Large, complex associations and unions need ultra-flexible membership management software to support their needs now and down the road. Here’s what to look for in software that will take your organization well into the future.
When your association or union is large and complex, you have unique goals and challenges to address – and your organization changes over time.
The last thing you need is software that doesn’t fully meet your entire organization’s needs or that requires significant (and costly) workarounds to support your organization long-term. It’s important to have membership management software in place that supports the way your organization works today while being flexible enough to adapt as your organization grows and evolves.
Four traits of ultra-flexible membership management software
Let’s look at four traits of ultra-flexible membership management software that will meet your complex needs today and can easily evolve as your organization grows.
1. A single system to run your organization
Your membership management software should allow you to start with the functionality you need and add modules as you need them. That means it should offer deep and broad functionality that helps you manage day-to-day work as you need it to across your entire organization.
Look for software that provides enterprise-level product modules that are specific for each function of your organization – such as membership, marketing, and accounting. All of the modules should be powerful enough to help you streamline and manage complex processes while being easy enough for even non-technical staff to use to accomplish their daily work.
TIP: Aptify membership management software by Community Brands provides a wide range of applications in one system to support large, complex associations and unions. It includes product modules to help your organization manage everything from memberships, customer relationships, marketing and meetings to e-commerce, accounting, inventory, reporting, and analytics. And, you can easily add functionality as you need it.
2. A configurable, scalable platform
As your organization grows and processes become more complex, your software needs to keep up. When you are using software that’s highly configurable and scalable, you have the power to configure it as needed to align with your organization’s structure and processes.
One of the challenges that often comes with highly configured and customized software implementations is that they can “break” when the software is upgraded. So, it’s also important that your membership management software is built to allow for configurations of all applications on the platform while staying compatible with future versions of the software.
TIP: Aptify is built on a highly configurable platform, giving you the ability to configure and update the software as needed without having to rebuild the core system or worry about the software breaking during product upgrades.
3. Extensive integration capabilities 
While your membership management software should support your entire organization, you still might want to integrate it with your current technology ecosystem today and extend your use of it in the future. For the ultimate in flexibility, your software should include integrations and extensions for things like your current email marketing or accounting system as well as learning management software (LMS), an online career center, and event software.
TIP: Aptify easily integrates with other applications, including the Community Brands suite of solutions, so that you can integrate it with systems you already have and extend it to meet future needs as your organization grows.
4. International support
Whether your organization operates globally now, or you might expand internationally in the future, your membership management software should be ready to support you. It should allow you to do things like:
- Use distinct primary currencies for any contact or product within the software
- Display database information in a variety of languages and dialects
- Automatically recognize and correctly display international characters, such as accents and umlauts
- Support multiple time zones
TIP: Aptify software offers international capabilities, including multi-currency and multi-language capabilities, Unicode characters, and multi-time zone support. Plus, Aptify has deep expertise in multi-lingual setup and implementation of global currency, taxes, and merchant accounts to support your global needs.
Find the right membership management software for your large, complex organization
Learn more about how to select the right membership management software to support your large and complex organization: View this infographic on How to Find Your Next Association Management Software.
