For Members
How do I sign up?
Go to https://landcare.wgcma.vic.gov.au/ and select Join Landcare.
Fill out all the details and select your group.
Select next.
Choose your payment method (credit card or EFT/cheque/cash).
If you select credit card, fill out the details and if you would like a recurring (subscription) or once off payment.
If you select manual method, you will receive an email saying a group admin will follow up collection of this.
How do I login?
Go to https://landcare.wgcma.vic.gov.au/
Select Member Portal Login.
Fill out your email and password.
Hit Login.
How do I reset my password?
Go to https://landcare.wgcma.vic.gov.au/
Select Member Portal Login.
Click on the Forget your Password button.
Fill out your email.
An email with a password reset will be sent to your inbox.
How do I pay?
Login and click on the Memberships tab.
Choose your payment method (credit card or EFT/cheque/cash).
If you select credit card, fill out its details.
You can select recurring (subscription) or a once off payment.
If you select manual method, you will receive an email saying a group admin will follow up collection.
How can I update my details?
Login and click on the Profile tab.
Update your details and click Save Profile.
For Groups
What is the cost for my group of using the Portal? What is Stripe?
There is no general fee for using the platform.
However credit card payments are processed using Stripe, an online platform that connects your bank account to the portal.
To use Stripe groups are charged 1.75% plus 30c per transaction.
Money will automatically appear in your account minus the fee.
The charge is only for credit card payments and not manual payments.
How does the group membership fee work?
Each group sets their own membership fee.
Payment made by credit card will go straight to your bank account.
Payment made by one of the manual options will need to be followed up by an admin, they will get an email telling them to do this.
There are no joining fees.
Memberships are typically for one year, however they can also be two or three year memberships if your group would like.
Memberships are for the calendar year.
There is an ‘early sign-up period’, this is the period towards the end of the year where any new memberships roll-over to include the next year. The length of the early sign-up period is normally 60 days, but can be changed to suit a group by their network administrator.
What types of memberships can we have? Can we have free memberships?
There are four types of memberships: ‘Financial’, ‘Non-Financial’, ‘Provisional’ and ‘Archived’.
On the 1st of January each year, all memberships roll over to become non-financial, but remain in the system. Upon payment, memberships will be declared financial.
Members who are not active or likely to pay can be moved to ‘Archived’.
They will remain on your list and you can export their data to Excel.
They will not receive automatic renewal reminders.
You can also manually say a member is financial by choosing them as paid and selecting other. This can work for complimentary memberships, if they choose to pay via a manual method, they will be named ‘provisional’ until money is recorded by an admin.
What control does a group have over the membership lists?
Group admins have complete control over their membership list.
Admins can update details, see who has paid, move members to admins and downgrade back to members and export their list to excel.
Only reoccurring memberships can be cancelled.
The portal only allows for calendar year memberships – how does this relate to insurance, our AGM and membership calendar?
Annual subscriptions are a requirement in the LVI Rules; however they do not have a time frame on it, they just require it to be annual.
This will not impact the AGM either. The AGM just needs to be held within 5 months of the financial year (financial year for 99% of groups ends on 30 June each year).
The benefit of separating member timing and LVI timing is you have 6 months (start of each year) to finalise your membership before you have to complete your LVI membership, rather than scrambling to collect members and finalise numbers at the same time your LVI membership is due.
So yes, this may mean some groups may have to either shorten last year’s membership or lengthen in order to line up with the new standardised timing. Please let us know if this will be an issue for your group.
I’m a group that wants to start using the portal, what do I do?
Contact rlc@wgcma.vic.gov.au with your group name and admin contact details, and we will set up your group in the portal.
The next step is to set up a Stripe account to connect the portal to your bank account. See our Stripe instructions for how to do this.
You can then email your group members with a link to the portal and/or add them manually to the system.
They will get an email asking them to reset their password and pay their fees.
I’m concerned about privacy and security. What is being done about this?
Just like a normal group, the group executives who are setup as admins in the portal will only be able to see their own membership list. Group admins can change the member’s contact details, membership fee, group information.
More broadly, data on the system is protected via encryption and various other methods by Olivitek Software. The backup regime for the portal is daily backups retained for 30 days and monthly backups retained for 6 months. The portal is stored on a server, separate to the WGCMA server pool, in the CT private cloud. The physical location of this is NextDC Datacentre in Port Melbourne with backups stored at their secondary data centre site in South East Melbourne. More information about privacy can be found here: https://landcare.wgcma.vic.gov.au/terms