Dear all,
I have just sent reminder notices to quite a few of you, as many memberships expire at the end of October. Additionally, many already expired or soon to expire members also received a reminder notice for the third time.
It again has come to my attention that quite a few people pay by check and that our check processing is haphazard and not efficient, mainly because it's a manual process involving the postal system, and we do not have an efficient way of dealing with checks, as a virtual organisation. If you pay through PayPal, we typically activate or renew your membership within 24 hours, and it is far less likely to slip through the cracks.
So please, can I encourage you all to use PayPal for your renewal payment?
In fact, currently I am developing the new version of the website and I'm currently spending time to write software that allows us to process PayPal payments automatically. That way, no further human intervention is required, and someone who pays through PayPal will see their access to the full member details activated almost instantaneously.
In the Pagoda SL Group we've been using our PayPal account quite happily for the last few years, paying the expenses of the club through PayPal and receiving payments from a majority of members. As we are not an incorporated organisation, we cannot open merchant accounts or even regular bank accounts, so PayPal is pretty much the only option open to us.
Yet there appear to be quite a few members who prefer to pay by check, even if the risk on lost checks is much higher, than by PayPal. What I'd like to know is why? On the new version of the system we will still offer a mechanism for payment without PayPal, but it is clearly going to be much less attractive to us as a group to handle these payments.
Peter
