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A healthy membership program can inspire your donors to greater engagement and provide a steady stream of unrestricted income. However, tracking donors through the various levels and managing their corresponding benefits can be a time-intensive task. As donors move in and out or up and down your membership hierarchy, you need to keep track of lapsed versus current members, the benefits members are entitled to at their current level, and which campaigns are most successful for targeting new members or recapturing lapsed donors.

Our tools are designed to help you easily acquire, renew, upgrade, and steward your members; track expire dates and benefits; and help you segment your communications based on your donor's membership status and level of engagement.

EveryAction lets you create your membership structure and then automatically applies that structure to each member. Membership Management does the work of tracking where your members are in the membership structure and applying the proper level and benefits for their current status. 

To implement your membership program using our tools, you will need to configure your membership management program and learn how to manage membership records and search and report using membership records. Before you can do this, you will want to have a clear understanding of how your current membership structure works.
 

Understanding membership structure

Membership is usually determined through a combination of a period of time (usually one year) and a contribution of a certain amount. As that amount increases and the member achieves a higher member level, they commonly gain greater benefits, recognition, or both.
 

If a member gives less or allows their membership to lapse, they usually move down your member level structure (though you can choose to set up your structure to keep donors at a previous level that is independent of their current contribution).

You will need to define your organization's membership structure when you set up Membership Management. The information you'll need for each level of your program includes:
 

Basic information about what to include in each level

• The name of each of your member levels
• Approximately how many members you have at each member level now
• Who is eligible for each member level
  • (Individuals, organizations, households, family, everyone?)
• Exclusions or who should never be added to that level
  • (Major donors who will always stay at the same level no matter the amount or date of their last gift? Staff members? Volunteers?) 
• What benefits, if any, are available at each level
• Whether you provide membership cards

Specific information to determine the settings for that level

• The term or length of time that a membership is valid or active
  • (Calendar year, Fiscal year, other)
• How to determine the Join or Start dates
  • (Is it immediate? Does it begin only on a certain date, like January 1?)
• How you define the end date of a membership 
  • (Is it 365 days after their last renewal gift? Do all members expire on the same date, December 31? Something else? Do you offer a lifetime membership?)
• How many months before a membership expires you will start renewal communications
  • (At three months? Earlier? Later?)
• Which donations count toward a membership renewal
  • (Is it only those made in certain months, or to certain source codes, or of a certain size?)
• Which types of gifts can be counted as dues payments
  • (Recurring commitments, pledges, peer-to-peer, events, and so on)
• If there is a grace period after a membership expires
• How you want to use Designation, Campaign, Source Code, and Custom Contribution Values to track, report, and manage member acquisition and renewals

More considerations

If there are current rules for membership that can only be applied by having a human look at a contribution and make a subjective decision, you will need to create an Activist Code to identify those contacts and set when that contribution will qualify the giver for a particular level of membership.

You'll also want to think about how members move through your organization's hierarchy:

• If there is a lapse in membership, are members reinstated at the old level?
• Do members ever go down the hierarchy or only up?
• If one household member moves into a higher group, do all household members get the same level?

Creating a logical hierarchy is an important step when setting up your Membership Management. When the automatic process runs, it will begin sorting your donors using the highest level of membership and working down the structure. Once a donor qualifies for a level, the contact will be added to that level and no others.

For example, if you have a Major Donor level, you may want to apply that to a contact, even if they technically qualify for your $20 Sustainers level. And you may have contacts in your $20 Sustainers level that you want to keep there, even if they qualify for your $50 Basic Membership level. To create the proper hierarchy, you would set Major Donors higher in the structure than your Sustainers level, and the Sustainers level above the Basic Membership.
 

If you have donors that you do not consider part of your active or lapsed membership program at all, such as major donors or volunteers, you will need to decide how you want to handle those cases in your records.
 

Gather as much information as you can about the specifics of your existing membership program to make your set up faster and easier.

Download this spreadsheet to help you plan

You can use our downloadable spreadsheet (below) to help you with this process.