Help - UK Co-op Membership Records

Hey everyone,

If you have a spare 30 seconds, could you tell me really briefly how you’re keeping track of your co-op membership? I’m trying to work out what the options are…

If you also run any digital services, I’d love to hear if/how they relate to the system above.

If you also also have raised any community shares, I’d love to hear if/how they relate to this system too.

Thanks!

PS - If this post fills you with rage at the sheer mention of “keep track of… membership”, just smash your keyboard and submit that and I’ll get the gist :pray:

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Hey Matt! Great to see you back.

At first I thought you were asking how we keep track of our Co-op UK membership (we don’t really), but as I let the message sink in I think you’re asking about member co-ops or those who run members services, how they keep track of their membership. Is that right?

Exactly! I’m really secretly asking about the legal “Register of Members” that all co-ops are required to keep but really any record of who’s part of the coop is what I’d like to know about.

For many years I’ve used CiviCRM to record community shares, memberships, and at a push to generate the member register, for a few cooperatives that I’ve been involved in. It’s not ideal for the register, but it helps. I’ve also just become aware of a new extension to support the Member Register for cooperatives in Italy - GitHub - civihost/eu.civihost.memberbook - so that might be a good place to start to make a UK-friendly version.

There’s also good work happening in the UK to enable CiviCRM to be useful for managing community shares beyone just recording the purchase. See CiviShares | CiviCRM and CoShares data | CiviCRM

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Most of the digital co-ops I know are way too small for it to be necessary to “track membership” as they only have a few members. Are there specific things you need to track? Is it more complicated relations, like part-time workers etc.?

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Hi Matt,

It all comes down to the size of your Co-op I guess. As Graham says CiviCRM seems to be popular for some, others use spreadsheet, larger Co-op’s have whole bespoke Membership systems.

So, it depends on your size, budget and needs really.

We’re currently starting the process of re-writing one such systems for a Co-op, but chances are this would be overkill for most Co-ops.

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We use our internal wiki which runs Outline.

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It might be worth getting in touch with the Ecological Land Co-operative. :smiley:

https://ecologicalland.coop/

They purchase farmland for use as farming co-operatives.

They raise capital using 5-year Bonds backed by the value of the land they are going to purchase, using a very similar legal mechanic to a leveraged buy-out, but to a very different purpose.

The ownership of the land is put into a legal structure using a co-operative ownership model. That land is then leased to the farming co-op’s that work the land. The Farming Co-operative’s are the Worker-Members of the Land-Owning Co-operative, while the Bond-Holders are Investor-Members.

Once the Bonds are paid back, via the rents paid by the farming co-op’s, the Investor-Members will withdraw from the Land-Owning Co-operative, so the only members of the Land-Owning Co-op, will be the Worker-Members, who are the farming co-operatives that are owned by their workers.

In essence, it gets the farmworkers to own and control the legal shell, that owns and controls the legal shell that owns the land.

Via a two-stage ownership system, they own their own landlord. :smiley:

In order to do the Bond Issues in the UK, the Ecological Land Co-op operates under the auspices of the FCA, which means keeping careful track of everything, including the Member Registers you were asking about. :smiley:

They would have a lot of useful advice about how they did this, as well as advice about being compliant with the UK Financial Regulator’s requirements. :smiley:

The organisation that worked on the Bond side of the legal details is Ethex:

https://www.ethex.org.uk/

They are always raising finance for community projects, CIC’s, as well as Co-op’s. They would be another source of good advice, as well as having contacts with all of their other successful past projects. :smiley:

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Hi Matt/all,

Just “do it”! I.e. start with a very basic spreadsheet recording your members. Start with just some very basic fields and then add to them as you need them. Think about if all of these fields need to be filled in for every single member or if there are “optional”/not always needed/applicable fields. If there are, perhaps mark the compulsory fields in the header with a star (*).

Once you’ve been doing these basics for a while, you can not only build on this with additonal sheets, within the same workbook, but using it will also give you an idea of what advantages you might get out of a more advanced system.

I’m happy to talk about this some more, my website is JMAutomations.scot and my number is 07760 272 563.

This is my first time posting in Co-tech because I’ve not got around to writing an introductory message yet but basically I’m a sole trader who’s planning to become a coop when the business becomes not just me.

My business actually specialises in optimising and automating these types of processes.

Thanks,

James

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Loving the variety of responses - thanks everyone! Keep 'em coming!