IYC - Managing Yacht Club Memberships at Scale - HD 1080p

7:24PM Nov 29, 2022

Speakers:

Ros de Vries

Patti Mangan

Prov Dhawan

Eric Korbas

Eileen Zedd

Keywords:

membership

member

people

yacht club

zapier

racing

weebly

clubhouse

club

software

space

update

create

instance

bit

campaign

monitor

year

called

island

I did want to just talk a little bit about Island Yacht Club for the benefit of people that may have just come here recently,

or may have been like, Okay, well, I we know that there were big change happened in terms of the digital side. Where did that come from? Why do we want this project to revamp the website, email newsletters and all that good stuff. So, just quick bit of history here. Once upon a time, we had a clubhouse and life was wonderful. That said, you know, as I mentioned before, on your club is 52 years old. Now, as of this year, it's been through a lot of peaks and troughs, it's been a bit of a roller coaster, the impression I get, there's a really cool pamphlet, by the way, called on my watch, I'm known as a couple of copies floating around, but I'll make sure that I loan you a copy or at least put one in our shed or something like that. So that you guys can get a bit of a sense for the trials and tribulations of the club when it had a clubhouse. So one thing to keep in mind is that, you know, you get a lot of the older like the members, I'm gonna say older members, but that long reflection on their age, it's more reflection on their tenure. That, you know, a really begging for clubhouse life. You know, and I have to admit, many things were much easier when we had a clubhouse, however, you know, the membership did expand and contract and expand and contract and they'll good years and bad years. And, you know, it was one of those things where, at the end of the day, I think we could keep a lot of what was happening in the club running. Because when you have people in a con house, you've always got people that you could sort of pull aside and say, Hey, can you sit down and stuff envelopes for me? Hey, can you help sign membership cards? Hey, can you do this thing. And so you know what an example of like one of those mass events that you kind of really need a clubhouse for is something like the crab feed, which is what I've pictured here, that would be a multi day preparation with many, many volunteers involved. And as someone who was involved in to crab feeds, a lot of it was just being in the clubhouse. And someone basically putting a mop in your hand and saying going good for gold, you know, absolutely go for gold. So, you know, that is a model of community in its own right, the fact that you know, people are just sort of there. And, you know, we all are committed to making the club happen. But you know, a lot of it is just us being there, not necessarily signing up for something specific a role specifically. And we'll talk about that in just a second. The other thing to note is that, you know, I mentioned a a clubhouse. A clubhouse is a good prospect if you're all based in Alameda or somewhere relatively close by as well. So, you know, membership was very SF Bay Area and Alameda centric. And, you know, for a good 50 years, like, Yes, there'll be people that would say that, hey, we're coming in from a window or San Carlos, well, you guys are still very much, you know, centered around a clubhouse as such, none of you guys are coming from Los Angeles or Alaska or anything like that. And, you know, by all means, this is this is I mentioned this in particular because this is a sort of where we still get a lot of unknowns from including the idea of having the membership by calendar year. It's it's around this idea that we're a community where we all gather together. Again, it had its trials and tribulations but you know, something kept going obviously for 50 years. So as you might know, our Clubhouse was very much well, our existence was very much time to being Alameda Marina. Rena, it still is we still have style racing. They're terrific place. You know, and of course it's our desire to stay elevate You're centric. However, now, we do have to have a more distributed model. On the upside, it means that we don't necessarily have to be centered on Alameda specifically. You know, we're still running many of the same programs as we did before. But we have people who have their residential addresses being forced into the Pacific. So in Hawaii, somewhere who, and then we also have people who are residing down in Mexico who are part of island Yacht Club, and then we have people on the East Coast. And, you know, a lot of that is, is pretty epic, it's, it's due to the fact that we've now had to transition to a model, which is very much online, it's as a result much more affordable. And therefore, you know, we've managed to attract a very different, much more diverse membership than we had previously. The thing is, people do come to yacht clubs, because they are looking for a sense of connection. And without a clubhouse, we, you know, have had to at least think that through, you know, quite significantly, how do we create these gatherings, you know, without having necessarily a physical location. And, you know, a lot of the genesis for us pouring a lot of cycles into thinking about this problem came from basically having to face this issue. During the pandemic, when we close up shop at the clubhouse, we also had the onset of COVID, in 2020. You know, at that time, a lot of clubs, literally just went on ice, they just paused and many stayed that way for two years, you know, that didn't make people sense, want to have a connection go away. So, you know, Island yacht club started during things like webinars where we could actually get together like this and have a round of introductions and then talk about something we're passionate about something, you know, sailing, you know, that was really how we sustained things for 2020 2021. The kind of cool side effect was that of that was that these were events of resume, they were things that, you know, people could sign up for fairly easily, we could promote them very easily on Facebook as well. And so, you know, we were able to really drive the sense of connection and create the sense of community right, by, you know, creating these events that people could log into remotely, and be part of, without necessarily having to go to a physical location. And so, you know, things really did snowballed from there. Now, it seems that, you know, in a way, like, we've had to evolve very, very quickly, because, you know, it's impossible now, it's physically impossible to issue. Even things like membership cards, the way that we used to, I still have my iyc membership card from 2020. And that, you know, was issued, it was like a laminated card, a piece of cardboard, that was had my name hadn't written on it, and somebody signature on it. And that might have been easy to do when I went to a clubhouse, or maybe there were just a couple of members. But I remember when I first took over memberships, and we had just started this digital model, and people that started joining the club, by signing up, I had something like, I just let it pile up for a while. And all of a sudden, I had this prospect where I had like 36, membership cards to issue. And I had terrible penmanship. And, you know, all of a sudden, I had to, like cut these templates, and write names, and started using the printer. And but I was still cutting things manually, and any which way. I mean, in the last month, we have issued 83 membership cards. And the only way we've been able to do that is by really just sort of having to rethink this process entirely. So that's why we come to here. And now. I'm going to pause for a second before I go into talking about the software stuff at all the techie stuff. Does anybody have any questions about where Island Yacht Club has come and the site in particular, I mean, why we've had to evolve like we have.

