It is amazing when I look back at how much our organization has grown in the past 10 years. I recall the meetings having attendance of 30-40 persons, and quickly escalating to 80-90, and now we regularly have 120-140 person at each meeting.  In total we have over 300 active members.  This growth speaks both to the community interest in beekeeping and to our group finding the right combination of speakers, topics, education, and support to be considered valuable to its members.

With this growth your board of directors recognized we needed a better solution than just a spreadsheet to manage the membership.  So, let this be the first formal announcement that we have chosen and are implementing a web based membership software with a target to be functioning in just a week or two.  We are very excited about many of the features and advantages it will offer our membership.  Three items that I think are of particular interest are:

• Members can manage their own contact information (phone, fax, email, etc) and designate if other members can see their contact information (membership directory)
• A document library that will contain an archive of the last few years of our newsletters, lots of “how-to” documents including recipes and instructions for candy boards and things like queen introducing steps.  There is also a folder for club documents, and board meeting minutes. You can look up current or older documents and download them, or just read them online.
• Easy membership renewal process, and something I am happy about, easier record management for Class and Bee Buzz Registrations.

This is a very versatile package that allows members to manage their own accounts, yet still provides our membership manager Caroline Johnson the ability to assist you in whatever you need to do.  An email welcome letter will be sent as an introduction in the near future, and we will have an introduction flyer available at the November meeting.

I am excited about this change as I see it as a further opportunity to better serve this group in ways that we either just couldn’t do before, or was a complicated, error prone process. Stay tuned for more information as we move forward with this feature rich web based application.

Thanks for being a part of our group, and I’ll see you at the next meeting!

Dane