Membership

Many groups seem to be going for Direct Debits for renewals - I'm always happy to sign up for this approach.

 

taking Heritage a bit far, that

 

Standing orders or direct debits? My understanding is that (understandably), the conditions for an organisation to be able to take Direct Debits (the ability to take an amount of money from your account, at their discretion) is far more onerous than accepting Standing Orders (where you elect to pay a regular amount, at your discretion), to the point where the compliance issues may not be feasible for small organisations. They can request that you set up membership renewals as a standing order (much simpler), but that has the disadvantage that it creates an administrative burden if membership rates change over time, since it is highly likely that many people will end up paying too little in their renewal and the organisation will have to request that the standing order is amended and / or collect the residual payment.

Tom

 

My understanding too. I can only think of one membership organisation that I belong to which can accommodate Direct Debits, whereas Standing Orders are common.

 

My particular beef is over my oldest's Junior Membership of a non railway preservation society which has to be done by paypal then send an e-mail to the man who understands these things.

I have suggested that you should be able to make a single payment to cover him till he's 18 but it hasn't happened yet.

 

Here in deepest Kent we still have 2 competing coal merchants with lorries that deliver weekly. As I'm never in I order and pay online by credit card and get a phone call to tell me its been delivered.

 

yes we do exactly that with our oil delivery, although the driver will take a card if you want. We usually get around to paying before we run out again, which isn't a problem as we are a regular customer and they're a local firm.

 

I'm currently going through the process of setting up a direct debit scheme, it is much harder than standing orders as you have to get your bank to sponsor you, although there quite a lot of bureaux out there to do the processing for you it's still a hassle.

 

Personally, direct debit and so on is not the major issue for me. Its the fact that you can't simply hit a bitton to pay, redirect to sage pay or pay pal, job done, 2 minutes.