Easy Member Check-In Software For Your Club

I vividly remember every time we went on a school excursion. The teacher would count us onto or off the bus to ensure they hadn't lost anyone. There would always be at least one little rat who would say random numbers in an attempt to trip up the teacher and make them restart the count. If I were those teachers, I know exactly what I’d have wanted to do in return. 

 

But you can’t do that to kids now, so that’s just one of the many, many reasons I didn’t become a teacher. 

My point is that merely tallying event attendees or jotting down their names on a clipboard when they arrive are unreliable methods of tracking event participation. They leave a lot of room for human error, miscounts, and recounts and make examining how events went after the fact trickier. 

What if I told you there was a much easier, more efficient, and foolproof way to check your members into your club or association's events? I'm sure you’d say, “it’s about time. We can have whole concerts performed by the holograms of dead people, yet we can’t check 100 people into a car show without a sharpie.” 

For those who don’t know, hologram concerts are 100% a thing now, and morally dubious concerns of using the voice and images of dead people to perform shows aside, it is remarkable technology. 
 

 

That’s a picture of a hologram of Buddy Holly “performing” “live” on stage in 2019. 

Well, today, we will look at one piece of technology that can make checking your members into events a breeze and involves zero holograms of dead singers. That’s an editorial promise. 

Digital Membership Cards For Easy Member Check-In

Digital membership cards are just like regular plastic membership cards, except they are cheaper, can’t get lost, are automatically updated for free, don't need to be printed out or posted, and have never choked a turtle. Plus, most notably for our purposes today, you can easily check members into your club events with them.

 

 

Let me explain, customers who use the Member Jungle membership management system will get free access to our custom digital membership cards and our integrated mobile app. These can be used together to allow you to easily check in your members at events. 

The process is super simple, so let me run you through it now. 

How To Easily Manage Member Check-In For Club Events

First, when someone signs up to join your club, their digital membership card will be auto generated with their member number, expiry date, custom QR code, barcode and membership level, if applicable. Your members will be able to access their digital membership cards from either the integrated Member Jungle mobile app or from their Apple or Google Wallets on their smartphones. 

 

    

 

The barcodes and QR codes are where the magic happens. These codes can be scanned by POS systems, but more importantly, for our purposes today, they can also be scanned by in the mobile app using your device camera.

This means that when your members arrive at any event that they have registered to attend, instead of standing at the door with a clipboard or trying to do a head count like my long-suffering former teachers, all you need is the Member Jungle mobile app on your phone. 

With this, whoever is taking attendance simply needs to open the scanner built into the Member Jungle App and scan the digital membership cards or digital event tickets of members who are attending. It’s that simple. Your members just need to show their membership card or ticket on their phone, your admin just needs to scan it with their phone, and the Member Jungle system does the rest. If it’s a free event, scanning a member card will register the member and mark them as attended, without the member having to do anything. 

 

 

Once the membership card is scanned, the Member Jungle system will log that member or ticket holder as having attended. This means that your attendance records will be stored in your system so you can review them after the event. 

Member Check-In Tools After The Event

After your event is over, you can log into your Member Jungle system to thoroughly analyse every aspect of the event. You'll have precise records of who attended, when they were there, and whether they made any purchases during the event. This information will be available in your admin area for your administrators to review, and it will also be stored on individual members' profiles. This will allow you to see how specific members engage with your club and provide them with a record of all the club events they have attended.

Later, you can review your events to evaluate attendance and engagement levels. This will make it easier for you to assess the success of your club's events and identify any that may need improvement. This is much more effective than relying on hastily written names on a clipboard. 

 

This is just a demonstration event, but you can see which tickets people bought, whether they attended or not, and if they received any attendance certificates. You can also refine your search by the ticket types they purchased, cancelled registrations, and more. Plus, you can email your attendees directly to ask how they found the event and request feedback.

This information is also stored on members’ profiles, which makes gauging the attendance of particular members much easier.

Here is an example of this. 

 

 

As you can see from that screenshot, you can track not only their event attendance but also their overall club engagement, purchases, courses, CPD progress, payments, permissions, and more, but that’s a story for another day. 

If you want more information on how engagement tracking works with Member Jungle, have a look at Measuring Member Engagement. 

For some tips on keeping your members engaged, see How Do I Keep My Members Engaged?

The truth is I could shout until I’m blue in the face about how useful this is, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as impactful as hearing from someone who uses Member Jungle to help run their club. Therefore, here is a snippet of my interview with Kali Germein, the SYP Historic Vehicle Club’s Secretary and Treasurer. 

"After the event, we were able to filter down the searches, and we could say Saturday night, "Was that successful for us?" We had X amount for dinner, and then I could go back to my other books and say, well, dinner cost us this much, but we made this much back. So let's keep Saturday night as it is obviously a good fundraiser for the club. And then there were other things like we might need to change accommodation costs because we're losing on it,"

"So I don't think that the rally for us as an event has been pulled apart and analysed like it was this year," 

"This year, we could identify if we needed more volunteers for one thing, or if we could do another thing ourselves, we would save money. It really was the whole shebang. If there were any questions from the committee, like "what did Tuesday night cost us?" I could just say here, this is what it cost. Straight away, I could just pull up whatever they wanted to know."

You can read the whole interview with Kali at Customer Story - SYP Historic Vehicle Club.

How To Start Managing Member Check-Ins Easily 

So that was how you can use the Member Jungle system to make organising event check-ins much easier than the old-fashioned pen-and-paper method.  

If you’re currently saying, “well that's all well and good but what the bloody hell is Member Jungle anyway?” then I'd suggest checking out What Is Membership Management Software For Nonprofits? - All Your Questions Answered. 
If you want more information on the Member Jungle app itself, have a peep at A Club App To Help Your Club Or Association Thrive.