The three questions that actually stop people.
Is our members' data safe. How do I get this past the board. What about the members who will never log in. None of them are about features, all three get asked after the demo, and the person who has to answer them is usually a volunteer with a day job.
The three questions that actually stop people
None of them are about features, and all three get asked after the demo rather than before it. Answered here so you are not the one guessing in a board meeting.
“Is our members' data actually safe here?”
The honest version: your data lives in a Postgres database with row-level security switched on, which means isolation between organizations is enforced by the database itself rather than by application code remembering to filter. A bug in our code cannot show your roster to another association, because the query never had permission to return those rows.
We are a small company and you should ask small companies this question. So the answers that matter most are the ones about getting your data back out.
Ask a security question →- Row-level security on every tenant table — isolation enforced in the database, not in a WHERE clause someone might forget
- Two-factor authentication available on any admin account, and enforced once enabled
- Full CSV export of your members, payments and reports at any time, by you, without asking us
- Card details never touch our servers — payments run on your own Stripe account, and we hold no card numbers to lose
- Nothing is sold, shared or used to train anything
“I still have to get this past the board.”
This is the step that kills more switches than price does, and it usually fails for a boring reason: the person proposing it is asked a question at the meeting they cannot answer, so the decision defers to next quarter, and next quarter nobody raises it again.
So we wrote the proposal for you. It is a one-page board pack with the cost, the alternative considered, the risks stated honestly, and the motion wording — the things a board actually votes on, rather than a feature list.
Get the board pack →- A one-page proposal you can put in the papers, with the numbers already filled in from your own plan
- The risks section is written straight, including what happens if you want to leave
- Motion wording your secretary can minute verbatim
- A 30-day free period means the board can approve a trial rather than a purchase
- No contract, no minimum term, and no setup fee to explain
“Half our members will never log in.”
Probably true, and it does not matter as much as you would think — because the parts that have to work for a member who will never log in are built to work without them logging in.
The organizing principle is that no member is ever required to create an account to do the thing they came to do.
See it as a member would →- Paying dues is a link in an email that opens a payment page — no account, no password, no app
- Event registration works the same way, from a phone, for someone who has never heard of us
- The member portal is a magic link, not a password anyone has to remember or reset
- Members with no email address stay full members — the roster does not require one, and plenty of long-standing members do not have one on file
- Your public website, directory and calendar keep working for everyone, signed in or not
And how long it takes
The other question boards ask, answered in elapsed time rather than features — with each step saying whose move it is.
- Day 0We do this
Your application is reviewed by a person
The only step that waits on us, and it is usually the same working day. The live demo needs no approval at all — you can be inside a real account before you apply. We review because we onboard every organization properly rather than at volume.
- Minute 0You do this
Upload the spreadsheet you already have
Export from wherever it lives and drop the CSV in. The importer matches your column names itself — First Name, first_name, Surname, Renewal Date all land in the right place without you mapping anything.
- Minute 1You do this
Check the twenty rows it shows you
Before anything is written, you see how the first rows parsed — including the dates, which are where a bad import hides. Wrong column? Change the mapping and look again. Nothing is committed until you say so.
- Minute 2You do this
The roster is live
Every member, their level, their renewal date and their tags, searchable and segmentable. This is the point at which the spreadsheet stops being the source of truth — and the point most people expected to reach in week three.
- Minutes 3–10You do this
Connect your own payment account
Your Stripe account, at your own rate. GatherAMS adds 0% — there is no application fee anywhere in the platform. Dues can be collected from the roster you just imported, on links that work on a phone.
- When you are readyYou do this
Invite the members
Nothing has reached anybody yet. The first member email goes out when you send it, to a list you have already looked at — not automatically, and not because an onboarding wizard decided the account was set up.
Still something unanswered?
Ask it directly. We answer every message ourselves — and if the answer is that we do not do the thing you need, we will say so rather than book a call to talk you round.