Video: Island Cruising Case Study

I inherited the island cruising website when I purchased the business back in 2021 and it was a site that had been set up by the former owners. And was working reasonably well for them with the limited number of people that they had on board. They had a slightly different format to me they wanted to kind of approve all the members before they came through, so that created quite a manual process, but as we grew quite considerably throughout the time I  found that I was spending a lot of time manually processing members sending out invoices and then adding them to various mailing lists and checking that their payments and things had come through and I realised I needed a more of an automated process to sort of help streamline things ‘cause I'm a one-man band so I need to be able to sort of automate some of my systems and processes. 

 

 

So John had already set up a Member Jungle site, and when I was going through the purchase of the business with him, he showed me all the great features that Member Jungle had in terms of the membership signups and renewals and the automated emails and things that go out. I realised that that was going to save me a lot of time and administration at my end, so I decided that I was going to set up my own Member Jungle site for Island cruising whether or not I purchased down under Rally or not, and that obviously all came together in the end

What Made You Choose Member Jungle? 

So, I think the Member Jungle platform really just had a lot of the systems that I wanted already built in as the feature. And on talking to John when I was going through the Down Under rally purchase, he said that he had done quite a lot of research himself going through the process when he set up his page. So, I didn't spend too much time shopping around I figured that he had already done a lot of that work for me and uh and what he showed me I thought looked really, really good, so I thought I'm just going to go straight away with that. 

So, now I'm working on combining both the island cruising and down under memberships and things onto one page, and uh, also, both websites that we've got will all come together in the Member Jungle system, so it's a One-Stop shop. It's a seamless offering for me, and it certainly saves me time, energy, and effort by having it all in one place, so I'm really enjoying using it so far. 

How Has It Been Going So Far?

I was really impressed with the support that Renee gave me and I'm pleased that I paid the extra to have her help me get things set up from the outset and the way that I wanted it. There are a few complicated little idiosyncrasies with the various different groups that I've got and different tiers of membership and the rallies and things that we run, so having her guidance there to get that back-end sorted nicely and give me some tips on how to transfer my content over which I did manually myself most of it, and she did all the more complicated side of things that I wasn't able to work out myself so it was definitely worthwhile getting some help with that process.

In terms of the processing of memberships, new signups and renewals has been a lot easier for me in terms of not having to manually kind of reconcile transactions on the bank statement because people just pay automatically by credit card. So, I don't need to kind of be trying to match payments with memberships and things like that which is a huge time saving. 

I also had different sorts of databases. I was using Brevo, which is like a company to send out my emails from, but I'm going to just change that all over to be in the one place being sent from Member jungle now. So being able to not have to add people to different places or you know, update different databases and things and having it all in one spot has definitely already saved me quite a bit of time for sure. 

I didn't have an online shop on my previous website, so I'm quite enjoying getting some things set up through the online shop and working my way through how that might work going forward. Because I sort of sell items on behalf of other businesses like cruising guides and training things that sort of stuff. So, I'm looking forward to promoting that a little bit a little bit more. Having all of the ability to send emails from the website as well is a really good option for me so it enables me to keep track of all the people that are current. So, I'm not having to try and update databases individually and that kind of stuff so yeah it's good. 

I also like having the ability to load documents onto the document library and segregate that to the people that are able to access that content so the Pacific Rally people are are only able to see the content that relates to them, so that's a really good benefit for me being able to have resources specifically set out for the people that are signed up for various different events so yeah it's good. 

What Would You Say To Someone Thinking About Signing Up With Member Jungle?

I would say definitely give it a shot, it's been a positive process for me with the transition. I've really enjoyed the help that I got, sort of first of all just sort of showing me the features and benefits and Rene's support with getting everything set up. That's been amazing. Yeah so I'm really looking forward to sort of actively using all of the different features that the website's got and uh yeah, getting a bit more familiar with it myself it's it's something I'm really happy with so far so yeah thanks for the opportunity.