Important steps to ensure your members transition onto your new website is as smooth as possible
Your new Member Jungle system has finished, and your new website is shiny and customised to your preferences. It's almost time to get this show on the road, but before you do, you need to ensure you do a few things first.
There aren't too many, but they are important, and you need to do them to give your club the best chance to thrive with your new system. This article includes:
- Configure Your Payment Gateway
- Privacy Policy & Terms & Conditions
- Check Your Organisation Settings
- How To Tell Your Members
- Add Renewal Reminders To Automate Renewal Time
- Handover To The Support Team
- Optimise Your Website SEO
- What To Do Now That Your Site Is Launched
1. Configure Your Payment Gateway
One of the greatest advantages of using Member Jungle is its ability to process online payments quickly and efficiently. However, to do this, you will need to connect your Stripe account to your Member Jungle system.
See Setting up and Managing Your Payment Gateway
You can connect your Member Jungle system to an existing Stripe account or create a new one for your site. Once your Stripe account is connected to the Member Jungle system, you will need to configure a few settings. These settings include deciding whether the gateway and service fees will be absorbed into your profits or added onto your prices. You can also choose whether to allow manual payments in your new system.
For instructions on this, see Configuring your gateway fees & offering alternate payment options
2. Privacy Policy And Terms & Conditions
I know that very few people read privacy policies and terms and conditions; however, that doesn’t stop them from being crucial legal protections for your club.
A privacy policy and terms and conditions are essential; not only is having them best practice generally, but it will also be mandatory under proposed changes to Australian law.
Proposed changes to the Australian Privacy Act will, among other things, make it a legal requirement for your club to seek informed consent from your members regarding what you do with their data.
This is just one reason your club needs a functioning and legally sound privacy policy and terms and conditions. Terms and conditions also play a crucial role in legally protecting your club from misuse and mistreatment by your members.
Basically, you need a privacy policy as well as terms and conditions for a whole lot of legal protection reasons already, and the government changes are making it a legal requirement.
For more on the changes and how to set up a privacy policy and terms & conditions, please read the following article. Changes to the Australian Privacy Act: Why Your Club Needs a Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions Now.
3. Check Your Organisation’s Setting
Your organisation’s Settings are some basic but crucial details that you will need to add in and double-check at this stage prior to launch.
- Company/organisation name
- Short name, e.g. “My Club”
- Organisation Identification Number: ABN/ACN/ARBN/NZBN
- Xero account code
- Website URL (this should not be changed from the current URL)
- Website name
- Contact email
- First and last names for the website contact
Please see Site and Organisation Settings for a much more detailed description of these details and how to fill them out.
4. Raise A Support Ticket And Request To Launch Your Site
Once you have done all of the above, you need to Open A Support Ticket and request that your site be launched. At this point, our tech team will review your system and prepare it to go live to your members.
They may find a few things you’ve missed or ask for some extra details here and there, but generally speaking, you’ll be off to the races. They will go over the more tech-heavy side of launching your new system, so to get a leg up on understanding all of that, check out The Tech Side Of Onboarding With Member Jungle.
One of the things they will cover with you at this stage is what domain name you would like to use. When someone uses your website, your domain is displayed in the URL bar at the top of the screen.
You can choose to use the existing Member Jungle domain, buy a new domain, or keep your existing domain. It’s up to you.
For more information about domain names and what your options are, please read Can We Use Our Own Domain Name When We Launch Our Site?
Once Your Website Is Live, What Do You Need To Do Next?
So, now that you’ve gone through all the checks to get your new system up and running, you just have a few more things you need to do to ensure you get off to a great start with your new system.
Tell Your Members About The New System
Now that your system is up and running, you can start telling all of your members about it. To help you with this, you will get a Prepare To Launch email with tips and instructions on the best way to inform your members about the upcoming changes.
This email will also contain some Canva templates that can be used as social media posts, emails, and printed posters to help you share the news with your members.
For more about these posters and how to use Canva, have a look at What Is Canva & How Can You Use It To Promote Your Club?
There are many other ways to promote your new system and get all of your members on board besides using Canva. In fact, one of the best ways to tell your members about the big change is to email them. The Member Jungle system even has a pre-built email template designed to make informing your members about the new system as easy as possible. This template can include an introduction to the new system, give them their usernames, give them instructions on how to set their passwords and instructions for downloading the mobile app.
For more information on all of these ways to tell you members and what to do if your members are hesitant to change, have a look at the following article: How Do I Tell My Members About Member Jungle?
Add Renewal Reminders For Your Members
You now need to go into your club’s Membership General Settings and add some renewal reminders to remind members to renew their memberships. These reminders can be set up to go out a certain number of days before and after a member’s membership expires.
These will give you the best chance of getting a high renewal rate when renewal time comes. For more information on how to do this and how to access your membership general settings, read the following Help Article, Membership General Settings.
Handover To Support
That’s right. The final step is the sad one: the training wheels officially come off, and Renee and the onboarding team are no longer your primary contacts with Member Jungle. From this point on, when you have a question or a problem with your system, you will need to use the Support Portal.
There are two bits of good news, though. First, the support portal is super helpful, and the dedicated Member Jungle support team is awesome and super responsive, so you’ll be in very good hands. Second, we host fortnightly webinars that are a great way to learn extra tidbits about the system and get live demos of new features.
If you want to find out more about how the support portal works and what to do if you have any questions going forward, have a look at The 3 Ways You Can Get Customer Support From Member Jungle.
Optimise your SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it helps your website be found when users are doing a search on a web browser. You will need to add key words and a site description to assist Google and other search engines to find your website.
Read how to best optimise your site here: SEO Tools
What To Do Now Your System Is Live
Now that you have completed all of the above tasks, you are free to launch your system and start running your club more easily and effectively than ever.
Remember to keep an eye on the Member Jungle Learning Centre, as new helpful articles are added several times a week. It can be a great source of information for your club going forward.