What a member organisation needs

You’ll need: Membership types, Memberships, Contacts — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

This course is for organisations whose people are members rather than customers: associations, cooperatives, clubs, unions, savings groups, churches, professional bodies.

Members are contacts

Start here, because it saves confusion later. A member is a contact — the same shared address book from Essentials — with a membership attached.

That is deliberate. The same person can be a member, a customer and a supplier without becoming three records, and their history stays in one place.

   CONTACT           the person
     + MEMBERSHIP    their standing in your organisation
     + PROFILE(S)    who is actually taking part

Membership types are what you offer

A membership type is a tier: Ordinary, Student, Life, Corporate. It has a membership name, an SKU, a rank for ordering, and a description.

It can be flagged most popular, which highlights it where tiers are presented.

Pricing is per period, and you enable only the ones you use: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly prices, each with its own switch and its own amounts per currency. A tier can offer several — monthly for people who want to try, yearly at a discount.

Max profiles caps how many sub-accounts a member at this tier may create, which the profiles lesson covers.

A membership is one person’s standing

A membership joins a contact to a membership type, with starts at and ends at dates and a membership expires setting.

That is the record that answers the only question that really matters operationally: is this person currently a member, and of what tier?

Active is not the same as existing

A membership that has expired still exists. It is history, and deleting it would erase the fact that somebody was a member for three years.

But for access — to a members-only page, a discounted price, a gated lesson — what counts is an active tier. An expired member sees the same locked content a stranger does, plus an invitation to renew.

Hold that distinction. Most confusion in member organisations comes from treating “has a membership record” and “is currently a member” as the same thing.

What the rest of this course covers

Dues and contributions, shared funds and lending, what members see when they log in, and the reports that tell you whether the organisation is healthy.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create two membership types with different prices, give a contact a membership that expired last month, and another that runs to next year. Then look at a members-only page as each.