I have one question for you, I think. Would you say that since what January 2020, in your membership has in terms of now now that we're in 2022, that your membership has regained where it was grown exponentially? I A decreased what is happening before pre pandemic to now.

grown exponentially is the closest thing I could I could describe it by. So when we started the beginning of the pandemic, we had 18 paying members. And that was still the one we were pre everything I'm going to show you here, like we're very much in this model where it was like, well, $100 a year to have access to a clubhouse. And then we realized very quickly that $400 wasn't going to fly for digital club. So but there was a, there was a period where we entered the year, and people had paid $400. And only 18 people did that. Yeah. So now nor think about 273. If I look at member space, for this calendar year, and we're rolling into the new calendar year, so far, about 83 people have renewed for 2023. And we haven't even really started to do the membership drive side of things. Yeah. Any other questions? All right,

you really have a different you really have a different dynamic than a lot of others. You've lost your house. Yes,

yeah. Yes. But you know, I would like to, you know, they've been complex San Jose sailing club who have been doing this for a lot longer than us very much the paper club, but still very much rooted in doing activities like cruise outs in the same way as we do racing. You know, very much the things that physical clubs pride themselves on, but take him to a setting where you know, without a clubhouse or necessarily a centralized model. We still made the things work. But we have to do things very differently, obviously. All right. So I'm going to just do a quick a quick review, though. I mean, before we started talking about how it all works with data and all that kind of thing. I just wanted to cap off the sort of introduction to Island Yacht Club side of things by sharing with you the member survey that Prov did recently, I just wanted to share a couple of factoids with you. Because I think it's it's best to have our membership speak to why they're with the club. So first of all, this is just I'm very happy to say that people overall seem very happy with the way things are going and island Yacht Club are super, super happy with that. But I think what the killer, you know, slide here is, you know, why two people join iyc. And I think, you know, the the $50 a year up to this point has obviously been very, very effective it is the number one reason why people come to the club is because it is affordable. You know, after that, and by the way, I will note that our membership fee is going up to $65, starting January one. So one of the things we do have to do, as a club is before the end of the month, you know, send out an email and say, hey, well, I know we've been telling you about this for months now. But we formally have to tell you that we're raising prices by $15. And the reason why we're, you know, just quickly why we're raising those rates is because the cost of everything has really gone up in the past two years, like absolutely everything, we still have to put gas in our inbox vote, you know, to send it out. So we can drop buoys and run races, we still have to put gas in our shared boat. We have really stepped up in the last year, how we reward our volunteers, you know, for a long time. Volunteering in real life was just a stressful thing to do with in light of COVID. Now, people do really want to get together and volunteer and seek that connection. But we want to, you know, we try to do a better job at making that more appealing. I mean, yes, you get to see your friends. But especially for roles like race committee, where people sit on a deck in the cold for three hours on a weekend, we want to make sure that those people do feel very much appreciated. And so, you know, when trying to although we have to now think about within, you know, reasonable parameters. We do want to make sure that we do reward people for volunteering and all those. All those things are not just paper trophies anymore. It's actually like rewarding people with merch, and food and drink and things like that. And all those prices have gone up too. So anyway, that's in a nutshell, just because folks will ask later on why the price is going up. And the other thing that we have, which is really a landmark of island Yacht Club is really the women's selling seminar. And this is something that, you know, always very proud to take into the 30th year, this year, in partnership with after God, I do really feel like this is something that we want to continue in one shape or form. It's also a very expensive operation for us as well. And the budget does come out of the island Yacht Club budget. So, you know, thankfully, we've been managed to uphold very, very good quality of this. But going forward, of course, it's going to require still get more organization, of course, budget. What is interesting, just because we have you here, Patty, I was always curious about how many people actually took us up on the come reciprocity. What we do now is we send out a letter and explain in very plain language, what this means. And it means that you can't just storm into other people's clubs. It's all about etiquette and cooperation, and, you know, being being a good friend to the boating community. But, you know, people say that they love this idea of reciprocity. Almost half our membership says, you know, it's part of the reason why they joined in reality, and really don't know how many people actually take it up. But maybe I have to ask that as a follow up question, at some point in time. But yes, I have always appreciated the hospitality I've received from other clubs. Mostly I go to other clubs, because I race, but maybe one day, maybe one day, we'll cruise our else Elberton. You know, give it a go. So anyway, I did want to share that just that much, just so that, you know, you guys get an understanding of where we are at. You know, we did get quite a bit of feedback to white people. Do you know what people are interested in? At the combin? There's a lot of cruising, there's a lot of racing races, meeting up. Races, racing racing. Super, yeah. So you know, even though we are a virtual club, things like racing and those sort of real life connections are kind of like indispensable to really who we are. So anybody have any questions about that so far? About why people value the club? What's going on there? Hi, Eric. How you doing? Hey, sorry for taking so long to get on. You are doing great. It's good to see you, Mr. All right. Yep, down here in the heat in Southern California in shorts all day. Oh, what are you in Los Angeles? Yep. I feel so bad for you. Yesterday, traveling down here is ridiculous. Well, I hope hopefully you're just staying at Maribel is like Maribel? Is family not having to do cross city commutes because that is the worst. I'm gonna have to do a little bit of a Friday. All right. Well, hopefully being a holiday week, it won't be the worst, fingers crossed. All right. So let's get back into it. Without all with all that introduction, it'll be great now to dig into the software part of it. I know. That's why most of you guys are here, just to learn about how I'm together. And this has been just a very iterative process for us. Because, you know, as the comp has grown, we've tried certain solutions that haven't worked out. And then we've moved on to another thing, or we've found that we get greater efficiency by doing something a little bit differently. My Michaels, at the end of the day really are to create processes that can be passed on to people fairly easily. So ease of use is a big deal for me. But then second to that, really, just to reduce friction, like I really don't want, I want people to get excited when they see a new member sign up for Island Yacht Club and not be like, Oh, now I've got to do this other thing. So it's been really about ease of use, and we're reducing friction. Um, so you know, thankfully I think all of you have the guide in front of you, as I mentioned, I was going to come back to this flowchart, why I'm coming back to this is because, you know, I do want to talk about this quickly, just in general. And then I do want to spend a bit of time just going a quick demo of most of the software tools we use, just so you get a sense for how you can personally jump in and start mucking around. You know, basically, I'm going to do just a series of little demos here. So at least if I you say, oh, you know, iyc is using this platform, what does this platform look like do etc, you have at least a little bit of information here. And maybe in the future, you can spend a bit more time kicking the tires. But this is more like an introduction to each of the pieces that put together that this puzzle. So I do first of all want to just go through some of the quick tasks with our website, we have a website builder called Weebly.

