What a member organisation needs

Before you start, open these pages: Members / Membership Types, Members / Memberships and Sales / Contacts.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

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, from the same shared address book you met in Essentials, with a membership attached to it.

That is on purpose. The same person can be a member, a customer and a supplier without turning into three records, and all 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 one kind of membership. Ordinary, Student, Life, Corporate.

It holds a name, an SKU, a rank that decides what order they appear in, and a description.

You can mark one as most popular, and it gets highlighted wherever your types are shown.

Prices are per period. You switch on only the ones you use: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Each has its own switch and its own prices per currency.

One type can offer more than one. Monthly for people who want to try it, yearly at a discount.

Max profiles sets how many people a member at this level can add. The profiles lesson covers that.

A membership is one person’s standing

A membership joins a contact to a membership type. It has a start date, an end date, and a setting for whether it expires.

That record answers the only question that matters day to day: is this person a member right now, and of what kind?

Being a member and having been one are different

A membership that has run out still exists. It is history. Deleting it would erase the fact that somebody was a member for three years.

But for getting in, to a members-only page, a member price, a locked lesson, what counts is a membership that is active right now.

Someone whose membership ran out sees the same locked page a stranger sees, plus an invitation to renew.

Hold on to that difference. Most of the confusion in member organisations comes from treating “has a membership record” and “is a member right now” 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 one contact a membership that ran out last month, and another that runs to next year. Then look at a members-only page as each of them.