Well, it seems that, if they do, they aren’t reading this.
I know what a U3A is, but what specifically are you looking to achieve?
A U3A is a group of people. We have Groups, such as walking or playing Bridge. Each Group has a Group Leader, or at least a point of contact. This person, the GL, needs to be able to contact all the people in the group with a single e-mail.
We’re currently looking at Wild Apricot, which is a ‘general’ membership management system. As such it does things we don’t need and, as far as I know, is not (easily) able to allow our GLs to mail only those U3A members who are in that group. Wild Apricot has its own website and as webmaster of our WordPress site I don’t want to throw it away and start again, learning a whole new system. I’mm looking for a WordPress plugin that will enable us to run our membership database from within WordPress. We need a login button on the site that will enable each or 1300 members to access their own information, pay their annual membership by card or PayPal and, in the case of Group Leaders, contact the members of their group.
Anyone?
s2Member can provide all that for you except for the emailing function. You’d need an additional plugin for that.
But if what you have described is all you want — so that you aren’t providing significant online content beyond the user’s own information — then s2Member will be overkill.
s2Member is designed to protect content — whether posts, pages, or files — for a whole variety of use cases and circumstances. If you don’t need all that, then Members or Groups would probably be a more suitable choice.
Thanks very much for your help. I am thinking that Wild Apricot is overkill but at least s2Member is a WordPress plugin that won’t require relocating the website from WordPress to Wild Apricot!
Our requirement does go a bit further than that. Each of our groups meets somewhere and there is a list of venues, together with which groups use them and when. The list of venues, cost of hiring and contact details for someone in charge of each venue is currently kept in an Excel spreadsheet. Another spreadsheet lists all the groups, together with the Group Leader, venue where they meet, frequency and times of meetings. A third spreadsheet lists all the members together with the date of their annual renewal. Another one is for the treasurer and has the usual money transactions of any group of people, including the necessary returns for the Charities Commission (in the UK).
I will investigate ‘Members’ and ‘Groups’. A single database with all the above in it will, if properly designed, reduce the amoung of work our Membership Secretary has to do – entering the same information in more than one spreadsheet every time!
Yes, that is a bit more complex. A lot of it would probably be best accomplished using custom post types, in which case using s2Member would make sense.
You could also use AMR users in order to display members’ details how you want. It works well with s2Member.
Then you’d just need to select a Newsletter plugin to handle your email requirements.