And then after that, I'm going to talk a little bit about how merchandise works. And then after that, I'm going to spend a bit of time talking about memberships and what that flow looks like. And we'll touch on Campaign Monitor as well because that's kind of like the umbrella email tool we use for basically all our member waiting columns. Wow, Roz, this looks awesome. Thank you very much for putting some heavy labor into it. Man. Look, I'm gonna tell you some people have fun hobbies on weekends. Obviously, I don't I say all that I keyboard warrior than the two things I do.

You found your hobby. It's right here. Yeah, it's

right here. It's right here. Gosh, okay. Yeah, no. Um, no, this was this was actually a bit of a hoot. So I had a good time doing this. All right. So let's jump into Weebly for a moment, I do want to talk about that. So the idea and we'll be coming back to this diagram a few times, just so that we don't lose track of where we're at. So Weebly is basically what powers our website. And we just hit share screen for a moment. So you guys can see all this share screen Island Yacht Club. So here's a website iyc.org. This is you guys probably seen it a million times over. But you know, some of you may not have, this is what the front page looks like. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of nice little options here, become a member, we've got some videos that show a bit about what we want, what we do explains our history, et cetera. I have not updated this yet. But I will actually, why don't we do that as a fun exercise together so that we're doing something productive tonight. Another part of it, which we'll touch on a little later is you might notice the your account. This is actually basically your account area as a young Island Yacht Club member. And under plans that will explain that you've signed up for things like annual membership for 2220 23. I've previously bought some content that's tied in currents. San Francisco Bay is like a cool webinar, which I've paid to watch effectively, and so on and so forth. And you can do things and I'm trying to encourage people to use this flow to like, edit their profile, so that we have people's details on hand and stuff like that. I'll talk about this a bit more when we talk about memberships. But any which way it's that's all to say that we have a fairly a fairly like happening kind of site where, you know, it isn't just a flat screen, you can actually interact with the club to a degree, we also have a members area as well, where you can do things like access our crew list, and see upcoming events and buy things. You know, so you know, we've got all these little touch points here that you can this page in particular, you can only access if you're a member. And so, you know, we have a combination of things like point of sale like you know, you can purchase things you can sign up for memberships, you can do all sorts of stuff with the island Yacht Club website. So what powers this is software called Weebly. Weebly is it's actually what it was acquired by square A few years ago. You guys might know square because basically, they create like point of sale hardware and software. They do like transactions and things we actually saw to using square A long time ago Oh, to accept payments at the clubhouse bar. So, you know, by default were quite biased towards solutions that plug in well with Square. Because, you know, you can do things like we can get a new piece of merch. And then we can, you know, bring our iPad and our Square Reader to an event and sell it accept credit cards and sell that merch or we can, you know, sell tickets that way and stuff like that to Foursquare, they've always tried to find ways to make it easier to basically accept transactions, and one of them is by having a website builder, and their own website software called square online. Their website builder, though is Weebly. And as I mentioned, we wanted to do something productive tonight. So not just show you this dashboard. But for instance, if you click Edit Site here, how easy it is to do things like update our website. So back to that value of like ease of use, I wanted to use software where you can just be like, literally, you type something in like Eric is the best. And hit publish. And you know, everyone can see that change straightaway. Eric is the best. But actually, the thing we're going to do tonight is we are going to just quickly update this. So just to show you how, as you can see, this is the editor by the way, and looks near identity, I like pretty much what you see is what you get with the software to use the old phrase, you know, this is the live side here. You can literally just be like, Oh my God, we need to make an update right now. And you can go zed, and then start Commodore Ross the breeze. And you can be like, Oh, thank God, you know. We've got that changed up. Awesome, awesome. And you can hit publish. And then a minute later, basically, but new information on your side. So we believe it's it's super, super versatile. This is all the pages that we have in Weebly, you can, you know, nest them differently. You know, you can do things like create a page, you can hide it, you can make it content created using the member space software we're talking about earlier. You can even create membership pages with a. So for instance, like in the v1 of this website, we did have like a member site that was sort of controlled specifically by Weebly, we did been up to some limitations with it, namely, not being able to timebox how long people can be members for. And so we stepped away from that solution. But for a club that was just starting to, you know, we'll get this model in might be something that they'd want to consider. The other thing is, we believe super affordable, too. It's like $29 a month. And so, you know, it's pretty incredible. And that lets you do things like run a pretty competent like online store. And basically, all you get charged for for items that get sold via the store is you know, the square of transaction fee, which is 2.9%. So, anyway, here we go, like for instance, the tides and currents webinar, you can access app for $10. We have lots of nice little things like that. I just remembered then that, for instance, we shouldn't have this change of watch dinner that's already passed. If we want to like get rid of that specifically, all you have to do is like click on it in Weebly, hit minus, hit done, hit publish. And then the site is updated just like that. So in all, it's a nice piece of kit, because, you know, it just lets you push, like changes to the live site very, very quickly. Final thing I mentioned with Weebly is that we have a section here called events. And we have, for instance, our Google Calendar, which is embedded and as you can see, this is tonight's session on our calendar here. And if you click on any of these sessions and events, oops, should go to the live site. I'm sorry, I'm still in the editing environment here. Then you can do things like see the Zoom links and stuff like that. So we're just trying to put this information out here super easily. You know how to like sign up to races, stuff like that. I haven't updated this for a while. But each of these events here is simply a blog post. So when we believe I go back to the Weebly environment here, you'll see in the corner here, it's As new posts, so if you want to, like post a new event on to our website, all you have to do is is still like a blog post and be like, you know, winter racing begins, you know, today or whatever it might be. And then after here, if you want to put it together, you can drop images in. And like, very quickly add images to, you know, sir, to the website. I don't have a good example right now here, but you know, it's all very drag and drop. And, you know, at the end of the day, I just want to be able to hand it over to someone and just be like, Hey, you don't need to know how to code, you just need to know how to, you know, hit post at the end of the day, and then that information is live on the site. So one thing Eileen was asking about was like, for instance, if we wanted to add, you know, a write up to our website, what can we do, I wouldn't necessarily do it under Events, just, just quickly, I'm going to discard the draft. So I don't get confused later, or somebody doesn't get confused. But we do have a page for racing specifically. And the fun thing about this is that again, you can just like drop content in here. So if we did want to add a section, that was like, learn more about our racing, or, you know, what we could do is basically just add a piece of text down here. And we could be like, right up from Island days race one. And we had a PDF file that our PR o gave us

