Read more about how the Faecal Sludge Management Alliance is successfully achieving its goals and growing its membership base with Glue Up.
The Faecal Sludge Management Alliance (FSMA) was established in mid-2019 and is based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It was created with a vision to work towards a world where all people, everywhere, enjoy equitable access to safely managed and dignified sanitation services. The FSMA is a member-based network that supports organizations and individuals working in faecal sludge management (FSM; the containment, collection, transport, treatment, and safe reuse or disposal of human waste). Its goal is to create a collaborative, responsive, and collective platform to advocate for the adoption and implementation of FSM as a utility service. They also support their members in their work in helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2, to achieve safe access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all.
The organization is about two years old and launched its membership in November 2020. They are a young organization with over 100 members. Its member network comprises sanitation workers, academics researching in the field, companies from the private sector, government agencies, and international donors. The FSM Alliance was established to provide a platform for all stakeholders in the faecal sludge management sector and to bring them together through international in-person and online conferences that exclusively focus on faecal sludge management and by providing a membership platform where these stakeholders can exchange knowledge, connect, and work together to improve the sector.
Amongst the few member organizations that focus on water, sanitation, and hygiene in a more general context, the FSM Alliance is the only association that focuses exclusively on faecal sludge management. Jan Heinecke, the organization’s program coordinator in charge of events and memberships, worked closely with Glue Up to improve FSMA’s event planning and membership management capacities. Read on to learn more about how the FSM Alliance is using Glue Up to achieve its goals.
Launching Our Membership with Glue Up
Before we initially launched our membership, we did not have another membership management system in place. We started with Glue Up by setting everything up before we publicly launched in November 2020. While establishing the organization, we had already clearly defined the membership types we would offer and how much each membership would cost.
However, we were not clear on which management system we would use to manage the membership. We were looking for a system that could help us manage our membership's administrative aspect, such as applications and payments. Additionally, we were looking for a CRM where we could store more than just our members’ data, to use it as our general database.
We discovered Glue Up through a recommendation from one of our board members. After considering other providers in the market, we chose Glue Up because we were impressed by its membership management platform and the support we received from our sales agent at the time and Glue Up’s customer success team. Help was always available whenever we experienced any challenges or needed clarifications on how the platform works.
A Membership Management Platform that Surpassed Our Expectations
We chose Glue Up for several reasons. We appreciated that Glue Up customized its pricing to accommodate our non-profit organization and offered us a very fair price. More importantly, Glue Up offered us more than the membership and CRM system that we were initially looking for. In addition to Glue Up’s membership and CRM modules, we realized that we could also utilize the event management and email campaigns module. We are now using Glue Up to manage our memberships, events, and email campaigns as we look into more features and add-ons that we can use in the future.
Glue Up Continuously Evolves to Meet Customer Needs
We appreciate that Glue Up is constantly adding new features and bug fixes to provide more value and improve our experience on the platform. It has been an exciting experience to grow with Glue Up and to have our customer success manager listen to our suggestions for improvements and have any problems we experience solved right away.
Streamlining Online Event Management and Increasing Member Engagement with Glue Up
Establishing our organization during the COVID-19 pandemic was both interesting and challenging because we were also planning the Sixth Edition International Faecal Sludge Management Conference 2021 (FSM6). The biennial FSM Conference is our primary platform for connecting people, government officials, agencies, and businesses to promote actions towards FSM.
We originally started planning the conference as a normal in-person event, but as the pandemic continued we also had to consider and plan for other scenarios where the conference could become an online or hybrid event due to the COVID-related restrictions. In the end, we decided to hold the conference fully virtually. The process to get to this decision was time-consuming and sometimes frustrating because we could not predict the state of events in 2021.
However, it was useful for us that we used Glue Up’s event management module to familiarize ourselves with running virtual events for our members. The module has helped us streamline processes such as event registrations and creating event landing pages. Apart from our major FSM Conference, we run four different categories of online events to engage our diverse member portfolio. For example, we host technical webinars where engineers and academics present their research, share case studies and best practices in faecal sludge management.
We also run regular sessions on the FSM Toolbox, which offers different online tools for people looking to assess and improve their sanitation services, as well as other capacity-building sessions available to sector professionals. Other aspects of our webinars include social topics on sanitation, such as improving sanitation service delivery for women and children or marginalized groups. We are also organizing networking events and are looking forward to using Glue Up’s Speed Networking tool to bring more people together to foster new connections and collaborations.
Enjoying the Best of Glue Up’s Features on an All-In-One Platform
Launching our membership with Glue Up and having all our membership processes working seamlessly has been the biggest win for the FSM Alliance. The setup process was easy, and the platform is also easy to use, especially for our staff members. More importantly, we are happy that the platform’s front end has made our membership workflow more intuitive for our members. It has also put us in a great position to focus on growing our membership and potentially try other features such as the community feature and speed networking tool in the future. We are looking forward to engaging our members more with Glue Up.
The membership management and event management modules have been the most useful to our organization. The event management module has improved our registration process and made setting up our event pages much easier. The email marketing campaigns module has also made our communications more effective and simple.
“I would recommend Glue Up because it combines all the different tools you need in one place. This includes memberships, events, email campaigns, and a powerful CRM that allows us to track our members’ engagement from email campaigns to events to their membership. I would also recommend Glue Up because you will be dealing with very nice people.”
Jan Heinecke, Program Coordinator at the Faecal Sludge Management Alliance (FSMA)
Promoting Membership Growth and Expansion With Glue Up
Our main focus is to grow our membership. To convert individuals into members, we follow up on and nurture those who attended the Sixth Edition International Faecal Sludge Management Conference 2021 (FSM6) and our other events. We also have plans for new initiatives and content to help us acquire more members. One of these initiatives is to explore the creation of a global industry standard for Faecal Sludge Management. We believe a global FSM standard is a powerful way to mobilize and grow the FSM industry and a concrete framework to use when engaging the private sector. It is needed to remove significant sources of uncertainty and disincentives for FSM sector stakeholders and to create market drivers that stimulate demand for FSM approaches.
The right software or system can decide an organization’s growth and ability to achieve its goals. The FSM Alliance is an organization with clear goals and ambitions on improving faecal sludge management locally and internationally. With Glue Up’s All-In-One Membership Management Software, the FSM Alliance aims to achieve its goals while growing its membership by streamlining membership management processes and better engaging its members through relevant events. Book a demo of Glue Up’s Membership Management Software and discover how Glue Up is helping organizations worldwide focus on what matters most to them.
