Forum access and 2011 membership renewals

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

Why not just a Google Form + paypal? Include a field on the form for paypal ID and amount sent.

Here, I spent 3.5 minutes making the first half of the form. Everyone send in some sample entries and I'll show what the results look like in a speadsheet.

Click:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreads ... DRkMGQ&ifq

JamesShort · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 12:16 pm

MikeWhitney wrote:

Why not just a Google Form + paypal? Include a field on the form for paypal ID and amount sent.

Here, I spent 3.5 minutes making the first half of the form. Everyone send in some sample entries and I'll show what the results look like in a speadsheet.

Click:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreads ... DRkMGQ&ifq

Few thoughts

Security of the membership spreadsheet. This can be done by only sharing with specific folks. I'm not sure if you can password protect it.

Can the spreadsheet be backed-up intermitently?

Still need to extract the data from the form and generate a hard text copy to archive and email to officers/treasurer. Not sure if Google Forms has the ability to do this.

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

The form updates a Google spreadsheet. This can all be done within a club gmail account (thscc@gmail.com?) that the treasurer controls. Admittedly, this doesn't make the treasurer's job much if any easier, but I am guessing that 90% of the club would prefer to renew like this. Might help retention.

Here's what it looks like. I added a few columns to the right for flagging what has been done with the record:

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

This is my first time using a form, I'm learning some neat stuff about it.

There is frame source available to embed directly into a THSCC page. Someone want to try it?

<iframe src="https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHZFdnhBd3JlRWY5ZjRxcFg1N1lzSFE6MQ" width="760" height="971" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

Jason Mauldin · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 1:05 pm

Wow, thats nifty.

Richard, my check will be in the mail when I get home from vacation.

Ryan Holton · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 1:12 pm

JamesShort wrote:

Security of the membership spreadsheet. This can be done by only sharing with specific folks. I'm not sure if you can password protect it.

YES, we use Google spreadsheets to track our Lemons spending. Only folks who are authorized can see the spreadsheet

Can the spreadsheet be backed-up intermitently?

Its in the Clouds dude Google takes care of that automatically

Still need to extract the data from the form and generate a hard text copy to archive and email to officers/treasurer. Not sure if Google Forms has the ability to do this.

No clue but seems easy enough

JamesMilko · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 1:17 pm

You can save a Google doc as a .xls. We use them at work a lot. They are pretty handy.

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

Ryan Holton wrote:

JamesShort wrote:

Security of the membership spreadsheet. This can be done by only sharing with specific folks. I'm not sure if you can password protect it.

YES, we use Google spreadsheets to track our Lemons spending. Only folks who are authorized can see the spreadsheet

Can the spreadsheet be backed-up intermitently?

Its in the Clouds dude Google takes care of that automatically

Still need to extract the data from the form and generate a hard text copy to archive and email to officers/treasurer. Not sure if Google Forms has the ability to do this.

No clue but seems easy enough

To reiterate / further clarify ...

The spreadsheet and form could be owned by thscc@gmail.com or thscc_treasurer@gmail.com. This role could also own the club paypal account. So simply there would just be 2 ways for member apps/renewals to come in to the exact same person (Bowie) who has always done it -- (1) paper forms in the mail which have to be typed into some member list, and (2) see new entries on the browser-based spreadsheet and copy/paste info into the member list. No need for another person to be involved here. Someone (James, me, Bret, whoever) could set this all up initially then hand it off when it works. Which should take, oh, I dunno, maybe a day or 2. This is not a complicated solution. Is it ideal? No, but sometimes progress is better than years of bitching about having to lick stamps.

And a copy/export can be made at any time for backup. And it can be shared with anyone as needed (officers, etc).

Ryan Holton · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 1:47 pm

MikeWhitney wrote:

Is it ideal? No, but sometimes progress is better than years of bitching about having to lick stamps.

As a former club officer who fought this, I couldn't agree more. Now is the time

Can I be the test guinea pig and pay my dues :lol:

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 1:55 pm

I personally have mixed feelings about the Google forms idea. I know that pretty much nothing has been done to improve this process forever, and that anything looks more attractive that how it is today.

But as one of those who have to fight through this data on spreadsheets, I would currently vote "No" to this approach. While it looks interesting on the surface, I view it as being little better than just having people submit renewal directly via Paypal and providing info via Paypal (maybe even worse than that). Mike is not selling it as anything but what it is, but please don't confuse a list of transactions with a real membership list. As Mike says, someone is going to have to look through each transaction in the Google doc spreadsheet, verify that the payment went through via Paypal, then find the associated entry in the membership list and update it manually. All this does is create a pretty front end for one time data entry. Cool for what it is, but in my opinion really limiting.