that we could link to one thing we could do for something like if we wanted to do that, like we can copy and paste the text here, or what we could do is we could grab this file, title here. And when you click that, you can upload a file, and you can upload it and store it on the site. So that's something to think about going forward. You know, I mean, just to address your point, specifically, is that we could just like upload the PDF there. And then that will be then available on the site for people to see. And then when you're done with all that you just hit publish. And you've got a resource that you can link to from your newsletter or wherever it might be. Yeah, cool. All right. Any questions about Weebly before we move on to the next thing? Cool. All right. So that's that's a quick intro to editing sites with Weebly. Again, when you log in, you just click Edit Site, and then you go into that nice visual builder. And away you can go, I just want to touch quickly on how items work. So you saw on our online store, when we went to, I'm just going to go to the store here, it's store. Okay, we have all these items here. And we took one out, where did those items live? Again, mentioning Weebly, it's very much like connected to the sort of square ecosystem, which is all about e commerce. If you click under here on this dashboard items, decide items, you can actually see all the items that we've offered historically, including how much dock we have. So you know, for instance, the island Yacht Club hat, which showed you it looks like we have 10 pieces that left. So we look at inventory in here. If you actually click on something like that, you go straight into this view where you can, you know, do things like change the pricing, or the visibility of this item, whether like, options for like shipping or pickup, and then stock levels as well, which is super important, because you don't want to end up selling an item that you don't have any inventory for, and so on and so forth. So you can this is all, you know, again, very much visual, you know, it's you can add images by just clicking on this, and then finding images, etc. It's all pretty straightforward. So, that's what items are, and items that are created here, I believe can also you'll be visible in the Square Reader. So you know, there is some sort of sync that happens between them as well, which is pretty, pretty good, which is pretty good. But, you know, we've got a lot of historical items that we've just kept in here. You know, for instance, our webinars that we've done previously, we did a whole series of webinars earlier in the year and this has been super easy to set up. You know, literally we've just made copies of previous ones like duplicated the item, so previous webinars, and then you know, plugged in do For details and whatnot, and then made that visible on the site. And also it's super easy then to market the event on Facebook and other channels. Which is why we've managed to go gangbusters with webinars. And I do hope Oops, I'm sorry. We can do that again in the future. Cool. Okay, any questions about items, all that? Cool. All right. So we've covered a lot of ground here, guys, this has been really fun. So just going going back quickly, that was basically Weebly. In a nutshell, Weebly and square, I should say, I'm not going to dig too heavily into square. You know, square is really square and Stripe, they're both sort of, in their pure sense, a way for us to process transactions, and particularly by credit card, but you can also do things like sending invoices as well. It's, it's kind of unsexy work. But it's good that the software out there that does it for us. So I'm going to dig into member space a little bit. Next. And as you as I showed you before, we have this whole your account section here, this is all member space. This is you know, basically what does things like, you know, charges your credit card pic, asking you for member details, all that kind of good stuff. You know, as a point of reference, if you if I log out of this. So I'm not I don't have any, you know, I'm not logged in this bottom simply becomes member login. If you click on that, um, you know, it'll ask you to log into your account. But if I am like a net new member, um, like, for instance, I'll just show you that, again, if I wanted to become a member, this is the experience you get, it's like the first asked to your name. And then after that, basically, it takes you to a screen that asks for your credit card details and more details about you as a potential member for Island Yacht Club. So this is member space as it appears to all members. So transaction run through square or member space. So a member space is actually a front for stripe. So if I go through just quickly back to this thing here into this flowchart here. What happens with membership, so with member space is that, you know, once you sign up for it as a member, there are two things that happen. First of all, there's stripe, quietly manages the transaction in the background, and then eventually pushes that money to the bank. But then that membership form data goes to another tool called Zapier. That makes it a little that makes it more public facing for us. So we'll talk about what this section in a second. But that's that's member space in a nutshell. Does that answer your question? Yeah. So how can we don't use square I guess? Yeah, it unfortunately member space has an exclusive range arrangement with stripe. So we only use the credit card stuffs. We don't use it for anything else. I would rather not use stripe. But the but we've been cornered into this in a way because member space actually works really well with Weebly. It's just very simple to setup. And yeah, that was basically it. These two are really a coupling here. Do they charge a fee like square does? Yeah, they do. It's also if I remember the fee breakdown, I'll get back to you on that. But I think that the credit card transaction fees about the same one to 2.9%. Yeah, but then we also have to pay so much to remember space as well. I think that's also in the vicinity of like $30 a month. Mm. All right. So member space. And again, I'm not like really I'm looking at I'd love to look at other solutions like that and we'll come we'll come centric. But you know, so far so good as far as member space goes from a usability point of view. So okay, let's have a look at it. It's gonna add it to my browser here. So remember space. So I'm going to I've logged in, I want to go check out Island Yacht Club. And this is basically we get dumped is the member space dashboard. So the idea with membership with member space is that they have this concept of member plans and may Members and member plans can be you know, it could be their 90 days access to a video. It can be access to a page you know, like our members page which has our code on it, our member discount code on cruellest and stuff. It can be a one year membership to Island Yacht Club. It can be, you know, one year membership to the small boot program, renewing every year, you know, or on the 12 month anniversary from wherever you signed up. So the idea of plans is pretty versatile.

