Video: Manjimup Family Centre And Member Jungle

Transcript

“I feel like it's raised the professionalism of our service. I think it's made our lives easier, it's saved us time, and it allows for a lot of integration of all of the things that we need. So, I think it is really well worth considering Member Jungle.”

 

 

“So, we are, we're obviously a family center, we're funded by the Department of Communities, and our sort of overarching brief is to foster connection and participation in the community, by our community members.  

We have a primary focus on families, so we run lots of activities where families can be involved together, primarily with under school age children. So, we do lots of playgroups, we do programs like a cooking program for three-year-olds, and then we do parenting courses as well; so we'll run programs like Circle Of Security or Tuning Into Kids or Protective Behaviors, which are designed to upskill parents. 

On a wider level, looking at the wider community, we run just any community… any programs that will help people to connect. So, for example, we run the Repair Cafe, if you've heard of repair cafes, where people come and bring their fix broken stuff, and we have volunteers who fix it up for them, and they have a cup of tea together and all that kind of thing. And it's just yeah, encouraging connection, and then we've got interest groups like leather work and Tai Chi, we have a Lego club for school-age children, really trying to follow interests in town and enable people to connect.”

Why Did You Start Looking For A Better Way To Run Your Organisation? 

“So, our memberships we took on pen and paper and kept in the filing cabinet and then we would use Excel to collect information for reporting. There was a lot of manual counting, and you know, just paper-based recordkeeping. And then I was using things like Try Booking or Eventbrite, things like that, to manage our events. We were chasing up, you know, when people hadn't paid their memberships, we were chasing that up individually by email and by letter.”

Why Did You Choose Member Jungle To Help Run Your Organisation?

“So what I was looking for at the time was a sort of, as complete a solution as we could. So, that I didn't have to keep using, you know, six different apps. Just, you know one for each different thing, and so that we could move away from paper-based stuff. 

We did, when the old manager was here, we did actually commission a small company to try and write us the software, but it was too big a job from scratch. They did it, but it didn't really provide us the solution that we wanted. So I looked at quite a few different client management software packages and things like that, but a lot of them were much more sales-based so it felt like they weren't really written with what we needed in mind. And Member Jungle really was the only one that seemed to be targeted at community organisations like ourselves and seemed to fit that whole, you know seem to tick a lot of the boxes.” 

How Has Member Jungle Improved Since You Started Using It?

“This is another thing that I like about Member Jungle is I feel like it's not like someone's just written a software package and put it out, and then it’s going and it doesn't develop. I feel like it's always in development, and I think that's really important. So, I had sort of come across from Eventbrite and you know other apps like that, and within the events module in Member Jungle, it wasn't quite as…  it didn't work as well for us, you know.

And mainly because it didn't have the recurring event, so every time, like we have Monday playgroups that run for 40 weeks a year. And I would have to go in and clone each one individually, and then I'd have to do Tuesday playgroups, and then I'd have to do Wednesday playgroups, and then I'd have to do Little Chefs that goes every Wednesday.

And it was really, really time-consuming and really, really boring to be honest. It was very, so that was yeah, so I requested recurring events through the you know, request feature. 

It's fantastic, and you know I have suggested, I think, just one tweak that I would really like to see in there. But generally it’s really great because I've now programmed to the end of the year. And I can do it in one big hit, and then if I just want to change one thing about one of those events, I can change it for the whole year instead of having to go back into each every single event and just change you know. Yeah, absolutely loving it,  I'm so grateful that they have done that because it's helped us no end.” 

Have there been any surprise benefits to Member Jungle?

“I think the app was probably the biggest surprise because when I hadn't really, you know, all other things I was specifically looking for, I wasn't specifically looking for an app. But all of our parents say once we get them to download it and use it it's much easier than going onto your browser and doing stuff. 

Then you've got that little feature where you can send notifications out via the app, so for example, if I've been late with my marketing and I just think "Oh my goodness I've got this program tomorrow and I haven't got many signed up to it." I can just send out the little notification via the app and they all get it pinged into their app and sometimes that just encourages a few late signups.

For us, so I think that's probably been the most (surprising benefit). There's loads of good things I could talk about some of them I expected so for example automatic reminders to pay your memberships, I kind of knew that was going to be a feature it was one I really really wanted so that's been great but I kind of knew about it so it wasn't a surprise; whereas the the usefulness of the app and the ease of use that the parents find has been a good surprise.”