Managing Memberships Plans

Within your Membership dashboard, you’ll see an overview of your membership scheme and all of your members. 

We can see how many active members we have for each of our schemes, as well as lapsed and cancelled members.

Our ‘pending’ members are those who have signed up through Direct Debit and haven’t yet paid their first membership payment, as well as those who are signed up through invoice but haven’t been marked as ‘paid’ just yet. Your lapsed members will remain lapsed for up to 4 months after we attempt to take a renewal payment, until they’re moved into cancelled.

Below our overview, there are lots of handy reports which can be filtered by date and downloaded into spreadsheets here.

From your membership dashboard, you can manage your Membership plans and the options that prospective members have to join the scheme.

You can give your plan a name, and a description which will be displayed to members. Select how often this plan renews, and the price, including any joining fees which are just charged at the point they join the scheme. This is also handy for ‘lifetime’ memberships, where members pay a one off fee, and then their membership is essentially ‘free’ for the life of the membership.

You’ll have the option to accept payment via card, direct debit, or invoice. The invoice option will only appear if you’ve enabled ‘offline payments’ within your membership settings. You can vary the options by plan here, which allows you to create different priced plans for Card and Direct Debit, for example. Bear in mind that for invoice payments, you’ll need to keep on top of invoicing and processing these payments, then marking these members as paid in the CRM.

Memberships can be shared, so you can select a maximum number of people to share with here. This number doesn’t include the person that sets up the membership – so set this as zero for individual plans, where the member cannot share their membership with anyone else. Once someone signs up for the shared plan, they’re then able to invite others to join as a member, and they’ll join your scheme in the usual way – so they’ll be asked to complete a form, but won’t be asked for any payment information.

You can vary the membership forms used for this membership, or just opt to use your default membership forms, as set in your membership settings. This can be handy if you have a specific institutional or corporate membership plan, where you’ll need to vary the form that is filled in.

Finally, you can decide whether to allow this membership plan to appear on your signup page – for honorary plans, legacy plans or otherwise ‘invite only’ type schemes, you can keep these private and just share a joining link directly with your prospective members.

Once your plan is configured, you can add new members to this plan. This can be accessed via your membership sign up page, or a direct link which you can send out to prospective members. Bear in mind that the links generated for private plans will expire after a month, and can only be used once.

To add a member manually, head to your Memberships dashboard and click ‘Add Member’.

GoodCRM also supports discounts on memberships, which can either be set up with promotional codes, or can be set up to apply automatically if no code is required. We support both percentage discounts and whole number discounts, and these can be made date specific too – this is helpful if you have an annual plan that renews on the same date each year, so members who join later in the year get a respective discount. 

Now we’ve configured our plans, our membership scheme is ready to sign up to. Here, you can see the form which members must fill in to create this membership. All that’s left is for your supporters to sign up!

Managing members

From your membership home, you’re able to see all of your members and filter by their membership status.

Taking a look at our example member here, we can see a connection to their CRM profile, their plan name, the status of their membership, the renewal date, and a link to their payment subscription which links off to your payment processor’s website. 

We can see the invoice history here for our member, and if this member pays via invoice, we can record a payment here manually. This will be automatic for card and Direct Debit payments, but be aware you’ll need to mark invoices as paid if they are handled outside of GoodCRM.

We have various options to manage this member, from the 3 dots on the left hand side. If we want to change the Stripe or Go Cardless subscription that is linked to their membership, we can do this here. We can also cancel their membership, either immediately or from next renewal, which will trigger an email to this member.

Clicking the ‘Manage for member’ option will log us in as if we are this member, so we can view their Membership Management portal. This area will carry your brand colours and logo here, so make sure you’ve configured your brand settings in the CRM first!

From the membership management portal, members can access the forms you’ve specified for them and edit their details as required. Any changes they make here will be automatically updated in their profile. To change the email they use to log in, it’ll need to be changed from this form here, rather than their GoodCRM profile.