Part 1 of 5 · The digital foundation
A member register without spreadsheets: one overview for the board
The spreadsheet holds up until two people edit it at once, one column gets sorted on its own, or the volunteer who built it leaves the board.
A member register is the association's single authoritative list of who is a member: with status, membership type, role, contact details, join date and the consent the information was collected under. It is not a contact list. It is the place where invoices, sign-ups and mailings get their recipients, which is why there can only be one of it.
This is part 1 of the series on the digital foundation of an association. The register comes first because the other four layers read from it.
What does a member register need to hold?
Name and email is what every spreadsheet has. It is the other fields that decide whether the register can be used for anything beyond looking at it.
Status. Active, awaiting approval, in arrears, left. Without status there is no difference between a member and someone who used to be one.
Membership type. Senior, junior, passive, household. The type sets the price, and the price drives the invoice.
Role. Board, treasurer, coach, volunteer, member. The role decides what the person can see and do — not an agreement not to look at the other tabs.
History. When they joined, what they have paid, what they signed up for. History is what a new treasurer must be able to read without calling the old one.
Consent. What the member agreed to, and when. It is both a legal requirement and the precondition for sending anything with a clear conscience.
Who should maintain the information?
The members themselves. A new address, a new phone number, a new surname: that kind of thing never gets updated centrally, because the board is never told. With self-service the member corrects it in one place, and everything that reads from the register is current the same second.
The same goes for joining. A public sign-up page where new members register themselves and pick a membership removes the entire manual step between "I would like to join" and "you are in the register". See member management for how the register, the roles and the self-service fit together.
The board keeps what requires a decision: approving new members, roles and access, and what happens to a member in arrears.
What does the member see?
The board sees a register. The member sees their own page: their membership, what it costs, when it was last paid, and the information the association holds about them.
It is the same information seen from two sides, and that is why self-service works. A member corrects their phone number because it is their own phone number — not because the board asked for an update in an email that never gets answered.
The side effect is fewer enquiries. "What have I paid?" and "am I still a member?" are the two questions a treasurer answers most often in a year, and both are on the member's own page.
Which information should you not keep?
Spreadsheets accumulate fields. There is almost always a column holding something a previous board thought might come in useful: national ID numbers, health details from a trip in 2019, a note about a conflict, a photo of a child.
The rule is that you keep what the association needs in order to run the membership — and that everything else needs a reason and a consent. A register containing only what is necessary is both easier to hand over and easier to answer for when a member asks what you hold about them.
That review belongs before you move anything. It is easier to leave a field out than to remove it later, once four other places have started reading it.
How to move the list you have
- Clean up before you move. Duplicates and leavers who were never removed do not improve by changing format.
- Decide what each column means. A column nobody can explain should not come along.
- Set up membership types before importing, so each member lands on the right price.
- Assign roles to the board first, and leave everyone else as ordinary members.
- Keep the old file exactly as it was, unchanged, and stop editing it the same day.
- Ask members to confirm their own details. It is faster than reviewing 300 rows yourself.
What about GDPR?
A single register makes the rules easier to comply with, not harder. When member data sits in one place, you can answer what you hold about a person, how long you have held it, and what they agreed to. When it sits in four files and a mail distribution list, you cannot.
Access control belongs here: a volunteer organising a trip has no need to see arrears, and role-based access is the difference between that being a principle and being true.
Frequently asked questions
Can members sign themselves up?
Yes. A public sign-up page lets new members register and choose a membership, with the board approving afterwards if the association requires it.
How do we avoid every volunteer seeing everything?
With roles. Each role gets exactly the information and functions it needs, and access follows the role — including when a volunteer stops.
Can we import our current spreadsheet?
Yes, members can be loaded from an existing list. Set up membership types first, so each member lands on the right price from day one.
What if two people share the same email address?
This is common in households and for child members. Each member has their own record with their own status and their own membership, even when contact goes to a parent.
What happens to members who leave?
They get the status of having left, instead of being manually deleted from several lists. The history is kept for accounts and reporting, and they stop being recipients.
Continue to part 2: subscriptions
Once the register is one place, invoicing can read from it. Part 2 is about subscriptions that collect themselves and are booked in the same place.