Membership Secretary

Every dropped inquiry is a lost member and, often, a person who never tries pétanque again. Inquiries scatter across personal email, Facebook Messenger, the website contact form and casual mentions at the bar — and without a shared system, two volunteers can answer the same person differently or nobody answers at all.

The practical manifestation is conversion rates from inquiry to paid member that nobody can measure, repeat embarrassment when a prospective member shows up to a session having heard nothing back, and burnout for the one person who tries to track everything personally.

An inquiry inbox aggregates messages from web forms, social channels and email into a tracked pipeline with status, owner and next-action date. Templated responses cover the common questions, handovers between volunteers preserve the conversation history, and conversion analytics show which channels actually deliver members.

First impressions decide retention. A new member who has to fill in three forms, send a passport photo by email and pay by bank transfer with a reference code is being told the club is hard work.

Many give up halfway. The practical manifestation is partial registrations that the membership secretary chases for weeks, missing license documentation that surfaces at the first competition, and consent gaps that resurface as GDPR problems years later.

The Onboarding Wizard sequences registration, license application, fee payment via Stripe, consent capture and welcome content into a single flow on mobile or desktop. The new member finishes in one sitting, the membership secretary sees a clean record, and the federation submission happens automatically if applicable.

Most member churn is not deliberate departure — it is renewal friction. A member meant to renew, missed the deadline, felt embarrassed, and quietly stopped coming.

The practical manifestation is a renewal season that consumes the membership secretary's January and February, predictable retention dips that the board treats as inevitable, and lost members the club could have kept with a single well-timed reminder.

Renewal Automation schedules reminders well ahead of expiry, sends one-tap payment links, handles grace periods with appropriate tone, and only escalates to the membership secretary when the member has actively disengaged. Notifications adapt to the member's preferred channel and language.