Most of us make use of our digital memberships every day. From getting coffee to borrowing a book from the library, digital memberships simplify many things. Using digital memberships has become second nature to us, but have you ever asked yourself why they have grown to have such importance in our lives?
In this article, we are sharing with you everything you need to know about digital memberships, and how to make good use of them. Whether you are a manager or a member of a community, knowing more about digital membership will make things more efficient for you.
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What Is a Digital Membership?
Digital membership is pretty similar to any other membership, but it is digitized, which makes everything easier for the members and the community managers. With digital memberships, you can benefit from everything that a membership offers, but with more ease thanks to technology.
The notion of “membership” has been around for centuries, but with the digitization of businesses and communities, becoming a member of almost any community is easier than ever.
It was only a couple of decades ago that community managers had to keep manual lists of their members and provide them non-digital membership cards. Needless to say, going through pages of information and dealing with such time-consuming processes was a big hustle.
The emergence of digital memberships has made everything easier for both parties in this situation. Community managers or business owners don’t have to deal with pages of manually written information now, and members don’t have to keep track of all their memberships by manual methods either.
The main thing digital membership systems facilitate is easier communication within the community. With membership management software and apps, you can effortlessly communicate with your members.
Benefits of Creating Digital Memberships for Your Members
There are two sides to the coin when we are talking about digital membership: What concerns the community manager, and the experience of the community members. To list the opportunities offered by digital membership software and applications, let’s look at these opportunities separately:
Improved member communication and availability:
When you have a digital record of all your members, it only takes seconds to reach them. Most member management software simplifies sorting through your community members to find who you are looking for.
Digitizing your community will also facilitate the announcements you want to make. For example, companies like Starbucks use their mobile apps to announce any member-exclusive campaigns. This way, any member that turns on their phone can see the current opportunities with a simple notification.
Digital membership cards:
Membership cards are now digital and personalized. Printing physical membership cards and distributing them among your members takes a long time. You also need to allocate a portion of your budget to the manufacturing and distribution of these cards, which is not worth it in most cases.
Physical cards are also constantly lost by their owners. Let’s accept it, all of us have lost at least one card in our life. When your members lose their membership cards, they have to contact you to print another one, and this usually takes an unnecessarily long time. Not to mention that it’s a waste of money and physical resources.
So instead of spending time and effort on printing, distributing, and dealing with the loss of physical membership cards; you can create customizable digital membership cards for your community. This way, you can make sure to avoid such minor but time-consuming problems altogether.
Easier Fundraising and collection of donations:
If you need to collect donations from your members, or you are a non-profit organization holding fundraisers, moving your members to a digital platform is the best thing you can do.
Digital membership facilitates both the collection and the accounting of your funds. You can find many platforms that allow app integration, which is very beneficial in this regard. You can check out here if you want to learn more about app integration and how it can help you.
Becoming a Member of a Digital Community
We have mentioned the benefits of digital memberships for a community manager, so let’s see what it has to offer to the members.
Become known in your community:
Just as it is easy for managers to find and connect you digitally, it becomes easy for you to connect them with digital membership. You can send your community manager an SMS, a direct message from within your social community platform, or communicate with them through email.
It is important to note that the extent to which you can communicate with the managers of your community is dependent on their choice, as they are the ones directing the community, but digital platforms give them endless opportunities to ensure good communication.
Not only with the managers, but you can communicate with the other members of the group very easily too! With digital membership, you don’t have to physically meet to engage in conversations with your fellow members. This will make task managing and handling community-wide problems much easier.
Safe payment:
With good communication ensured among the managers and the members, it is very simple to make payments through digital platforms. It is also much safer to have every transaction recorded digitally, instead of delivering your donations and payments by hand.
Communities and services in your reach 24/7:
You can think of membership software as a robot secretary. You can always reach out and ask questions, and your questions will be answered when the time is right. As a digital member, you never have to wait to meet people physically to voice your concerns or make suggestions.
Keep in touch and stay updated:
As we mentioned in the Starbucks example, staying updated as a member is crucial. Depending on your membership status, getting constant updates will provide you different opportunities.
Let’s say you are a member of a student club in your university, and a couple of club members have decided to hold an impromptu meeting. You can learn all about it through your digital community platform and join in! Or if you have the app of a food delivery platform, and they hold flash sales for their members, you will be alerted with the notifications sent to you.
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If you are interested in an all-in-one management software that includes these services and more, you can Check out Raklet. Raklet is customizable and offers you endless opportunities. You can sign in now or schedule a demo to see how you feel about digital membership!
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