Membership Migration for the PMA
Migrating memberships is one of the most frequent requests we get for organizations with members. Often, a team is handling membership in one way, sometimes with a spreadsheet or a CRM service, and is ready for some more sophisticated tools. Or, a previous website solution isn’t providing the needed features and it’s time to expand. We love taking on these tasks and usually lean on the power of MemberPress to make our work easier.
The Production Music Association
Enter the Production Music Association (PMA). We were really excited to meet and work with the PMA, which came to us as a referral from our previous client, The Society of Composers and Lyracists (SCL). We’re always really proud of a client referral – it’s one of the best indicators that we’ve done our work well.
The music industry covers a wide swath of professions – from composer to lyricist to publisher. It is one of the only creative professions that doesn’t have union representation in the entertainment industry. That means that organizations like The SCL and the PMA are vitally important to give professionals a voice. Production music itself is a subset of the music industry as a whole and requires some unique memberships types.
The PMA came to us with some very specific site goals. They needed a new look for the site, wanted easier site editing, and wanted to connect to a CRM service. Central to the redevelopment effort however, was a better way to manage their memberships.
Membership Migration and MemberPress
Since the membership piece was such a big component we started our development process with this as the central effort. The previous tool combined the member information with event ticketing, memberships, and some analytic information. Overall it made management very difficult and didn’t provide a lot of the modern features which were desired. We knew we wanted to move to MemberPress and decouple some of the work from the website. Specifically, we didn’t want to store all of the member details on the site and wanted to leverage a service that would allow for segmented communication.
MemberPress provided a strong start to the membership aspects of the site. It not only allowed for very granular gating of content, it provided several other important tools. First, creating different account types was streamlined. So we can have student memberships, composer memberships, and Library memberships. In fact, there is a MemberPress add-on that provides the ability to provision corporate accounts so multiple users can fall under an organization umbrella. Additionally, MemberPress communicates wonderfully with Active Campaign. This allows for user categorization which communicates directly into the CRM.
A New Look
While development was focused on the membership issues, our design team was focused on the new look for the site. We were fortunate to once again work with Robert Nienhuis at Nien Studios who spearheaded the site’s new design. There were several key templates that we knew were needed and we created a fresh look for the site that really provides some great tools for new visitors who are looking to become members as well as to provide information to existing members. The new member landing page is one of our favorite features of the redesign. Once you login to the new site you really get a snapshot of member services.
Membership Migration and Active Campaign
With design and development underway the project was in solid motion. The other half of the membership migration was the CRM component. Active Campaign provides a platform that scales as your organization grows. We were able to import all of the PMA’s existing contacts and tag them appropriately as we imported them. Now, when the PMA creates a new membership, users data moves automatically to Active Campaign with the correct membership level and tags. This makes communicating with specific member sets incredibly easy.
Improving the Management Process
We didn’t overlook one of the important requests for the project which was to make site management easier. Most of the simplification for this project was in changing out the theme. We stripped all of the CRM functionality out of the theme for the site. We believe that the theme should handle the display of the site and plugins should handle functionality. This step alone put much of the functionality in its own easy to manage place. We also leverage Beaver Builder and populate the site with specific modules that are in use on PMA pages. Adding, changing, and removing content in all of the major types is very fast.
Working with the PMA was a very smooth process; they were very responsive and knew what they wanted. Most importantly, they were very happy with the results and we expect this to turn into more memberships. Membership migration can be relatively easily with some managed steps and is a great way to provide better service for existing customers. If you need any help with membership migration reach out to us today.
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