A member register that keeps itself current

Almost every association starts with a spreadsheet. It works perfectly until the day someone emails a copy to someone else and there are suddenly two versions. Then the treasurer changes, the file stays on a private laptop, and nobody dares say how many members the association actually has.

The real problem is not the format but the direction: in a spreadsheet, only the person who owns the file can change anything. The member whose phone number changed has nowhere to put that information, so the register ages at exactly the rate members’ lives change.

A digital member register reverses that. The member updates their own details, the board sees the change immediately, and nobody has to email a file to anyone.

The basics are short: name, a way to make contact, and the membership itself. Beyond that, the register should answer three questions — is this person a member right now, what type of membership do they hold, and has the fee been paid. In Membly that is membership type, status (active, inactive or pending) and payment status.

On top of that, most associations collect what the activity actually requires: phone number, address, which group or section the member belongs to, whether they sit on the board, and whether a guardian is linked to a child. In Membly you can also add up to ten custom fields — text, phone, address, date, multiple choice or checkbox — and tie them to a specific membership type.

The principle is to collect what you have a use for, not everything you can think of. Every extra field is something that has to be kept current, protected, and one day deleted.

A member register contains personal data, and the association is the controller of it. In practice that means being able to say why you keep a piece of information, how long you intend to keep it and who has access to it. Membly is the processor and handles the data on the association’s instructions, under the processing agreement you accept when the association is created.

Access is restricted from the outset. An ordinary member sees names and roles in the member list but never anyone else’s phone number, email address or postal address — only administrators and leaders see contact details. The same boundary covers more sensitive fields such as gender and date of birth.

Personal identity numbers are entirely optional to collect. If you choose to, they are encrypted, shown masked in the interface, visible only to administrators and leaders, and never included in an export — not even when you export the whole register. Every member can also request their own data or delete their account.

This is general information about how Membly works, not legal advice. Assessing your own processing — particularly how long data should be kept — is a decision for the association to make and document.