Background:
When I took on the task of being Commodore at the beginning of 2011, one of the things that I wanted to achieve was to gain a better understanding of who and what our members wanted, and to have an easy, reliable and secure method of being able to communicate - and involve members - with what was going on at the Club.
Whilst we had a 'Membership Spreadsheet', I am sure many of you will appreciate it is notoriously difficult to ensure the one Master copy is kept up to date and yet available to the various people - Secretary, Membership, Social etc. who all need to access it. Furthermore, a Spreadsheet does not allow for easy email handling, and come Renewal time, there is the whole trauma of Mail merges etc. - easy if you know how and do it regularly, but not so easy if you are old and only have to do it annually! There was also the important issue of Security, both of personal information and of the 150 or so email addresses which were being held on a normal PC.
What I felt the Club really needed was a proper 'Data base', as opposed to Spreadsheet, and for it to be held in a 'Central' area that was available over the Internet so that it could be accessed by those who needed it, without having to leave home etc. Whilst I knew this to be possible, I also knew enough to know that it was 'Easier said than done', and although I probably could have done it myself, it would not have been without an awful lot of time and 'head scratching', and despite being semi-retired, I do not have an unlimited amount of time to allocate to Sailing matters - or so I am repeatedly told!!
However, IT developments are moving apace, and the practicality of 'Cloud' computing - i.e. where all the Data is held 'somewhere' by a third party who provides access to it over the Internet / Web - was becoming a real reality. In discussion with various members, Gareth Brown - who I wish to publicly thank for the initial work he did - found a Canadian operation called 'Wild Apricot' (Just a geeky name I guess! - but from now on just called on 'WA') who specialize in providing Cloud based Membership software and Data storage for small 'Groups' be they Charities, Clubs, Faith Groups, etc. If you wish to see what they have to say about themselves - which is plenty! - visit www.wildapricot.com .
Gareth did a great job using their initial 30 free trial and got this basic facility up and working in "an afternoon" - thereby demonstrating how very much cleverer he is than I am!! After he had shown it to me, I spent some time exploring this facilities potential and then progressively involved the committee so as to ensure they supported this possible solution. At our October Committee meeting, it was agreed that we should look to use the WA facility to handle our 2012 renewal cycle and to see if it supported / aided the improved communications we aspired to in reality.
