3 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] thread
Hello,

I have been working (on and off for the last 2 months) on a member management system called Jonze. It allows campus orgs better manage their member data such as attendance to surveys to membership dues.

For the past 2 years, I was the "technical director" of the African Student Union (ASU) at our school (UTD). Majority of my work came down to managing member information like participation and payment. Two things I observed:

1. Event Attendance. Most orgs would use Google Forms, generate a QR Code and keep the data in some google sheet. However, 9 times out of 10, nobody did anything with that data because God help you that you want to find out who your active members are. And on the members side, they are asked for the same information every time they try to mark their attendance which can increase drop off.

2. Membership dues. A treasurer would have to sometimes do near "investigative journalism" by going through CashApp, Zelle, Venmo to know if someone was a paid member. This hurdle can limit the frequency of offerings to paid members. This is an unnecessary administrative burden.

Jonze solves this issue through an admin dashboard where organization officers can have elevated privileges to

1. Create events that automatically have an attendance link and downloadable QR Code. (Plans for syncing with Google Calendar, Instagram posts, GroupMe announcements and LinkedIn coming soon).

2. Create custom forms for member sign up, general surveys, and attendance

3. Create plans to segment users into tiers. (Such as Regular, Paid, Alumni). As well as managed membership payments to automatically switch user tiers with Stripe

None of these are features sent from the heavens :). You really could do them in Excel if you tried hard enough. They are just better things to spend time on in an org.

There's more detail on the blog post. https://jonze.co/blog/launch

If you have an questions, ask away :).

I love the concept and the execution, however I would encourage you to think bigger – as an undergrad there were tons of problems I tried to solve in my microcosm of the world on campus. Those problems exist on other campuses, sure, but there are much bigger opportunities outside (e.g. the nonprofit space, professional organizations, etc.). Membership management is a crowded space so think about how you differentiate.
Thank you for the advice. I just wanted to start off small but I see where you are coming from. I'll broaden the scope and talk to other kinds of orgs for the next iteration of it. Again, I appreciate the advice