We’re working with a prospect to propose a new website (hopefully based on EE) and I wanted to get some input from the community about how we can achieve their goals.
The prospect runs a membership based non-profit organization. They host just under 100 events per year. Members and non-members are able to attend the events, but the fee to attend is cheaper for members. Payment for events needs to be handled on the website (something I know we can accomplish with a handful of available add-ons). Payment for membership is something that’s currently handled offline and will most likely continue to be that way. Memberships are based on annual terms. The prospect needs the ability to easily see which members are about to expire so they can market to them to renew. Member accounts also need to be disabled (or have their group changed) upon expiration. My gut feeling is that a CRM is what’s really needed here, but I haven’t found a CRM solution that will integrate with EE. I’m trying to avoid a solution that requires them to manually update member accounts in EE when memberships expire or renew. In addition to the above, they also need to be able to send emails to members and non-members (which I also think we can do fairly easily with the available MailChimp add-ons).
I guess my biggest road-block here is that the EE Member module really isn’t a CRM, and I think even if we add the required custom fields it’s really not going to be a very good CRM. I’m just trying to find a solution that will prevent them from having to update multiple systems when new members sign-up, renew, or are terminated.
Any thoughts?!