En-Nur

The community managed memberships and donations through third-party software. It was expensive and inflexible, but the core issue was that it had never been built for a mosque. Generic membership tools are designed around the average association, so they arrive with their own assumptions about how members register, how fees are collected and how money is reported. The community’s actual requirements had to be squeezed into fields and processes designed for someone else, and the ones that didn’t fit simply weren’t supported.

The result was a tool the people running the community spent their time working around rather than with. Work the software should have done still happened by hand, and every month they paid a subscription for a system that didn’t match how they operate.

They needed a system built around their own requirements, at a cost that made sense for a community organisation, and one they would own rather than rent.

Discovery meant working through, with the people who run the community, the questions any system has to answer before it can be designed. Who can become a member and how they register. When a monthly payment falls due and what happens if it’s missed. How donations differ from membership fees and how each needs to be recorded. What the admins need to see at the end of every month.

Those answers became the brief, and anything that didn’t serve them didn’t get built.

The admin dashboard carries the complexity. Members, payments, donations and reporting all live here, because this is where the work of running the community happens. Payment status is visible across the whole membership, so the question of who is up to date has an immediate answer.

The member dashboard stays simple. Three things: your details, your payments, your status. A member can update their information and see exactly where they stand without having to ask anyone, which also spares the admins a whole category of questions.

Reminders are automated. When a payment falls due, the system sends the reminder itself. Admins no longer have to work out each month who needs one.

Donations are kept separate from membership fees. They are different kinds of money with different meanings, so they are recorded separately and reported separately. Admins get clear donation reporting without having to untangle it from membership payments first.