Online Membership and Payments for Unions

The new WorkChoices legislation threatens the way unions collect membership dues. Unions are faced with having to abandon employer collection of dues and quickly moving members to direct payment.

A mix of strategies will be required to make the changeover; online payments have the potential to be a big part of that mix.

Social Change's Online Membership and Payments module is designed to help unions with the changeover.

The system allows members to join, pay online, or register for direct debit payments -- and it makes it easy for people to switch from payroll deduction to direct debit. All they have to do is provide their details and they see the membership rate relevant to them -- without having to be confronted by a range of different options or rates.

Recruit members as well

Having online payments on your site means being able to recruit more members. For example, the NSW Teachers Federation averages more than 800 new members a year with their online payment service.

Costs are down

Setting up a secure online payment service is now relatively inexpensive. Most unions should be able to set up a secure online payments facility for less than $5,000 with typical ongoing costs in the region of $600 per annum. The cost will vary depending on how many different type of membership you offer and how many transactions per year you process.

Even if a smaller union is only 10% as successful as the Teachers, that's still 80 new members a year. Multiple that by membership fees, and the cost of adding payments to a web site will be recovered very quickly.

Easy to distribute funds to branches

If separate branches need to be handled individually, the system collects and pays fees to individual branch bank accounts, and has separate administration for each branch's membership applications.

6 Important Benefits

1. It's integrated

Integrated business solution. The system has been designed to ensure that all components work together harmoniously: online interface, secure payment gateway, transaction data downloads and financial reporting. The system can be integrated with a Union's membership system for membership verification, to collect membership detail changes, etc.

2. It's user-friendly

o The system makes it easy for a user to work through complex membership options.
o Intuitive membership rates selection. Users are guided through a hierarchical membership category/ fee structure assisting the selection of the correct fee to pay.
o Client branding. Some payment solutions take users to a differently branded web site during the payments process. All pages on Social Change's membership module (including secure payment gateway pages) are branded with the Union's web design, so there's no confusion.

3. It's secure

Financial transactions are securely processed in a system which has proven bank strength security and comes with Government accreditation. The gateway architecture provides for a highly scalable and redundant network and the use of 128bit encryption.

4. It's flexible - you can have direct debit as well as credit card options

o Users can do one-off credit card payments, recurring credit card and direct debit payments as well as cheque and cash payments. All major bank credit cards are handled: ANZ, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, NAB, and St George, and Mastercard, Bankcard, Diners, JCB and American Express.
o Users to choose to have recurring payments. The big benefit is that this is very low cost, it doesn't incur a merchant service fee, and it doesn't require the consumer to give their Credit Card number - so their perception is that it is more secure.

5. It's easy to manage

o You can manage the system using a password from any internet connection.
o You can easily save transaction data and import it into a membership database or a spreadsheet.
o The payment transaction provider, Commsecure provides helpdesk support on tip of ensuring high system availability (99.9% +) because they have dual site redundancy.
o You can change the business rules and workflow whenever you need to.
o It's easy to add new membership rates for annual updates.

6. It's re-usable

The payment gateway can be reused for other ecommerce needs, like merchandise sales.