The Membership Campaign is the feature that lets you manage your memberships, register your members, add them to your database, and track dues payment status.
A Membership Campaign can be online or offline (learn more here), and lets you differentiate groups of members based on different pricing tiers when needed.
This article covers the following topics:
- What Membership Campaigns are used for
- Member status and associated permissions
- Managing membership periods
- Editing a member's membership dates
What Membership Campaigns are used for
Adapting the campaign to your organization's needs
Member sign-ups are managed in the Forms > Memberships module. Depending on your organization's needs, you can set things up in several ways:
- One campaign per season/year: one for year N, one for year N+1, and so on;
- One campaign per member type: if your members fall into distinct categories (e.g., professionals vs. individuals) with different membership plans;
- One campaign per activity type: if your nonprofit runs multiple activities with different membership plans, we recommend creating one campaign per activity.
How memberships connect to other features
When you register someone through a Membership Campaign, you're telling the system that this person is a member. Several things then happen automatically:
- The member will be added to your Community contact list. You can identify them in the list using the
icon;
- Membership accounting entries (and the corresponding payment, if applicable) will be automatically recorded in the Accounting module. Learn more: Entries recorded automatically in accounting.
Read this article for more information on creating Membership Campaigns.
Member status and associated permissions
How the platform defines a member
Your contact database (Community) contains everyone connected to your nonprofit: donors, members, former members, administrators, and more.
A member is someone who pays dues to the nonprofit — in other words, a person recorded in the database who is linked to the organization through a financial transaction.
Member status applies for a set period (unless you allow lifetime memberships): when someone joins, they are considered a member for a period you define. Once that period ends, they are treated as a former member.
Identifying members in your Community
Since members are a distinct group, they are already flagged with the member badge in your Community, and you can find them quickly using the simple filter.
You can also run a more advanced filter (by membership dates) using the Refine function, as explained in this article.
Managing membership periods
Setting the length of a membership period
You can configure membership periods at step 2 of your Membership Campaign. This setting applies only to required pricing tiers (membership plans) and not to optional ones.
There are three ways to define when a person is considered a member:
- Date to date: for example, from 09/01/2023 to 08/31/2024;
- X months from the membership date: for example, 12 months starting 09/01/2023;
- Lifetime: the person becomes a member from their sign-up date or a set date (e.g., 09/01/2023), and their membership never expires.
Membership period and accounting period
The membership period and the accounting period don't automatically align — you define the start and end dates for each independently.
The ideal setup is to align them: for example, have both your membership period and your accounting period run from 01/01/2023 to 12/31/2023. The same applies if your memberships end on 08/31.
If your membership period doesn't match your accounting period, you can carry over membership-related entries to the next period using deferred revenue.
Read here how to record one or more memberships as deferred revenue.
Editing a member's membership dates
Editing a specific transaction
To edit a member's membership period, go to the Members tab of your Membership Campaign, then click the eye icon to view the transaction details.
On the transaction page, click the Edit button:
Clicking this button lets you update the membership period and save your changes.
Adding a membership period from the Community
It is not possible to bulk-edit an end date or delete membership periods. You'll need to update the period from each individual transaction (see the previous section).
You can also add a membership period from Community > Contacts:
- Select the relevant members, then click + options:
- Check Add as member and enter the desired membership period;
- Click Confirm:
Learn more:
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