and they were in trouble. At the end, they were collecting dues once more using a platform with no upfront fees. I usually like to work on bigger projects, but being able to solve a serious problem relatively easily was very rewarding for me in this case!