Members-Systems Help

Help Topic: Organisation Settings for Membership Details

You can tell Members-Systems how your membership works and how you would like the system to administer your members.

You can do this from the Membership Settings screen, which you can access from the Organisation Admin|Membership Settings menu item.

You can make the following changes to your membership settings

Membership Numbers

The way that membership numbers are used in the system is described in The Membership Number field. To specify that membership numbers are to be used, change the next membership number to be allocated automatically, or to state that membership numbers are allocated manually, make the changes and press the 'Update Membership Number Settings' button.

Membership Expiry Warnings

You can create a set of Membership Statuses, so that you know who is still a current member. Every member will always have a membership status, which is calculated automatically from the rules that you enter here.

You can specify, if you wish, that members are sent warnings my email message when their membership is about to expire. A warning message can also be sent to the organisation administrator if required.

1 or 2 warning messages can be sent to your users and a single message to the administrator. You say which messages you want and how long before the expiry. You also need to say for which membership status expiry these messages are to be sent. Press the 'Edit Expiry Warnings' button to start the update and 'Update Expiry Warnings' to complete them.

Note that these email messages, currently in a standard format, are sent from your organisation's email address and require that you have set up an SMTP Email Server for your organisation (See Organisation Settings for Email).

Membership Types

Every member needs a membership of a definite type. When your organisation is set up, there is a single membership type of 'Member' which is a membership that will never expire. In fact, you may have as many membership types as you require - for an organisation such as the Scout Association in the United Kingdom, these might be 'Youth member', Leader', 'Helper' or 'Supporter'.

Each membership type can have a different length of membership, which can either be a fixed length membership, e.g. for 1 year from 1st January, or rolling (e.g. 6 months from the date of joining). Fixed length membership may also have a roll-over day (e.g. 31st October) for new members, so that anybody who joins after 31st October will have a 14 month membership until 31st December of the following year. Note that the fixed period fields are only used when the membership period type is set to 'Fixed'.

For a membership type which does not expire (for example, people remain members until they resign), set the period type to 'Rolling' and the dropdown for length of membership to 'Does not Expire'.

Note that when you specify your organisation with an Organisation Type, the initial Membership Types will be set up appropriately for your organisation, although you are free to change these if you wish.

Membership Status Rules

Every member of your organisation will also have a membership status, which is calculated automatically from the rules that you enter here.

Membership statuses are marked as 'Active' or 'Inactive'. The default search for members will include 'Active' members and exclude 'Inactive' members. In this way, members that do not renew their membership will not receive normal email messages that are sent out to the main organisation.

To help you initially, Members-Systems will create 4 statuses for your organisation, which you can update as you wish, and which are intended to help you with managing your membership these are 'New' (for the first month after a member joins), 'Current' (during the bulk of their membership', 'Grace' (for the 4 weeks after their membership lapses - this is an active membership, so that members who forget to renew will get messages while they get around to renewing) and 'Expired' (4 weeks after their membership finishes).

In this area, you can set up whichever statuses you wish, although it is recommended that you do not allow gaps between the various membership statuses that you set up. The membership status is recalculated for you approximately daily - the expiry messages are sent out at this time. You are welcome to update a member's starting and ending dates in the Membership tab of their Members Details page - their status will then be recalculated immediately.