Did you know that you can utilize the internet dominating WordPress content management system as a full featured Association Management System? It’s true! Many associations are already recognizing the benefits of running their association’s website on WordPress.
Professional associations and trade associations have their own unique needs and systems — including:
1. MembershipWorks – These are not listed in random order. MembershipWorks is the very first plugin I recommend for professional associations. MembershipWorks is truly the backbone of your Association Management system.
MembershipWorks provides the core functionality such as member management, online payments, event management, and a ton more.
Note that MembershipWorks is a paid service. There is a very limited free plan, but in order to fully utilize the core functionality, you’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan.
If you want to take a deeper dive into MembershipWorks, feel free to check out some of our other posts on the subject.
- Building an association website using WordPress and MembershipWorks
- Online membership management for professional associations
- Add member billing and easy online payments to your association website
- Register for an event directly from your site calendar
- Online member profiles and directories made easy
Keybridge Web is an official development partner for MembershipWorks — and we’re here to help with any questions or to start planning your new system.
2. MailPoet – Even with all of the social media options out there, email is still the undisputed king of content delivery. If you want to get news or information to your members, send them an email.
MailPoet allows your members to be notified when a new blog post or news item is posted on your website. The plugin can be set to notify users immediately, or via a daily or weekly “digest” email. Your members will receive a beautifully formatted email with images, excerpts, and links to full articles.
In additional, MailPoet can also be used to send out traditional monthly, quarterly, or annual newsletters.
3. RallyCongress – Do you want to give your members an easy way to contact Congress or state lawmakers directly from your website? RallyCongress is a service that allows constituents to easily send an email to representatives based on their location.
This powerful tool to allows supporters to take meaningful action with just a few clicks. Your organization can provide a template letter that visitors use directly, or edit as they see fit before sending. And of course, there are a ton of social media sharing options, such as posting the letter to your Congress person’s Twitter account.
While this isn’t technically a WordPress plugin, it includes embed code that can be included into your WordPress website, and set as a members-only page (if you’d like).
This is just one of several advocacy features that RallyCongress offers, and we appreciate their personalized support as well as their reasonable and transparent pricing.
4. WP Job Manager – Adding employment listings to your website is a great way to engage members. The WP Job Manager plugin adds a full featured job board to your website. You can restrict the job listings to just members, or make it available to the public. Members can submit their jobs directly through the website, and the association staff can easily approve and post the job. You can set up the plugin so that jobs can be posted for free, or require users to pay to post an ad.
And the job board itself is slick and user friendly. Users can easily search and filter by category, job type, keywords and location.
5. Gravity Forms – Gravity Forms gives your association the ability to create forms of all flavors. Associations have utilized Gravity Forms for officer voting, member polls, volunteer forms, and much more. In addition, Gravity forms includes tons of addons to third parties which enables you to connect into systems you may already use, such as Constant Contact, Salesforce, or Slack.
Summary:
This post provides a high-level overview of some of the amazing features in these plugins. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The options for building your association website in WordPress are virtually limitless. That’s why we are here. We can work with you to determine the tools and setup that best fit your association’s needs.
So, if you’d like to learn more about creating your association’s website and AMS with WordPress, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Keybridge. I can be reached at 877-302-2185 (ask for Mike), or at mike@keybridgeweb.com.
