Manjimup Family Centre

 

What Is The Manjimup Family Centre? 

Manjimup Family Centre is a family and community centre that aims to provide people in their local area with a place to come together, learn, and support one another. It opened its doors in 1978 and has helped countless generations of locals since then. 

They run everything from preschool playgroups to parenting classes, a repair cafe, special interest groups like Leatherworking and Tai Chi groups, and a whole lot more. Due to their various activities, Manjimup Family Centre hosts an insane number of events each year, with over 800 individual events in 2024 alone. 

Since early 2022, Manjimup Family Centre has been using the Member Jungle system to help manage their organisation and massive event load. So, in February of 2025, with their third anniversary with us fast approaching, I caught up with Ruth Phillips, Manjimup Family Centre's manager, to find out how things had been going for them. 

Why Did The Manjimup Family Centre Start Looking For A Better Way To Manage Their Organisation? 

Manjmup Family Centre has existed since the late 1970s and has undergone a fair few changes over the years. A few years ago, it found itself in a position familiar to many clubs and associations: managing its membership via multiple platforms, apps, and systems. 

Ruth Phillips, explained. 

“We had our memberships on pen and paper and kept in the filing cabinet, and then we would use Excel to collect the information for reporting. There was a lot of manual counting and just paper-based record keeping. And then I was using things like Trybooking or Eventbrite, to manage our events,”

“We were chasing up people who hadn't paid their membership, individually by email and by letter,”. 

The centre decided to look for a system that would help consolidate all of their platforms and allow them to manage everything from one location.

“What I was looking for at the time was sort of as complete a solution as we could get, so that I didn't have to keep using six different apps, just, you know, for each different thing, and so that we can move away from paper-based record keeping,” Ruth recalled.

How Did The Manjimup Family Centre Go About Looking For A New System To Help Their Family Centre?

So, armed with the goal of finding one system that would fill all of their needs, Manjimup Family Centre set about looking for one that was right for them. 

Ruth explained what this process involved. 

“When we first started looking for an integrated solution, 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, 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. Member Jungle was the only one that seemed to be targeted at community organisations like ourselves and seemed to fit.” 

“The other thing that I was looking for was a website, so the fact that you're also able to incorporate that into your Member Jungle package, and it's all integrated, was what really attracted me to it, as well as it was also an Australian company”. 

So, the team at Manjimup Family Centre chose Member Jungle and started the setup process in early 2022. Ruth reported that the onboarding process was pretty easy, and it didn’t take them too long to get up and running. 

“There's the video tutorials and all the help pages. The biggest thing that helped, I think, was just being able to ask endless questions. I've always found the support from Member Jungle to be really good, quick and very, very responsive when I've had questions,” Ruth explained. 

How Have Things Changed For Manjimup Family Centre Since Selecting With Member Jungle?

It has been nearly three years since Manjimup Family Centre first joined Member Jungle and in that time they have noticed a lot of benefits with the system and how it helps them in their day to day operations. 

Ruth had this to say about how things have been going. 

“There's loads of good things I could talk about. For example, automatic reminders to pay your memberships. We were sending out emails individually saying that your three-month membership is now due, whereas all that is taken care of automatically now,”

“I think the [Member Jungle] app was probably the biggest surprise because I wasn't specifically looking for an app. But all of our parents say, it's much easier than going onto your browser,” 

“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, ‘my goodness, I've got this program tomorrow and I haven't got many signed up to it.’ I can just send out the notification via the app, and they all get it pinged into their app, and sometimes that just encourages a few late signups for us,”. 

Ruth also talked a bit about how Member Jungle’s constant product releases and developments have helped make the system even better and more useful to them over the years, 

One key example is Member Jungle’s reporting and analytic features. As Manjimup Family Centre is funded by the Department of Communities, it needs to provide the D.O.C. with detailed reporting to show what it is doing with its funding and how it is being spent. When they first signed up with Member Jungle, our reporting system was adequate but not perfect. However, over time, the system has improved and become much more useful and time-saving for them. 

“This is another thing that I like about Member Jungle. I feel like it's not like someone's just written a software package and put it out and it doesn't develop. I feel like it's always developing, and I think that's really important,” Ruth explained. 

Final Thoughts

When I asked Ruth Phillips if she would recommend Member Jungle to an organisation who was considering using our system, this is what she had to say. 

 

“I feel like it's raised the professionalism of our service. I think it's made our lives easier. It has 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,” Ruth Phillips.