[FX.php List] Solution for Society Membership

[Roger Moffat]

Hi List - Happy New Year

I'm the Membership dude for 2 non-profit societies and for more than 10 years now have run their membership databases in FileMaker Pro, using files that have over time been tweaked, extended, probably fudged, etc etc. They're similar in makeup, but nowhere near identical...

They're sitting on my FileMaker Server 11 down in the basement and in one case are accessed only by myself and one other person by FileMaker Pro client, and in the other case by myself by FileMaker Pro client and someone else by a web interface that was originally made using Claris Home Page, and now is tweaked to use FMWebSchool's BlackBelt. to allow one other person to make changes to records, indicate payment made etc.

It's more than time to get up to date with new databases that provide far more functionality than we currently have, and I'm thinking/hoping that someone here has, or knows where to get such a solution. At least from my point of view something pretty much ready to go will be a LOT (by many orders of magnitude!!) easier than continuing to tweak and fudge these files to do what's needed.

Here's a list, probably not complete, but hopefully missing nothing major, of what we'd like to move to:

• ability of anyone to join society and pay by PayPal and have their record created in the database. (We've used PayPal for some years now, but don't have merchant credit card facilities at this time at least).

• management of userID and password to allow members access to change just their record and make subsequent payment - including retrieval of lost passwords etc.

• management of "members only" areas of the website, validated by knowing that a person is current in their payment of dues - this would include the ability to have that verification done from a website (and hosting business) which is not where the FileMaker Server lives - our FileMaker server lives at home, and handles other databases (genealogical records) totalling nearly 2,000,000 records, but our main website is at http://SimplyHosting/net/ 

• access by web interface (and of course FileMaker Pro client) to whole database for manual entry of changes, payments and new members by Society Officers

• ability to mail different membership groups (expired members, or current members for example) about different matters.

These are the major items I think - anything obvious I've missed?

Free is of course good but I'm sure quite unrealistic - but we've got money and can purchase such a solution "within reason". I don't expect we have enough money to pay someone to develop this, but hopefully there's a solution that fits these needs already in existence somewhere?

Thanks Very Much for any and all help with this

Roger

http://ClanMoffat.org/
http://wmgs.org/