Set Up Your Online Borrowing Platform
Guidance on the borrowing platforms that are available to support your project and borrowing processes and procedures
There are two main online borrowing platforms on the market, Lend Engine and My Turn. Most Benthyg locations tend to use Lend Engine, which was developed in Wales.
We are working with My Turn and Lend Engine to develop resources to support setting up and managing your borrowing platform.
We now have dedicated chapters for these borrowing platform resources - Chapter 26 for My Turn and Chapter 27 for Lend Engine.
Your online borrowing platform should make it easy for members to reserve and borrow items from your Library of Things and easy for staff and volunteers to follow your standard processes by automating as many of them as possible, keeping an audit trail of your risk mitigations.
Your borrowing platform should also include a Terms and Conditions page with your borrower’s agreement and liability waiver for members to refer back to at any time; this should also be linked on every automated email to reminded members that they have signed and agreed to these terms.
You can set up different categories of membership, and different annual fees for those members.
We recommend having a free membership option wherever possible to encourage borrowing, or at minimum having a concessionary rate, to encourage people to sign up whatever their circumstances. You may wish to have a different membership category and fee for community groups, and businesses.
You can also set up special discounted memberships for students, blue light card workers (NHS, Police etc).
Your online borrowing platform will also function as a database and data collection point, so bear that in mind as you set it up and tailor your processes to mitigate risk at every opportunity.
For example, you can make it compulsory for your staff and volunteers to obtain a signed borrower’s agreement and liability waiver from each member prior to their first borrow and you can also save signed forms against members’ contact information, providing a clear audit trail for that process.
You can also integrate Lend Engine with MailChimp and create mailing lists and newsletters. For this reason, you may wish to create a separate category for volunteers to send them tailored updates.
You can set payments up on your platform for the money to go into your designated bank account via stripe and take payments on collection using cash or card payments (if you have a card machine).
The system also supports automatic email prompts; when someones signs up as a member, when they reserve an item, when they collect an item, when its due back and if the item becomes overdue.
Please note that you will need to personalise your borrowing platform and automated emails with your project information to ensure it is relevant to your community.
Please get in touch with us if you would like to discuss support in setting up your borrowing platform.
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