Discussion: Club Membership

I am working on the OUSA membership database and some questions are arising as we decide how to treat the data in an extensible manner. I would like to get feedback from clubs on how they do things.

Does your club require family memberships to share a physical address?

If not, does your club collect and use more than one physical address per family membership?

Similarly, for group memberships (e.g. schools, BSA troops, JROTC units), do you store and use more than one address?

EMPO -- family memberships share the same physical address. We haven't had requests for a group membership in quite awhile, but I think we'd only keep one physical address for such a group.

HVO -- We only utilize one address per membership, regardless of type, and only send (paper) mail to that address. As for where additional family members live, we don't care.

For RMOC:

We collect address data on our membership form (even though we haven't snail-mailed anything to members in years), and we don't have any members who've tried to use different addresses for various members of a family. (RMOC doesn't have a strict rule about family members having to be in the same household, as far as I know, and it hasn't ever come up in the past few years.)

For group memberships, we only create one record for the group leader / main contact. We give our member discount to all students / juniors, so we don't have a need to track each individual member of the class, troop, etc. (which would be difficult, anyway, since they change a lot).

I assume you already have a system in place to identify all members of the same family membership, but here's what we do (just FYI): every record in the membership table has a Member_ID and a Subscriber_ID. I assign the Subscriber_ID as the person in the family who's the most frequent attendee at our meets, and the IDs are just their names concatenated together (probably not the best practice from a database design perspective, but it's much easier than having to look up ID numbers anytime I need someone's Member_ID.) For example:

Subscriber_ID	Member_ID
CarolSmith	CarolSmith
CarolSmith	MarkSmith
CarolSmith	MeganSmith
CarolSmith	AaronSmith

OCIN. Ditto to HVO. Our newsletter is entirely email although we tried for a while to print and send copies to those members without email, that process tended to break down. Unfortunately there are still a few members wIthout email out there and we do a poor job staying connected with them.

OCIN is discussing moving to a memberless system... Anyone who requests would get our email. Member and nonmember rates would merge. I'm not sure I like the idea but several of our board members are real gung-ho for it. At the risk of hijacking this thread, anybody have any thoughts about that idea?

VOC has been operating with a system approximating a memberless system for a while now, and it seems to work fine for a small club where things can be settled informally. My experience with larger clubs is that they need more structure.

I don't understand your last sentence. What would the problem be with larger clubs?

If all the club offers its members is discounted local meet fees, maybe it's not worth the effort to maintain. But it is far nicer to be a part of a club that offers real benefits and club feel. Worth trying to do that before going the other way.