There are lots of settings in your CRM to customise your membership scheme. 

Once you’ve installed the Membership add on, and completed all of your set up steps, you’ll see 4 green ticks.

We’ll generate two links here: one for your membership sign up page, which includes all of your public plans, and one for your membership management portal. This is the portal your members can sign into and manage their own details.

There are lots of other settings on this page, which can be used to configure your membership scheme.

You can specify the email address to notify of new sign ups to your membership scheme – or leave this blank, to keep this switched off.

You can set the default forms which are used when new members sign up to a membership, or edit their profile through their self management portal. If you need to set different forms for one plan in particular, don’t worry – you can specify a different form when you set up that plan.
If you’d like members to be able to edit their linked Organisation’s details too, you can switch that on and specify which form to use. Bear in mind that you’ll need to connect new members to their organisation, in order to grant them access to edit those details.

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We know all membership schemes are different, and you might not actually use the term ‘membership’. Here, you can set a different name, like patrons, friends, supporters – however you refer to your regular supporters, set that here.

You can also change the wording on your sign up and thank you pages, to give it a personal touch.

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Once your membership scheme is up and running, your CRM will send automated emails to your members throughout their renewal cycle. Every new member will receive an activation email, with a link to set up their password for their membership management portal. You can add in some additional copy to these emails here, and view the preview on the right hand side.These emails will carry your branding too, so make sure you’ve completed the branding set up before you go live with your membership scheme.

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Next, you can amend your plan settings, which relate to your members regular payments. 

Your membership scheme prices might change over the years. If you’d like all members to be automatically updated, so they pay the current price for their membership, tick this setting on. This will take effect from their next renewal date. Otherwise, their payment will remain the same as when they first joined your scheme.

You can also allow members to change their own plan from their membership management portal. If ticked, they’ll see the option to switch to your other public plans in their portal.

When they switch plans, you can choose to pro-rate their payment for the year – so for example if they move to a more expensive plan, they’ll be charged the difference, pro-rated based on how far away their next renewal is. If they downgrade to a less expensive plan, they’ll receive a credit if paying by card, though do note we can’t refund Direct Debit payments. If you leave this setting switched off, we’ll just charge them the new amount for their new plan at next renewal.

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Finally, you can select to offer offline payment as an option for your members. We don’t recommend this option, as it relies on your staff to handle invoicing and payment collection outside of the CRM, but you may wish to offer this option for some plans. 

If your membership scheme qualifies, you can also choose to mark all membership payments as donations within your CRM, and collect Gift Aid declarations for them – be sure to check you’re eligible, before switching this on. 

You’ll need to enter your charity number into your Fundraising settings in order for us to collect GiftAid Declarations – we’ll cover this in our Fundraising training later on.