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Managing memberships with Power Apps
We look at three examples where Microsoft Power Apps portals improve the efficiency of membership organisations. Whether you’re a fitness centre in need of a better registration process, a charity requiring a place for its members to access fundraising resources, or a company looking for a step-up from paper holiday forms, portals can provide the ideal solution.
Microsoft Power Apps Portals allow businesses and organisations to extend their processes by making their information and services available online to internal and external audiences.
For example, a charity’s portal would allow volunteers, fundraisers, paid staff and potential supporters to access specific information, such as training programmes, safeguarding policies and ways to donate. The portal allows the charity to determine which group has access to which information based on the requirements of each specific group. Portals employ a user-friendly interface and can be customised to look like an extension of your website.
Power Apps Portals can be designed to support any type of business or organisation. Sports clubs, hobby groups, charities, not-for-profit, religious organisations, the list is endless. And because they’re based on Microsoft’s Power Platform, they can be used alongside other Microsoft products such as Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Power BI.
Imagine you’ve set up fantastic fitness centre with all the latest equipment, exciting classes with amazing staff, and an ever-growing social media audience – you’re definitely on the map.
But something is missing. Your members still must fill in a paper application form to join, check your Facebook posts to find class times, and pick up the phone to change their membership. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if all this was accessible in one place?
With Microsoft Power Apps portals, your members have access to these services 24/7, reducing the time you spend on admin which means more time engaging with your clients.
With Power Apps portals, you can provide:
Afree trial, a day pass, a rolling membership, or a 12-month subscription, members sign up to your gym online. No paperwork or phone calls required!
Members can update their bank or credit card details, or upgrade to the next membership tier whenever they want.
Members book classes without having to pick up the phone or send you a DM on Facebook. You can also use a calendar for managing room and event bookings.
Keep your members updated with announcements of forthcoming events.
Encourage members to visit by allowing them to monitor their class bookings using charts and visualisations. If you use a swipe card system, link your Power Apps portal to it to provide check-in frequency information.
Get your members to track their weight, calculate their BMI and how much they can bench, all via the portal. Once they see the progress they’re making, they’re going to keep coming back.
Engage your members with notification emails and text messages to remind them of their upcoming membership renewal, or the classes they’ve booked.
Allow your members to update their details, whether it’s a change of address or a new phone number.
Could your charity improve the way it engages with its volunteers and staff?
Perhaps you already have a fantastic website that explains what you do and why you need volunteers to help do it, but once someone has filled in your online form, is the rest of the correspondence handled via phone calls, emails and post?
By providing a central hub for your volunteers and fundraisers, they’ll feel much more like a member of your team, with self-service access to everything they need to provide the necessary support to the organisation.
Power Apps portals provide:
A new volunteer goes to your website and fills in a form. They click submit and see a message saying, “we’ll be in touch”. This can take away some of the enthusiasm they have, especially if they’re eager to get started straight away. With a Power Apps portal, once they’ve signed up, your volunteers get immediate access to your membership hub, giving them information that isn’t readily available to the wider public and keeping their enthusiasm running high.
You have a wealth of information and resources available to your volunteers and staff, such as training videos, fundraising guides, posters and printouts, which you share via email or send through the post. While this may work reasonably well, they are easily lost or forgotten. Use a Power Apps portal instead as an information centre to provide focused access to all the resources everyone needs.
Your volunteers are the public face of your charity, so it’s important they have a training path to follow before they take part in any charity activities. Allow your volunteers to use your portal to track their progress, encouraging them to stay engaged with the training path with emails and text messages.
Let your volunteers log their fundraising activities on your portal by using JustGiving integration. Their portal account can be linked to their JustGiving account, so they can easily create new fundraising activities and keep an eye on donations without having to leave the portal. What’s more, you can direct fundraisers to the correct resources depending on the type of event they opt for.
Allow your volunteers to log their volunteering sessions by date, time and location, as well as any follow-up activities or comments. This gives you the data to focus your future volunteering activities on the places and times that attract most interest.
Incorporate a live chat feature in your portal to allow volunteers and fundraisers to ask questions of the relevant team without needing to call in or email.
There’s no need for members to call you if they lose their password – it’s all handled automatically via the portal.
Do your employees struggle to find all the latest information regarding HR? Is it a case of trawling through emails or company drives for the latest version of a staff handbook or holiday request form? And once they have found it, do they have to print it out, fill it in and then scan it before sending it back?
For many companies this is still the norm. But Power Apps portals has the solution. It gives employees all the information they need and the ability to raise requests and reports online without recourse to paperwork.
Give your employees access to the latest HR guidance, such as staff handbooks, health and safety information and internal policies.
Rather than using email chains for important and private communications between your employees and HR or management, allow employees to use the portal for this kind of correspondence. All queries are kept secure and are visible only to authorised parties.
Use the portal to keep track of any ongoing disputes, accidents, near misses and grievances, providing the appropriate people with full visibility of the history and status of any issue.
Provide an employee onboarding zone within your portal for guiding new recruits. Include useful resources such as organisation diagrams and information about benefits and rewards.
Incorporate regular health and safety documentation and reminders into your portal, such as workstation checklists, lone working assessments, and eye test reminders for DSE users.
Lose the paper holiday forms and use your portal for holiday requests and approvals, sickness and parental leave, and incorporate team calendars to ensure each department has sufficient cover during planned absences.
All the options discussed above are implemented directly via the cloud-based Microsoft Power Platform, so there’s no need for your own servers or other costly overheads.
The license costs for Power Apps portals are calculated per login session for logged-in users, and per page view for non-logged-in users. Various pricing options are available depending on the login capacity.
As with other Microsoft products, there is a wealth of resources available online to assist with implementation and user training.
Contact us to arrange a free 1-hour consultation to find out how Power Apps portals can help your business or organisation.
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