Membership Team Issues
Most of our members pay by standing order or other electronic means. If you do not, please consider it. It saves on our administration processes, reduces delays, and means less work for the admin team who can then spend more time boating. We send details with your renewal. Most new members these days join with PayPal, because it can be done on line there and then. We had some troubles with the PayPal account during the summer, but it is back in action again with links on the website for access. PayPal is great, and easy on administration; the only downside being it costs us about £1 per payment. Is there a chance that you could change to counter credit, direct transfer or standing order?
We are now in the final stages of the move away from members’ standing order payments going to our Santander account. This has now been closed and any payment attempted to the account will now be bounced back to the payee. We have written to every member to which this applies at least twice and only a handful remain to confirm that the change has been made. Those members will be reminded again at their next renewal. If you want to double-check now, the sort codes of our banks are Barclays 20-37-13 and Santander 09-01-51. A big thank you to all members who have helped with this.
We still use paper systems, with membership renewals going out this way, but if members ask us to send membership renewals by email we are happy to do this. Just send us a message or you can request this online in your membership records page. Please only do this if email is a regular part of your life: there is no use asking for correspondence in this way if you never look at your email. And not to worry, we will not be going all email anytime soon. We know that most of our membership prefer to have paper communication. Don’t forget that we send out an email bulletin covering the month’s representative activities and other snippets of news. You only get this if we have your email. We never give email addresses to third parties.
And finally, we understand that members sell their boats and go ashore. It is part of the normal cycle of membership that we have always seen. Please tell us if that applies to you. If you continue to receive NABO News after your renewal date has passed, it is a sure indication that we are hoping and expecting you will renew. We do not cut this off for a couple of months in case you are away boating and missed the renewal. Just let us know; it saves our time writing again, and checking and rechecking.
Thank you for all your assistance, and don’t forget to find us some new members! If each of you found a single new member, it is self-evident that we would double our membership.
All the best from the Membership Team
David Fletcher
