Membership Process Automation

Project Portfolio
Systems & Operations

Membership Process Automation

Replacing inconsistent paper agreements and manual handling with a system that enforced consistency at every step.

Smartsheet Workflow Automation Process Design Project Management
Context
Big Canoe Property Owners Association, North Georgia
Timeline
July to December 2024
My Role
Sole designer and builder
The Problem

Big Canoe is a private residential community with resort-style amenities serving thousands of property owners. Managing membership for a community of that scale is operationally intensive: new memberships, cancellations, membership changes, and medical leave requests all required individual handling by the Membership Director through phone calls and emails.

Every transaction was manual. Each request arrived through a different channel, required its own back-and-forth, and was tracked informally. The volume was manageable until it wasn’t, and the process offered no consistency, no audit trail, and no path to scale.

There was a second problem underneath the first: the organization had no formal membership agreements. Members were enrolling and making changes with no signed documentation in place. There was nothing to reference, nothing to enforce, and no record that a member had ever acknowledged the terms of their membership.

What Was Built

I redesigned the membership process from the ground up in Smartsheet, building automated workflows that allowed members to submit requests digitally through a centralized system and introduced formal agreements where none had previously existed.

Membership Agreements Wrote and built the organization’s first formal membership agreements, covering new memberships, changes, and medical leave. These were created by referencing the POA’s Amenity Membership Provisions document, and integrated into the digital submission process so members acknowledged terms at the point of request.
Digital Submission System A centralized intake point covering all core membership request types: new memberships, cancellations, changes, and medical leave. Members submitted through a single consistent channel instead of calling or emailing.
Request Routing and Notifications Each request type was routed appropriately on submission, triggering automated notifications to the right staff and keeping the member informed without manual follow-up.
Automated Logging Changes were logged automatically as requests moved through the system, creating a reliable record that had not existed before and reducing the risk of requests falling through the cracks.
The Impact

Daily email and call volume to the Membership Director dropped significantly. Response times improved and the experience for members became more consistent and professional. Staff who had been spending time on administrative back-and-forth were freed to focus on higher-value work.

The agreements piece had a different kind of impact. For the first time the organization had signed documentation on file for every membership transaction, giving staff and leadership a clear record and a reference point that had not existed before. The process went from entirely informal to documented, traceable, and defensible.

The deeper value was structural. The community was growing, and the old process had no room to scale. The new system did.

Skills Demonstrated
Smartsheet Workflow automation Process redesign Digital intake systems Agreement and documentation writing Automated routing and notifications Stakeholder management Project management

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