Why Your Club Desperately Needs More Than One System Administrator

If there is one thing we can learn from musicians, it is that striking out on your own is hard. So often, we see a member of a successful band try to go solo, and it goes terribly. Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, and Dave Grohl were all once part of very successful bands, and they’ve had awful solo careers.

I know what you are going to say. Dave Grohl’s career has been extremely successful post-Nirvana, and I have to admit that's technically true, but it's also been absolutely awful to listen to.

The reason I bring this up is that, just like JC Chasez leaving NSYNC, it can be really hard to go solo. At Member Jungle, we have worked with a lot of clubs and associations over the past decade, and one common problem we see crop up time and time again is clubs that only have one administrator in charge of way too much of their organisation. This can and does cause massive problems for an organisation when something eventually happens to this one person.

Why Your Membership Organisation Needs Multiple Admins

This article outlines the risks of relying on a single system administrator and the immediate steps your committee should take to protect itself. You will learn:

• The Bus Factor: Why relying on a single dedicated volunteer is a massive risk to your club's survival.
• Preventing Burnout: How sharing the digital workload across your committee keeps your main administrator from burning out and quitting.
• Role-Based Access: How to safely divide administrative tasks without giving everyone the keys to the club's bank accounts.
• Immediate Training: How to get your backup administrators trained up today using Member Jungle's dedicated support team.

The Bus Factor: The Danger Of A Single Admin

If you're not acquainted with it, the bus factor is a tech phrase that asks the question, if the person in charge of this project were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, how much trouble would it be in? Basically, are you AC/DC or Joy Division, able to overcome the death of your lead singer and able to carry on making great music with little more than a name change? Or are you Queen or the Doors, dead in the water when the star is gone? If your club's administrator were to suddenly quit, go missing, or die, would your club be able to keep going? Or would all the logins for your email system, website, bank accounts, and more be lost with them?

We've seen this happen a lot over the years; one dedicated volunteer manages everything: they build the website, manage the spreadsheets, find a membership management system, and onboard it all themselves. They may get others to help out, but they are the linchpin of the whole operation. Everyone else on the committee breathes a sigh of relief and happily steps back, letting this one person effortlessly run everything. Everything works smoothly until the moment that the volunteer gets sick, moves away, quits, or misjudges the bus's speed when crossing the road.

When that sole administrator vanishes, the remaining committee members are left entirely in the dark, which usually leads to one of two outcomes.

In the first scenario, the departing volunteer was doing everything on their own computer, using disconnected systems that no one else had access to. The remaining committee is forced to rebuild from scratch, which is often when they realise they need to adopt a secure, cloud-based software system so they are never left that vulnerable again.

In the second scenario, the club already has a great membership system in place, but the sole administrator has never trained anyone else to use it. The new committee inherits a platform they do not understand, panics, and makes the mistake of cancelling the subscription. They throw out a perfectly good system and go right back to manual paperwork, destroying years of hard work simply because they did not have a second person trained on the basics.

Both of these stressful situations can be completely avoided by ensuring the digital workload is shared and that your club always has a backup administrator.

Sharing The Stage To Prevent Volunteer Burnout

The key to keeping your organisation running smoothly in the long term is to have more than one administrator with their hands on the wheel. It’s why planes have co-pilots, and why the bands that survived their lead singer's departure were the ones with multiple songwriters and creative leaders in the group. If one person holds all the keys to the kingdom, you’re screwed without them; if two or three people have keys, then you’re effectively bulletproof.

It doesn’t really matter whether you are using a collection of disparate systems, have just joined a membership management system, or have been using one for years; you need to take a step back and inventory who has access to your system. 

Ideally, you want at least two main administrators who have full access to your system. You should also have several other admins with limited access to parts of the system, to help spread the workload. I am definitely not telling you to give half a dozen people full access to your club’s bank accounts. Modern systems like Member Jungle allow you to grant specific permissions based on what a volunteer actually needs to do, meaning you can easily divide up the workload without giving people too much access. For a complete guide on exactly how to set up these roles, have a read of Don’t Let Your Committee Get Lost In The Jungle: A Guide To Member Jungle Committee Access. 

The goal of all this is to share the administrative burden across the committee without compromising security. By training at least two other committee members on the basics of the system, you ensure your primary admin can actually take a well-deserved holiday, step away during a busy week at work, or simply get sick without the entire organisation grinding to a halt. 

Get Your Backup Admins Trained Today

You absolutely should not wait until you are ready to step down from the club to start thinking about getting more people trained up. The best time to bring a second or third administrator on board is right now. If you are just starting your journey with Member Jungle, you need to get other committee members involved immediately.

Getting them involved early means you are not the only one who understands how the new software works. It stops you from becoming the single point of failure right out of the gate and ensures you are not left carrying the entire digital workload by yourself.

You don’t even have to train your new admins yourself; Member Jungle offers free and paid training, including dedicated Committee Training. You can easily book a session for your committee, and our team will show them the ropes. We will walk them through exactly how to use the platform so they can hit the ground running.

All you need to do is add them to the system, set their role-based permissions, and book them in for a training session. Your future self will be incredibly grateful that you did.

How To Protect Your Club With Multiple Administrators

Before you close this tab and get back to running your club, keep these core takeaways in mind.

• Eliminate the single point of failure: Add at least two other committee members to your system right from the very start.
• Share the digital load: Use role-based permissions to safely delegate specific tasks and prevent your volunteers from burning out.
• Utilise Committee Training: Book your backup admins into a Member Jungle training session so you do not have to teach them the system yourself.
• Future-proof your organisation: Sharing the workload guarantees your club will keep running smoothly even if you need to take a sudden, well-deserved break.

Future Proof Your System

Ultimately, bringing more admins on board and getting them up and running with the system will make every part of your club more stable for the long term. Taking the time to set up more administrators today guarantees your organisation can easily survive unexpected changes without skipping a beat. 

For a look at what types of training Member Jungle offers, have a look at Why Member Jungle’s Online Training Is Important

And to check out how to set up different permissions for your volunteers, read Don’t Let Your Committee Get Lost In The Jungle: A Guide To Member Jungle Committee Access.