My 2 cents is that if we want to get something done for this year, then just open up Paypal directly for 2011 renewals. Yes it would suck as a data capture method, but for 99% of the renewals, we just need to know who it is and not anything else. If you have an address update, etc. just email Bowie.

:soap:

Then, lets get serious about something real. I know there is talk, but lets see some real action. I am also afraid that as soon as we put in place something that is marginally better, it will take the wind out any effort to build something really useful. Frankly I think it is embarrassing that we are in such a high tech area that we are still operating on paper.

Richard

PS: I love Google docs and use then (and share them with others) extensively myself.

JamesShort · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:10 pm

Richard Casto wrote:

Then, lets get serious about something real. I know there is talk, but lets see some real action. I am also afraid that as soon as we put in place something that is marginally better, it will take the wind out any effort to build something really useful. Frankly I think it is embarrassing that we are in such a high tech area that we are still operating on paper.

Yeah that.

I just threw this presentation together:

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id ... w&hl=en_US

Obviously the DB design is incomplete and quite trivial, but you get the idea.

MikeWhitney · **Joined:** Wed Aug 20, 2003 9:15 pm **Posts:** 4724

Ok, tell you guys what ... I'll give you until the end of the year to get something serious together. In Jan I'm going to convince the new Pres and Bowie that the Google form is the way to go.

You've got 3 months :lol:

JamesShort · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:33 pm

I've been in communication with Bowie and he is inviting of these plans. However he would NOT entertain having to log into a google spread sheet and go back and forth from window to window to update entries in his spreadsheet from the google spreadsheet. Hell, he expressed to me that he doesn't want to read through paypal transaction info either or log into paypal for that matter

. He would invite only having to do do manual updates via our web front end in those odd corner cases that Carl outlined (added to last slide of presentation).

I'm meeting with him at September's meeting to discuss a few more specifics. Any of you in this conversation are welcome to get there early to join us.

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:59 pm

MikeWhitney wrote:

Ok, tell you guys what ... I'll give you until the end of the year to get something serious together. In Jan I'm going to convince the new Pres and Bowie that the Google form is the way to go.

You've got 3 months :lol:

I wouldn't bet against you Mike. But it is good to have some pressure applied!

JamesShort wrote:

I've been in communication with Bowie and he is inviting of these plans. However he would NOT entertain having to log into a google spread sheet and go back and forth from window to window to update entries in his spreadsheet from the google spreadsheet. Hell, he expressed to me that he doesn't want to read through paypal transaction info either or log into paypal for that matter

. He would invite only having to do do manual updates via our web front end in those odd corner cases that Carl outlined (added to last slide of presentation).

I'm meeting with him at September's meeting to discuss a few more specifics. Any of you in this conversation are welcome to get there early to join us.

I am crazy busy with other stuff, but would like to help and will try to make the time. I do much of this type of stuff (especially the big picture thinking) for a living. Send me a PM.

Richard

MarekRozanski · **Posted:** Fri Aug 26, 2011 1:03 am

Seriously? Is it really that difficult to come up with a membership management system?

1. Start with a database of current members. (What does our web host provide? MySQL? PostgreSQL? SQLite?)
2. Create a dynamic web page for membership enrollment/renewal. (I see that at least PHP is available.) Let user select new membership or renewal.
--- a). If new membership, show a form like Mike's, with all the required personal/family info.
--- b). If renewal, let user pick from list of current members (maybe verify with password; although if someone wanted to renew my membership, I'd be fine with that)
--- c). Present standard PayPal form with some user or transaction identifier that PayPal will send back when the transaction is processed.
--- d). Use parameters sent back from PayPal to insert/update user entry in membership database. Include PayPal confirmation #.
3. If Bowie wants to look at paper, offer a way to export a printable page (PDF, Excel, CSV, whatever).
4. For the luddites who want to fill out a paper application and a check, offer that option with a "processing fee" ($5 or $10 extra), to nudge people toward online enrollment.

If designed and implemented properly, the system should be able to reconcile payments from PayPal and from manual entry. It could even plug into phpBB to lock out forum access of those who forgot to renew on time. We could extend it to handle event registration and points tracking.

Just sayin...

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