arrives. Yeah. Another quick question. What one does it also include? Like, where we did the dinner and collecting money for the dinner? Was that also handled through member space?

No, no. So with the dinners, for tickets, specifically, just going back to this tickets, ag member dinner, and I was reading your mind here. That's specifically Weebly? answear. Yep. Good. So. But for things where it's kind of like the idea that you you're signing up for a limited period of time, that's what member space is better at. Mostly because it can allow you to get content for, you know, periods of time. So, you know, and I'll dashboard here, this is the aggregate that 275 paid members. This is a number of members that have a current member that are currently on a membership plan. We don't use this idea of trial members, the idea of trial members is like, again, for, you know, if I was trying to sell you some sort of content, and this is like, for instance, people that are doing things like selling a subscription to a series of videos might use trial memberships. But, you know, like, the idea here is that, you know, you can give someone 30 days free, potentially on the shared vote program, and then after that, you start getting charged, like something like that could be a good, you know, scenario for trial membership. The free members thing, I use this quite liberally. What free members mean, is that, in the context of island Yacht Club, is we have this idea that if you sign up after October 1, you're actually eligible for the membership for the following year. Right. So what I'll do is, I'll create these freemium like these people that sign up in 2022, I'll add them to the 2023 plan, member plan as a free membership. So these are basically people that have just rolled over to the following year, and that's 58 of those. And then after that, things like page views, this is this comes down to like, if I have content, like the members page, how many people have visited that members page, but then all the other pages to that I have behind the membership, the savings is based on they have some very basic functionality and member space. Like if someone starts signing up for their membership, they get as far as adding their email address and a part of creating a password, but then don't actually go through to the payment stage, then they get a nudge email saying, Hey, did you Did Did something go wrong. And the theory here is, you know, in the E commerce space, we call this abandoned cart. It's this idea that if someone gets halfway through making a purchase, and then abandons it, you can send them an email automatically, which says, just click on this link, and we can we can continue with your payment or your membership. And that has been pretty effective. I do get replies to those emails, because people think they're actually from a real person. The membership by default, the emails are like really needy, they're like, Hey, Did something go wrong? Can we help you? And people actually do write back and they're like, Yeah, I'll come back to it next year, or you know, whatever it might be. But it's just fun way to like to sort of start a conversation with someone often that you don't know who started signing up for iyc and then got distracted and decided to do something else. And then as I mentioned, you know, stripe is stripe, they basically handle all the payments so you can actually jump in and have a look at payments over time. So anyway, I'm going to get into the meat so remember plants as I mentioned can be are a lot of different things to us. Right now. We have the two membership plans that are currently active being asari. This is a free one that to roll over from 2022 and then this is the the link that you get on the website. Finally we have this content this tides and currents. We have an arrangement with Kami Richards, who's a local sailing celebrity He that he gets to 20% of all proceeds from this. So far, we've raised him the equivalent of a free drink at the boathouse tavern. So he's not going to get rich on this. But you know, it was a nice thing we tried. Cool. Any questions about this so far? Cool. All right. Final thing I'll show you, oh, so to two more things I'll show you is that you can create coupons. So I shouldn't hide these. But we've created various coupons for you know, people that want to join plants for free. This is all super secret stuff. So I'm going to skip to the next, which is members and members is basically everybody that signed up. And as you can see, everybody sign up for a plan is mostly at this point, the annual membership plans. If you want to dig into that member, you can click on there and start seeing their details. This is a list of all the emails that they've received invoices, you know, nudge emails, stuff like that. charges that have happened. And so why this is good is, you know, if somebody like Mary is like, Hey, What date did I get charged by membership, you can have a look here. If you need to refund the member, you can actually do that in stripe. You can actually like for instance, let's see if he showed details, you can get things like the charge ID. If you actually view the customer in stripe, you can have to log into it. Okay, we'll do that another time. But the idea is that, you know, you can process a refund in stripe itself, that happens once in a blue moon. But the best way to do it is to go via member space and then go through the stripe login. All right, um, great. So this is really how things get mentioned, like, administered in the background. And finally, you can add notes and things like