JOY Media is Australia’s LGBTIQA+ independent media organisation, made up of the diverse voices of the rainbow. Based in Melbourne, Australia, the JOY team consists of a small paid staff and a large volunteer cohort who together bring news, music, information and entertainment 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.

Challenges

Membership and donor data was held in a ‘flat file’ database, the payment side for each transaction was handled manually. This required six tiers of manual processing:

• Eftpos manual capture, plus cash, cheque and money orders
• Check database, add person if require
• Update membership fields manually
• Update donor fields manually
• Export data to create Confirmation letters
• Export data to create Renewal Reminder letters

“Reporting historical data was almost impossible. For end of year data, processing of all transactions had to be completed before relevant data could be exported.”

Solution

JOY Media implemented Payments2Us with membership and event management modules and customised their Salesforce fields to cater for the specific requirements of their membership, rules, process order and approval requirements.

The processes were automated from online checkout forms, receipt and confirmation letter delivery plus the automation of renewal reminders with 1st and 2nd reminders flowing based on workflows.

Features that were appreciated included:

• the automation of workflows that updated field data, eg. when a Membership Record is processed with a payment
• the automation of triggers and alerts to remind Admin that something may not be quite right.
• the ability to have recurring payments for donations and memberships.

Prior to implementing the project, there was the opportunity to review all the current fields, create new fields to make full use of the automation steps to come, and importantly to clean-up the data so as to only import clean records to Salesforce.

We can now process transactions for Training Courses, Events and Ticketing.

Results

The end to end process (previously all manual steps) has gone from 20mins per transaction to zero.

One person would spend the whole day processing memberships and donations, input to a flat-file database, issuing receipts and letters. The automation of the end to end process has meant we can do the administration of the whole process in 30 minutes a day.

The support we receive from Payments2Us is first class, as is the knowledge and experience present to create payment system solutions that work.

Importantly, we can accurately report on statistics and revenue in real time.

Although the membership officer in our NFP organisation is a volunteer role, if it was a paid role the saving would equate to 0.9FTE.