A bit off-target, but possibly of use.... I'm on the board of a local SIG of the ACM. I moved some of the "member data" from Excel to Access (guess that was a step in the right direction) before realizing that I was heading down the trail of reinventing a whole suite of member management tools. As I'm looking around, I'm noticing that a lot of the features in tools that we are *not* interested in would be helpful for what you *are* interested in. Here's the kinds of things that "groups" (e.g. church groups, gyms, professional associations, etc.) have to do to maintain their "membership". Although you're coming at it from a "business" perspective and might be tempted to look at "customer relationship management" tools (CRM floods the market), looking at it from an "event management" perspective may help you:
- event calendars - member profile management - online registration and payment - automatic email notifications (date- and finance-based) - reports sliced every way to Sunday - ID badges (name tags) - group email (for many definitions of 'group') - web-hosted or PC-based (we want collaboration on hosted, but you may be OK with pc-based) - TODO lists - non-member contacts (conference halls, hotels, etc..) - discussion forums - newsletter distribution - document downloading - mail-merge What synchronicity... The president and I are meeting to discuss this kind of software in about 2 hours, so I have some fresh in my brain. Do a search for "event management software" or "group/club management software". We're looking at companies like memberize.com, regonline.com, clubexpress.com, irm-systems.com. I'm only about 2 hours into the research, so YMMV. Also, there is a huge cost spread. I just called a company who has an entry price of $125,000! Their web page looked very similar to a $5 per member per year site. I'm looking to see if our grassroots solution could be replicated in other SIG's around the world, but he's got a top-down approach and I've got a bottom-up budget. When we've done online registrations in the past, we had options of paying a percentage of the fee or a flat rate per registrant. When we did the math, the break even was at about 100 conferees. Also, watch out for their target group size. We tried a disasterous software package for our most recent tutorial. The politics were the deciding factor there; she pushed it through, said she'd shepherd it, then vanished. It was release 1.0. Enough said? The 1.0 issues aside, we found out that it was more tuned to a large conference with a dedicated, central contact person who knew the software (i.e. a power user). There are other tools that are more tuned to collaboration and "baby speak". Let us know how your searching goes. I'll report back, too, if I find that this genre of software may be useful. -- Michael R. Wolf [EMAIL PROTECTED] **NOTE** new, shorter spelling of obsolescent MichaelRunningWolf-at-att.net > -----Original Message----- > From: Jacinta Richardson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 4:45 PM > To: perl-trainers@perl.org > Subject: Bookings management software > > G'day everyone, > > I have a question for those on the list who run publicly enrolable > courses. How > do you handle your bookings? > > At the moment we use a combination of nms-formmail, RT, LaTeX, a wiki and > memory. It works but is time consuming. I've done a few web searches but > I > haven't found any course booking software which matches what I'm looking > for > which has: > > * automatic invoice generation (which I can then edit if I want > before > printing) > * automatic cover letter and email generation (again editable) > * various status levels: entered into accounting software, paid, > processed, payment reminder sent... > * attendance lists > * book lists (we give out free books as part of our early bird) > * customisable reports; particularly ones which estimate course > profitability, and ones which can be used as reminders to print > course > manuals, order books, confirm facilities etc. > > etc. I'm considering writing my own as a good way to learn either Jifty > or > Catalyst, but I thought I'd ask to see if anyone on here had a working > solution > already. It doesn't have to do everything, as long as I can customise it. > Failing that, what would you like to see in such a tool? > > Jacinta > > -- > ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._ | Jacinta Richardson | > `6_ 6 ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`) | Perl Training Australia | > (_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-' | +61 3 9354 6001 | > _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' ,' | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | > (il),-'' (li),' ((!.-' | www.perltraining.com.au |
