After the popularity of our last "top tips" post, here are some more ideas to help you manage your Student Groups, and make your members' experiences with joining your Sports Clubs and Societies easier!

1) Categorise your Student Groups in multiple ways.

As well as the default "Category" attribute set, try adding a "Campus" attribute (and add a "Campus" filter to your groupings list) if your Students' Union supports students over several campuses as you can see on ARU Students' Union's website.

Add "Awards" attributes so your Student Groups can display any awards they have achieved on their website page as you can see here on one of CUSU's society pages. Information about how to do this can be found here on our Knowledge Base.

Or add a "Status" attribute so you can display some of your groups separately on the website if they are brand new and need more members like Heriot-Watt University Student Union has done with their "Members Wanted" page.

To find out how to create multiple attribute sets, take a look at our Grouping Types support page.

2) Give your committee members the ability to list their own tickets and stash.

Get in touch with MSL if you would like us to enable the create tickets and/ or create products pages within your committee member's admin tools, where they can also add customisation options to any tickets or products they add. Once enabled, check your committee members have the "Edit events" and/or "Edit products" permissions. Give them "View sales reports" permission so they can quickly and easily see a record of any purchases of their tickets and products. For more information about how your organisation admins can create products and tickets, take a look at our "Sell products and tickets (Committee members)" support page. 

3) Set the default finance codes for each of your Student Groups per-product type.

 If default finance codes aren't set, when a Student Group without a default finance code creates a product, the product will be created without a finance code linked to it which may cause issues with financial reporting and exporting till readings. Setting default finance codes for your groups allows your groups to create products (tickets, merchandise, etc.) that are linked to finance codes - this can all be done in bulk via your Admin Website. Find out how to bulk import finance codes, bulk update finance codes, and set default finance codes here on our Knowledge Base.

4) Remove your system's current Global Expiry Date before selling next year's memberships.

Make sure your new membership expiry dates are set correctly by letting MSL know when you're ready to start selling memberships for the next academic year. The system maintains a list of Global Expiry Dates (GED), one per year. By default, a new membership will use the current value of the GED. Ask MSL to delete the current GED before students start purchasing memberships for the forthcoming year - once it's been deleted any new memberships will then last until the next year's GED. Any existing memberships are unaffected by these changes.  

5) Set a membership renewal window.

If you don't want your students to be able to purchase a new membership for a Student Group until a specific date we can apply a renewal window to your memberships. If a student is already a member of a group and they try and repurchase before the renewal window they will see a friendly message advising them of the date they can renew their memberships. For more information take a look at our support page here.

6) Need your members to provide next of kin information, and/ or agree to a code of conduct before purchasing a membership, ticket, or other product?

If you would like us to bulk enable the "Next of kin" details collection for all of your membership products, or if you'd like us to create a custom product agreement please get in touch. Check out our support page about how to collect additional information during the purchase process here.

You might also be interested in...

Finding out more about how our MSL Student Group Finances module could help to manage your Student Group's expenses claims. Watch the recent whistle-stop web tour recording here!

Thank you!

We hope you've found some of these tips useful - please share your own tips with us, or get in touch by emailing support@ukmsl.com for help using any of these features.

If there is a particular theme or topic you'd like us to cover, please send us your suggestions and we'll bear them in mind when planning our next post.