HMGS has been around since the ‘80s, originally starting because a group of miniature war gamers wanted to legitimize a club around historical miniature war gaming. Over the years, this small group has grown to have more than 1,500 members.
However, over the last few years, membership has ebbed and flowed, and since the pandemic, the organization has experienced declining membership numbers. HMGS was looking for software that would give them a more robust focus on membership statistics and a community focus. And that’s when they found GrowthZone’s MemberSuite and GZ Community platforms.
Dave Allnut, HMGS Vice President, said, “We're using them both in as much as we can integrate them as possible because we also have a robust community. So we're using MemberSuite to manage the membership aspects, Career Zone, and some other things that are features of that. But then we're also using the community structure to try to emulate the community structure we had in our old system.”
Within the last couple of years, HMGS has evolved to include more robust leadership roles, including appointing a membership coordinator. With this transition, there’s a lot of membership data to mine.
Before switching to MemberSuite and GZ Community, HMGS was using clunky membership software that hadn’t been updated in several years and was missing the features and capabilities HMGS needed. In addition to this, reporting capabilities were poor, which didn’t allow the team to mine the membership data or find out meaningful information. “If we wanted to find out how many memes we had in each ZIP code, you could run the report three different ways and get three different numbers. In some cases, you could run it three times the same way and get two different numbers. And that caused us to lose confidence in it,” Dave added.
Eventually, HMGS decided it was time to explore other options with more robust capabilities. The team gathered as much information as they could about other platforms, creating a short list of seven other options, narrowing it down through extensive demos, interviews, and looking at the support structures available through each platform. Because HMGS is a volunteer organization, they had to ensure the platform was sustainable and maintainable because they didn’t have the ability to quickly pivot into another option like other organizations.
One important part of their search process was answering how easy it was for them to work with and whether the company gave the team confidence that they’d be there for them when needed. One solution stood out from the others: GrowthZone’s MemberSuite with GZ Community.
The Solution
With HMGS’s community structure set up, their first priority was to get MemberSuite up and running because that’s the system that will be used to get all of their members to renew. Being a membership organization, this part is incredibly important.
Because HMGS is new to GrowthZone, they fully transitioned to MemberSuite approximately three months ago and also engaged a third-party integrator to help with event management while getting up and running with MemberSuite. HMGS runs 3 conventions a year. With their previous system, members had to log into the system, validate their membership, and then it would take them to the event management system, resulting in a few different steps for members to register for conventions.
By switching to MemberSuite and GZ Community, the team opened up many more capabilities that they didn’t have before. For example, one of their goals with MemberSuite was to eliminate the extra steps and have event registration be just one step.
The team also has strong project management and many goals for their platform, including setting up a career center to open up roles for membership and setting up community pages for battlefields, non-convention events, historical sites, museums, libraries, and schools to spread awareness of the hobby and events. One problem HMGS has run into is that many members don’t realize they’re running events, and they hope to change that through their events page and additional advertising.
The Implementation Process
The implementation process has been a learning experience for the team, taking a few months longer for the data import than they expected, but throughout the process, they’ve had a strong support team with GrowthZone’s implementation coordinator, technical support staff, and migration coordinator.
Because the team is so new to MemberSuite, they’re currently working on basic functions such as getting member profiles updated and exploring auto-renew features that they didn’t have previously. They’re also exploring reporting capabilities, such as setting up standard reports, how they can get the right reports in the right hands, and how they can use their data to make data-driven decisions on membership.
HMGS has strong IT execution, so their team is working with GrowthZone to build out organizational pages and working with customer success on best practices. Because the team now has access to capabilities they never had access to before, they’re making one of their IT team members more business-focused while another IT team member is focusing on implementation and on how to fully use their new capabilities.
GZ Community was one of HMGS’s driving factors for switching to GrowthZone. At this point in their journey, they’re starting with basic functions such as posting files and board meeting information.
Dave has a strong project management and corporate IT background and has managed many software projects and hardware implementations over the years. He’s familiar with dealing with support, negotiating contracts, and understanding best practices and how things should work. Dave draws on these years of experience both in terms of what he expects and the failures he’s previously experienced. This experience has helped his team think differently and ask different questions than other people may ask. For example, in a support handover call, the HMGS team was asking detailed questions such as “What is your response time? SLA service-level agreement? Do you have one? What should we expect? Does every call go through support, or how do you decide what goes to customer success?”
HMGS’s IT team is also able to handle a lot of things that they don’t necessarily need GrowthZone for. For example, they’ll experiment in the software sandbox to see how to make things work for them.
What advice does Dave have for associations considering partnering with GrowthZone?
- “One, do as much due diligence as you can upfront in the selection process. Build the right matrices; make sure you’re getting all the information you think you need, not just in terms of current capabilities, but also your comfort that the company will be there for you over the long haul, because these things are not easy to implement.”
- “Second, be an active participant in the implementation. You have to be there for the calls. You have to do the work in between. You have to ask the right questions. You have to stay on top of the implementation. That means not just managing your team, but it’s helping manage the GrowthZone team or the MemberSuite team to get things done.”
- “The third thing I’d say is I think it’s very important that you build the right relationships. And that’s both internally as well as with the GrowthZone team.”
Dave added that when transitioning to a new system, there are bound to be some hiccups; it’s not going to be perfect right away, so it’s important to have some patience and communication both ways. He also recommended monthly board meetings. Dave said, “Every board meeting, I gave our board an update on the implementation process. Here’s where we’re not very technical; here’s where we are; here are some of the challenges we’ve had, just to keep everybody informed about what’s going on, to try to prevent any fires that might erupt somewhere. We sent regular communications to our members to tell them what’s coming.”
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