Board approval pack for new membership software
The step that kills more software switches than price does, and it usually fails for a boring reason: the person proposing it gets asked something at the meeting they cannot answer, the decision defers to next quarter, and next quarter nobody raises it again.
This is the proposal, written the way boards actually decide — cost, the alternative considered, the risks, and the motion. It is vendor-neutral in shape: use it to propose us, a competitor, or staying put. Boards approve proposals, not demos.
The one-page proposal
Replace the square brackets. Keep it to one page — a board paper that runs to four gets skimmed, and the questions you did not answer get asked out loud.
PROPOSAL: [ORGANIZATION] membership administration system
For the board meeting of [DATE] · Prepared by [NAME], [ROLE]
1. WHAT IS BEING PROPOSED
That [ORGANIZATION] move its membership records, dues collection
and member communication from [WHAT YOU USE TODAY] to
[PROPOSED SYSTEM], beginning with a [N]-day trial at no cost.
2. WHY NOW
[ONE OR TWO SENTENCES. The strongest version is a specific
incident, not a general complaint: "we could not produce a list
of members in good standing for the March vote", "the renewal
notices went out twice", "only one person can access the file".]
3. WHAT IT COSTS
Subscription: $[AMOUNT] per [month/year]
Setup / implementation: $[AMOUNT or "none"]
Payment processing: [YOUR PROCESSOR'S RATE], paid to
[PROCESSOR], unchanged from today
Platform fee on dues: [AMOUNT or "none"]
------------------------------------------------------------
Total year one: $[AMOUNT]
Against current spend of $[AMOUNT] a year across
[LIST THE TOOLS BEING REPLACED].
Net [saving / additional cost]: $[AMOUNT] a year.
4. ALTERNATIVES CONSIDERED
a. Do nothing — [WHAT THAT COSTS US: the volunteer hours, the
risk, the thing that will happen again]
b. [OTHER PRODUCT] — [WHY NOT: price, fit, or what it lacks]
c. [PROPOSED SYSTEM] — recommended, for the reasons above
5. RISKS, AND WHAT WE WOULD DO
Migration goes wrong We keep the current records
unchanged and read-only until the
new system is reconciled on three
numbers: total members, active
members, dues outstanding.
Members do not adopt it Paying dues and registering for
events require no member account.
Adoption is not a precondition for
the money to work.
The vendor fails or is Full export of members, payments
acquired and history at any time, in CSV, by
us and without their involvement.
It costs more than expected [WHAT THE CONTRACT SAYS: term,
notice period, price-change terms]
6. WHO DOES THE WORK
[NAME] leads the migration. Estimated [N] hours over [PERIOD].
No other volunteer's role changes until it is live.
7. MOTION
"That the board approve a [N]-day trial of [PROPOSED SYSTEM],
and delegate to [NAME] the authority to migrate membership
records and to enter a subscription not exceeding $[AMOUNT] per
year, subject to a report back to the board at the meeting of
[DATE]."
Moved: [NAME] Seconded: [NAME]
For: [N] Against: [N] Abstained: [N]
APPENDIX (attach, do not read out)
- Current spend, itemised by tool
- The export we would be able to take out, listed by file
- Quote or published pricing page, datedHow to use it in the room
Circulate it with the papers, not on the day. A board asked to read and decide in the same five minutes defers by default, and deferring is the outcome you are trying to avoid.
Section 5 is the one that wins the vote, and the instinct is to soften it. Do the opposite. A proposal that names its own risks and says what happens in each case reads as someone who has thought about it; a proposal with no risks section invites the board to invent risks you have not prepared for.
Ask for approval of a trial rather than a purchase. It is a much smaller decision, it is genuinely reversible, and it converts the argument from "is this the right system" — which nobody in the room can answer — to "is it worth [N] days of one volunteer's time to find out", which they can.
If the answer is no, get the reason minuted. "Deferred" with no reason is the state a proposal never comes back from; "deferred pending the treasurer's year-end" has a date attached to it.
The questions you will be asked
- 01
“What happens to the data if they go under?”
Answer with the export, specifically: what files, in what format, obtainable by you without the vendor's involvement. If the honest answer is that you cannot get your data out unaided, that is worth knowing before the vote rather than after.
- 02
“Who else has access?”
Name the people, not the roles. Boards are reassured by a number they can picture — "two of us, both with two-factor authentication on" lands better than "role-based access control".
- 03
“What about members who aren't online?”
The answer that works is that they stay full members with no change: post, cheques, and someone recording it for them. Any system that requires every member to hold an account will fail in a volunteer organization, and the board is right to test for it.
- 04
“Can we go back?”
Say what the exit actually looks like — the export, the notice period, and how long you would keep the old records read-only in parallel. Ninety days is a reasonable answer and a specific one.
- 05
“Why is the treasurer deciding our software?”
They are not — that is what the motion is for. Delegated authority with a reporting date is the shape of this decision, and section 7 is written to make that explicit.
Free to use, adapt and hand to whoever does this job next. If something here is wrong or missing, tell us and we will fix the page — contact us.