Motion - Approval of funding for funding over the allotted 2009 web budget for a one time expenditure to purchase aMember software for Razorback Reef membership management and integration with phpBB3, portal III and Coppermine Gallery. Purchase of the aMember is $179.95, phpBB3 extension $40, Coppermine extension $40 and installation by Georgi Hristov of $400 (around 10 billable hours). The expenditure is 659.95. The integration of our website will complete the 2nd phase of our work with the initial being forum revamp and visual integration of our gallery by Invision Blue to be complete in the coming weeks, second being membership management integration and at a later date the installation and integration of Joomla! as our content manager that will be the front page access to Razorback Reef. Integration of the programs that we use will mean that we can manage memberships throughout our website and allow the automation of a lot of the process that currently are manually done on an inconsistent bases primarily due to to the fact that we are all volunteers. My main concern is Razorback Reefs lack of securing renewals from members which I currently estimate at less than 30%. By more efficiently tracking our members we can communicate with them for a host of reasons along with membership renewals. Currently the president is the only member who maintains a member data base capable of mass and group emailings, loss of this basic database would create mass amounts of work to recreate so a management via the website rather than an individual officers pc is a matter of safety. We currently maintain a member database on our Other benefits of integrating with aMember allow for statistical reporting allowing the BOD to more effectively make decisions based on actual website usage, continued single sign on ability as our website grows, allow for customized membership fields for needed information, tracking of payments for memberships through PayPal and automatic emailing of members for membership renewals among other benefits. I encourage the BOD to visit aMembers website and read over what potential the program has and the exciting way in which its integration into our site will allow us to grow.
