How IWAI overhauled their membership management with Beacon

The Inland Waterways Association of Ireland  “IWAI”, founded in the 1950s, is the voice of Ireland’s waterways enthusiasts. As a voluntary organisation with 24 branches across Ireland, the Association has championed safe boating and the restoration, use and preservation of Ireland’s precious waterways for generations. They’ve even got a printed magazine, Inland Waterways News (IWN), which goes out to members every three months, keeping the community up-to-date on all things IWAI. 

The Association relies on its membership system to raise funds for its campaigning, publish its magazine, run boating rallies and ensure all of their members are insured, which is quite a complex endeavour. And over the 70 or so years that IWAI has been operating, technology has developed quite a bit.

They began with pen and paper, eventually moving to a bespoke membership system that an IT savvy member built for them about 10 years ago.  It was a huge improvement, but over time it became time-consuming to maintain and was beginning to show its age. They needed an integrated solution that would streamline their operations, automate manual tasks and improve the member experience and renewal process.

After signing up for a month-long trial of Beacon, they quickly saw how they could use it to improve how they managed their membership programme. 

At the time, the team didn't have a reliable overview of their member base. They didn't know how many members they truly had at any given time, which memberships were due for renewal and when, and how best to encourage those people to renew their memberships. Previously, the main prompt to renew was a polite reminder in the member magazine. But making use of Beacon Workflows and the Zapier integration, personalised email reminders are now automatically sent when someone’s membership is due for renewal.

With Beacon, two thirds of our members have renewed in the first two months of the year. The big thing that’s blown us away is that over 50% of those members have signed up using a subscription which is huge because it reduces our renewal administration and allows us to know who our members are going to be in 12 months’ time. 

One of the features IWAI implemented first was Portal Forms - a super useful way for members to login and update their own membership record within Beacon. It was a whole new process for members, who were used to juggling postage stamps and emails, but once they got the hang of it, the manual work involved with maintaining member records was no longer needed. 

We are volunteers so anything we can achieve to bring down the administrative workload is a big win. We can now spend more time on the new stuff that we want to focus on to improve the service to members.

Alongside their campaigning on issues critical to the waterways, one of IWAI’s primary activities is to organise rallies for their members - community events for those passionate about boating and waterways. Before, registrations were managed manually, but now members can book themselves in directly via the website, and any attendees that don’t pass the automatic checks that IWAI have set up - like being paid-up members with valid insurance - are flagged to the team. So they can be sure that only full members are attending, and manually combing through registration lists is a thing of the past.

A key feature for them was dual currency payments. As a whole-of-Ireland organisation, they needed a system that would allow some members to pay in euros and others in pounds.

We liked a lot of the features, but the dual currency support was really integral, and made us think ‘oh, what else can this do?'

Alongside dual currency, support for Gaelic characters (used in the native Irish language) was also very important for IWAI. Beacon enables their members to fill in forms in either English or Gaelic, improving accessibility and personalising the member experience. 

In the Republic of Ireland you are allowed to state your postal address in either English or Gaelic. So many of our members submit their postal address in Gaelic. It makes the process so much nicer for members.

Being a volunteer-run organisation with varying IT skill sets, IWAI leaned on Beacon’s Support team while getting their new CRM and membership system set up. 

It’s a credit to the Beacon system that it allows people with some IT skills to learn how to customise it. The support team has been absolutely brilliant. It was actually the difference between success and failure because when we hit roadblocks in our knowledge and understanding it was the support team which guided us through that.

IWAI’s commitment to their members and embracing of new technology has transformed how they work. Their data is now reliable, members can update their own records, the renewal process is automated, and the time spent on admin is minimal. The end result being that IWAI has more time for campaigning, community engagement and improving services for their memberships.

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