that, too, and very rarely need to use that. But that's how membership works. Cool. All right. Um, and then the next thing, so we're going to talk about just very quickly, Zapier, which is a tool that we use for pushing data around. So for any given member, you'll see if you go to show custom fields, you see that we have quite a bit of data that they've provided on signup, things like phone numbers, addresses, all that kind of good stuff. As you can imagine, the day to day membership management stuff, or, you know, we want to like just do a quick eyeball of like, where people are, for instance, what their home port is, or the city or state or whatnot. Going through members, one by one this way, is obviously super tedious. It's like, you know, you'll be like, Oh, okay, then I want to go see what what Jeff is up to. Okay, good, I can see this. But you know, obviously, this is no good. For someone who's printing membership cards, they obviously can't click through this type of stuff up, you know, or take this information in aggregate. So, what I've we've done to make things a little more easier for a lift perspective is gone. Why don't we just get all this information and stick it in a spreadsheet and make sure that spreadsheet stays automatically updated? The other thing is, you know, we have a list of these members in Campaign Monitor. In the olden days, we would be like, okay, every now and then let's do it export. We can export all these people, and we can import this list of email addresses into Campaign Monitor. That sucks. It's also very time consuming. So the idea is that we've got this software called Zapier. And so, you know, just to show you what the end result is, before we go into what Zapier does, just so that you guys, you know, can see the end result. Here's our 2023 member list. And this is sort of very much formatted just almost identically to what you would get if you literally went into member space and you said export, you know, you can export this expanded file, and expanded file is basically you know, each plan will have its own column, the member status, all that the expanded file is effectively this spreadsheet here, which is a Google sheets that has, you know, everything nicely formatted here and, you know, easy to read through and important Link, I've thrown a few columns at the end that you don't have a member space, like the date that the membership card was sent to the person. So that, you know, we were sending cards up to 1119. We've got a few new members now that we have to catch up on these guys here. But you know, I would consider this fairly up to date. But any which way this is this is obviously something where if I was to jump into member space and hit Export, and a few days later, hit Export, and then a few days later, it'll get really tedious, and most likely, I'd make a lot of mistakes.

So we have the software called Zapier, that makes a lot of these problems go away. I put it here. It's API API is basically a techie acronym for let's get some software to talk to some other software in a way that's kind of useful. So what is Zapier? Zapier is basically what we would the olden days called middleware. Middleware, as I mentioned, is kind of like, let's get some software to talk to some other software. And in this case, before I jump into one of these zaps, specifically, the idea here is the software actually knows how to talk to literally 1000s of software applications, and are mostly the ones that you and I use every day. And it basically allows you to just go, hey, I want to take that data out of one app, and then throw it into another. So I showed you that example with the spreadsheet from member space. The idea is that in Zapier, you create these, these apps, and you go, I want to do very specific data manipulation. So what happens here is I've created the ZAP called updated member profile to 2023, iyc members, Google Sheets, and this is these, these are the building blocks that I've put together goes, someone's updated or created a member profile in member space. A second step is go looks into my Google Sheets and goes, Hey, does that person exist in Google Sheets already. And if they don't exist already, well, if they, in this scenario that someone does exist, they'll update that row specifically, but if they don't exist, they'll create a new row in Google Sheets. So that's, you can imagine, you know how you can do this with all sorts of different software. But the idea is that this is like a visual editor that basically runs in the background. So every time someone signs up for a membership, in Canada, in certain member space, slash weekly, they get added to the Google Sheets automatically. That's a lot of info. But, you know, you know, the horror show starts when you click on one of these things. And after that, you can start seeing, like all the crazy stuff that I've done in terms of logic, but the idea is that, in short, that means member space. And what we're saying here is, hey, in this column, which is ID, put in an ID in the column, which is first name, put in first name in the column, its last name, last name. So if you go back into the spreadsheet, Id first name, last name. And just it's a way of going okay, let's push all that information from members space and to hear an update every time this happens. So this is currently on like a 15 minute timer, it'll just say, hey, is anything happening in member space? And then 15 minutes later, we'll be like, is there anything happening in member space? And then if there's something has changed, it'll just update spreadsheets straight away.

