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[krahling]

The Richland Astronomical Society in Mansfield, Ohio uses the Night Sky Network platform for membership management.  Are there any other clubs use it as well?  

 

The primary advantages are that it's free (to the club) and relatively easy to use.  It manages our membership, membership applications, public and private calendar, outreach events and tracking, dues status, etc.  

 

The biggest weaknesses I've found are:

• It doesn't support pasting from MS Word into email messages without a lot of massaging of the text.  This is most apparent when sending out meeting agendas and minutes with an above average amount of formatting.
• It doesn't allow attachments - which is understandable and probably for the best.  So we send links to the documents in the emails.  

We maintain two membership rosters:  The one on the NSN and then the Excel spreadsheet for the Astronomical League roster.  It's relatively easy to pull from NSN and update the AL roster.  

 

We'd like to hear from other clubs that use NSN and their experiences and suggestions for using it effectively.

 

 

 

[JMW]

I was our club's treasurer about a decade ago. I joined the Night Sky Network first as a means of enabling members to independently get astronomy magazine discounts without my involvement. I also tried to have the club use the NSN site for additional public outreach. The interest waxed and wained so sometimes activities were published and other times they weren't.  Our current club leadership reached out to me about the Night Sky Network and I added one of them as a coordinator so they could add new members to NSN and look into publishing events at the NSN site. 

 

My current involvement with our club is just as a member and my wife and I do several public outreach events with the club each year and sometime's give a presentation to members at the monthly meeting.

 

I think NSN is a good resource and can be another useful way to give the club exposure.