Video: The Australian Association Of Voice Actors And Member Jungle

In early 2025, I interviewed Simon Kennedy, the president of the Australian Association Of Voice Actors, to find out about his and his association's experiences using Member Jungle to help run their organisation. 

This is how it went. 

Video Transcript 

“I think if you're an association, you know of over, say, 100 or 200 members, I can't imagine you would want to deal with renewals and that sort of thing manually, and I think it's a no-brainer. The idea of doing that stuff and not having it automated, I don’t even want to think about it.”

 

 

“I'm Simon Kennedy, I'm a voice actor, and I'm the president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors; we call ourselves AAVA. The Australian Association of Voice Actors, AAVA, we set up in the beginning of 2024, and the idea was to create some cohesion and give some advocacy for the voice-acting community.”

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

“So, when we started, everything was basically happening on Google Docs, Google Docs, Google Drive, everything we did was in this sort of share Drive situation. So, we would have a membership application form which was a Google Form, and so all of that information was then going into Google Sheets, and we got to a point where we were sending emails out to members, our membership grew, you know, into hundreds very quickly. And to send emails out it was a lot of cutting and pasting, and we couldn't send it to everyone at once because our email system wouldn't allow that many emails at a time. It became a bit of a manual nightmare.

And then it occurred to us that when everyone's memberships are up in one year, at various times, we're going to have to manually go through and try and renew memberships, and the idea with that was not making me happy, so that's when we went okay we're going to need we're going to need a system here.”

How Did You Go About Looking For A System?

“So, I did a lot of research, the team,  the community that we have, our committee did a lot of research. We were looking at various CRMs from around the world; some came close to doing what we needed, some did some things but not other things, and some were just so expensive. 

And I'm talking like 20 grand a year expensive, and we're like we aren't that big, we don't have those funds. So, we really were looking around, and then Member Jungle was in that list, and provided more of what we needed in one place than anything else.”

What Stood Out About Member Jungle?

“The things we were looking for were automatic renewals of memberships, being able to stay in contact with the members and send emails out, providing you know member-only portals within our website so that we could have a walled-off section just for members. 

So, those are some things we were looking at, and when we started researching, Member Jungle seemed to be the only one that would do all of those things and do them all for a price that was acceptable for our membership. I mean we could have used someone else but every single membership fee would have paid for managing the membership; so it was absolutely out of the question, it was out of the question. 

So, Member Jungle was just one of the many CRMs, and because it specialised in members it just seemed to fit.”

How Was The Onboarding Process At Member Jungle?

“Signing up was easy, it was very simple and I have found that when I've had a bit of a question something a bit technical and I've thrown it at the [Member Jungle] team they've been pretty helpful in getting back [to me]. 

And I think for us, having the support in Australia is actually great because of the time zones. You know we deal with time zones a lot in our business, and no one likes it. You have to wait a day to hear back, or you know what, something depending on what's going on. So,  it's good it's good for us knowing that we actually have something that's local, and I quite frankly, like supporting an Australian product. I mean, we are the Australian Association of Voice Actors, after all.

So, all of our member data was sitting in Google Sheets because our membership form had been a Google form previously, so that wasn't too tricky. There was a little bit of, I made a couple of mistakes, but they weren't mistakes. I couldn't walk back. So, I could go through and import things again, so that system was pretty well explained. And the Member Jungle guys were definitely helpful, along the way as well. 

But yeah,  I was actually surprised at how easy that was, and then when I saw all of the members in the system, you know, with their member numbers, and I was like oh it's, it worked.”

How Has It Been Running Your Association With Member Jungle?

“Yeah, so events are something that we use quite a lot because we have, generally, at least one webinar every month that we like people to register for. So, doing that, we’ve become better at that,  or I should say I've become better at it is I haven't shared the duties much yet. But, yeah I found that to be great. 

And the system where you set up an event, people register for  the event, and you can set up automatic email so that maybe a week before or a day before they get a reminder. The email - you know you could send out the Zoom link or the address for whatever event you're doing in the automatic emails and that sort of stuff. So, that's been really great.

And ticketing as well, we actually realised that, we offer free events and webinars for our members because that's part of their membership, but there are people who aren't members who maybe take interest in some of the webinars we do. So, we have a ticket price for non-members, and there have been few occasions where people have taken that up. So, the ticketing system has been great; it's actually added a little bit of extra revenue as well.”

Would You Recommend Member Jungle To Other Associations? 

“Yeah, I would. I'd recommend Member Jumble because the price point is good, especially, you know, small to medium associations and so forth. 

I think there's other products out there, but they are just not affordable, and I think yeah, I think one thing an association or a club doesn't want to do is spend most of their membership revenue on managing the membership; that just seems ridiculous. So for us, that was a massive thing, the price point as well as the functionality, so yeah. 

I guess the price point says to me that Member Jungle understands who the people are that are using it.”