All right. Um, was that a lot? Like, crazy amount of info? I need to drink water for a second. All right. Our brains haven't exploded yet. Okay. Are you doing as

you have I know, Eric, well, look, I just wanted to say it pause it refreshes for a second. Um, this this is all very iterative stuff that I've done over the course of two years. So I don't expect everyone to pick it up in exactly two minutes, okay, or an even 90 minutes. But the good news is we're on the homestretch now. After this, it'll get we're on to the easy stuff. I promise you I really do you better just not turn around because we're gonna put handcuffs on Yeah, yeah, I know. Fair enough. Dude. It's okay. But at least you can see so far I have not tied to any code whatsoever. Literally like any totally go in too, if you're wondering what I've done, or what I've broken for that matter, you literally just have to like, click into it and go. No, what I mean is we're gonna need you to cipher

through this stuff. Good Lord.

All right. So we're almost there. Okay, so easy stuff,

right? This is the easy stuff. This is how

easy it gets. Well put it this way once you've got your head over this concept that a lot of this stuff is happening while I was sleeping. Yeah,

yeah, this Zapier is great. You can do a lot of different things with it. Yeah.

All right. Cool, guys. So final thing is Campaign Monitor, which we will. Let's see just very quickly on a Campaign Monitor, so as you can see, here, Zapier basically pushes members into Campaign Monitor in Zapier, this like simply looks like I just go back here at subscriber and Campaign Monitor when you membership a member space. So as on Tim, and the idea here is that when there's a new membership, it'll basically add people to this island Yacht Club Members list in particular. So the thing is about this is when, you know, for instance, people's memberships expire, in the perfect world, they should in theory be removed from this Members list. To be honest with you, I'm like always, like second guessing whether or not that's the reality of it. So you know, at some point in March next year, we do have to go on a bit of a check slash delete of laps memberships. But at least for the people that do join, we can we're failing, we're confident that the list is you know, they'll get added to this list, then it's up to date. So what is on your club members? So let's see if I go into

quick question. Yes. So this is when they get added into member space. But in member space, they can also update their email address. Right. So do we have do we have that currently to where they update that then it also updates Campaign Monitor?

Yes. So that's an interesting one, I might have to create a new or change the trigger? I short answer is I don't think so. Because right now, our event is new membership. Okay. But you can you can change the trigger, so that you can update the profile. And I know, we do that together. We can do that together. Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, it'll take a few minutes. So let's do that after this. Oh, yeah. No, we can do that another day. Perfect. That's great. Because we have to make sure test these things too. Okay, so that's Zapier. Let's go into Campaign Monitor then and have a look at that list specifically. So as we mentioned, we have this list called on your card members. And it is basically getting updated. So these people all does get added by Zapier. Most recent membership added here was 20th of November, to keep in mind is that if someone is already on this list, for instance, they remember last year, and they just chopped up their membership this year or they renewed it won't actually put the date is date subscribed, it'll just simply update them. So if we look into someone like Karen Dell this she's actually been on this list for actually I thought she had been around a little bit longer. But you know, for instance, she will she's on a number of all those already that we've created. Here we go. She's received emails, as it turns out, she's got some software that opens emails repeatedly. This happens. Let me have a look at another person actually someone who I know has been around for a while, like myself, I should say, Rose. Let's see. Roster freeze. Let's have a look at what I'm up to. But here we go. So I've been on this list for a while now since 2021. And, you know, basically I've stopped I've moved away from storing, like a lot of people's information in Campaign Monitor. I don't think it's the best place for it. I think it's really good for storing things like your mind. Brady, and you know, maybe who your second year plus two is on your membership. But, you know, what is interesting to have a look at. And what I get the most questions about is like, you'll get people who will be like, I didn't receive your email is how did I know about a thing? And you can actually use this report in Campaign Monitor to go okay, well, cool, you actually did get the change of watch email, you clicked on a link even. So it's nice having this sort of information, because, you know, it does sort of take a lot of the questions out of, you know, when people say, hey, you know, I didn't hear about this thing, or I didn't hear about that thing. You know, you can actually have a look in Campaign Monitor, and, you know, see what the, the truth of it is. So, um, you know, let's management, pretty straightforward. Again, you know, these are all sort of programmatically sort of updated, I never have to jump into the lists, and and, you know, people manually, Zapier just also work for me. What most people most of you guys will be spending your time in then is you're not managing lists so much as campaigns and campaigns here is basically it's this is what you'll see when you click on the campaign's tab, all the email newsletters that we've sent to our membership. So this is good for, you know, historical reasons, being able to see, you know, what campaigns we've sent, what dates that kind of thing, you even get, like a nice little preview here of what the campaigns look like. So, if you're wondering about that email that was sent, you know, three months ago, or, you know, next year, we're wondering what was sent for nominating committee, it's all visible here, which is, you know, very, very useful. You can even tag the campaigns, I use this for women's sailing seminar as well. So it's good to be able to, like tag the campaigns and just pull up the campaigns you want, etc, etc. What I do for the most part, when I'm sending newsletters is, I will just grab a newsletter from a previous week. And I will go copy. And it'll think about it for awhile. And then you can say, once it's done, you could edit draft. And then this will give you basically the previous email that you sent. The main things to think about here is when you click edit, you go into this visual editor. And it's all just very, how do I put it, like, you can just type things here. You can, most of this formatting is actually just sort of baked in, it's, you know, something I've created, I've just added to it a template effectively, just like member space, same idea, you drag a title in, you can click on, you know, the image title, you can browse images, or you can upload your own. And one thing I should point out to you, Eileen, because if you want to be using this in the future, you can actually do things like use free images from here. So if I wanted to just find a generic image of a sailboat, I can do that and just like dump it in. And it's a really nice sort of free software, like free images that you can use. So you know, this is nice, and you can do things like it very basic edits, crops, as well. So a lot of these tools is sort of just baked into Campaign Monitor. It's very, very visual. So, you know, very, very simple stuff to use. Yeah, so I'm not going to go too deep into it here tonight, just because there are like, there's certain art and science as well. For instance, you want to show message only to Campaign Monitor, sorry to own your card members, but not your general population. You can actually do that. You get this little question here who should see this. And you can do things like you can get super Trixie, you can just be like, Hey, I just want to show this to Island Yacht Club members, and a Campaign Monitor or workout like who, for any given email address, what was there on? And okay, if you're relying on your card member, then cool, we'll show you this banner. You know, this is particularly useful for memberships Like for instance, if you want to promote a members only webinar, or you know, even our member survey, right? But you want to send the email newsletter to a whole database, which is 1000 People only, you know, 300 that should see this banner, for instance. You can do that. You can create these like subgroups of people as well. So for instance, this This is all very historic stuff that I've got here. But, you know, if I created a list of people who sign up for a webinar, you could say literally, I just want to show this banner to these people that sign up for the webinar. So they call these segments, but they're just basically subgroups to these bigger groups here. All right. So, Eileen, do you have any questions? In particular Wilson working through Campaign Monitor? I'm not really

I did, I was able to upload a couple pictures that I had. And I figured out how to do the links. When I first tried to upload the pictures, one of my pictures uploaded sideways, while trying to figure out how to rotate it.

Right. So that is a thing. I? So just quickly, are you getting the pictures off your iPhone,

I emailed them to my computer and then uploaded them from the computer. And most of them were fine. It's just the the picture with me and Alice at first, it was rotated. And I couldn't figure out how to change. And so I just deleted it, and then like, resized it, and then uploaded it again.

Yeah, so the rule. Unfortunately, these cropping tools, they don't give you any sort of rotate or anything like that. When it comes to images in particular, that is a common issue. That happens. For some reason, it'll be rotated one way on a device, but not like that's not actually its true orientation. Often, what you have to do is you just got to rotate it using like preview, if it's a Mac, or some sort of on your desktop, and then save it and then upload it. That's happened to me before. And what I've done is I've exported the image versus like a JPEG, and then saved it onto my computer and then tried uploading it. Okay, yeah. So that's one thing. That is one thing, if you could do it, rotate it on your machine, before uploading it to Campaign Monitor. Yeah. So in all these cases, with these are all images of my iPhone. I've downloaded them as JPEGs. Sorry, Patti,

I gotta go to a 630 meeting. But thank you so much. Catch up?

Don't worry. I'll send you the recording after Thank you.

Appreciate it. Bye, bye.

Yeah, so that's a common, that's a common way to fix that issue. Basically, these are all like exports of JPEGs and things like that, that I've uploaded. All right. So that's it. Um, this is obviously an old newsletter. This is not me. This should be you, Eileen. So Oh, final fashion mention is that for video, just because we're getting videos of races, you can actually throw a video in Tallinn, and you can add like a YouTube URL, and it'll create a preview of the video. So that's something that's super useful. Just because I know, Ed, you've taken a lot of video in the past of our races. If you can upload that video to YouTube, then it's super easy to add to the newsletter. All right. So those are the those are the big scenarios. I know we're short on time. So I am going to say Save and Next. And obviously, I'm not going to send this newsletter. But I did just want to give you at least some insight. So all the drafts here you can see there's a test draft campaign, and there's the one I just created, edited just now. And you can just jump onto these and Campaign Monitor and go to the races. Okay, so that basically wraps up the software side of things. I don't want to dig too deeply into membership fulfillment. I think that's actually you know, as far as the slide goes, a lot of that is actually covered in the guide. But I do want to make you aware of, you know, the fact that we do have this whole section here about membership cards and letters. You guys have seen the Google Sheets now with our member lists, the 2023 members, Google Sheets, so I linked to it here. And mentioned it is like one component of this whole process. But things like the welcome letters and whatnot. You can it's worth just spending a few minutes is having a look at this. I've even thrown in a tutorial like about how for instance to do mail merges. Well I'm sorry, short Prov I'm going to be giving you a lot of these items when I see you. You know, we can, you know, print out five cards together. And then after that you're going to be an expert.

Sounds great. So this next weekend

that's great. Very, very happy to hand over printers. First yours,

you? I'm sure you are. Yeah, very, very

happy. But long story short, it's been documented. I'm not going to go put together membership cards right now. Because use of your

time I'm going to try and talk to Barry until allowing me onto the boat.

Yes. And the final thing I should say is working bees. So this wouldn't all work without our volunteers. And Prov this is you know, I mentioned this to you earlier, this is your team men, like, you know, we do these working bees like two or three times a year Eileen is now seeing you know, it's just a nice time together. Actually, we just hang out. And we go we have 35 cards, which we want to send out right now. And as you can see, we have things like envelopes. We have membership cards, we have stickers, we have letters, we've got Alice, being very deep feeling very beautiful during the trifold here. You know the end result is a stack of letters that Nathan has under his hot hands here, where we bring our membership packs together and stick them in the mail. The mailbox is literally next to the boathouse tavern. So it's a very very good fulfillment center for us. Better still this beer, so that's it. Great. So how do you guys feel your brains will exploding amazing