Essential Features for Membership Management Software

Essential Membership Features

Membership management software, in some cases also known as association management software, has many key features that are critical to the user experience, including the capabilities for self-service.

Some features of membership management software are crucial depending on your business model and how your organization works. Other membership features might be nice to have, but they may be adding more expense that doesn’t add a lot of value to your members because they aren’t typically used.

So, how do you discern what’s necessary and what’s supplementary for membership software?

Sign-Up, Auto-Renewal, and Message Management

The most important concept is the membership itself, which includes signing up, auto-renewal, and messaging.

Messages you’ll typically (auto) send to members include:

• Reminders that the renewal is coming up and any charges that will occur
• Any steps that members need to complete when signing up or before their membership renews
• How to get in touch with you
• Steps to cancel their membership

Membership Cancellation Process

Cancellation processes vary depending on the business. Some membership models highlight how easy it is to cancel at any time. Others require members to call a salesperson who’ll try to rescue the membership.

Whatever your method, it’s important that these processes are as polished as possible. And even though you may try to rescue the membership and prevent the cancellation, you don’t want to be frustrating in that process.

Auto-Renewal and Updating Payment Information

In many cases, people auto-renew, but there can be some logistical challenges at times. People might move to a different location, and they may change their billing information. They may receive a new credit card from the bank because their old one will expire soon.

Depending on your payment gateway, it’s possible to have the card information automatically update. This is key to preventing billing failures for membership sites with renewals.

Roles and Communities

Another key membership feature is being able to establish roles and associate based on membership selection.

This includes determining what those roles can do and what access members have based on those roles, in addition to any assignments and possibly regions, chapters, or groups that they’re a part of.

It’s important to present these in a way that’s clear and easy to navigate. Hierarchy is a key feature of this.

For many of our membership projects that we work on, a crucial factor of membership management is the ability to manage members within a chapter or a regional area or within an organization, for example.

Certifications and Other Processes

Some of our membership groups include organizations that have certification processes. It’s important that the certifications occur within a certain time frame.

To maintain that accreditation, it helps to have self-service capability and reminders for people to complete the certification process.

Offer Benefits to Upgrade

Another key aspect for membership self-management is the ability for members to upgrade and downgrade, and to have access to a friendly presentation of the pros and cons.

Ideally, you’ll promote upgrading the membership throughout the lifecycle. This can be helpful when paired with email newsletters, discounts, promotions, or coupon codes to give members more incentive to upgrade.

For example, you might offer them a year of discounted rates, such as 15 percent off everything they buy. Then after that first year, they would resume the automated billing at the standard rates.

It’s vital to message this properly and clearly to the user about what’s going to happen with their billing and what their benefits are.

Manage Information

Members also need to be able to manage their information in general, such as their contact information, payment information, and hierarchy or account information within their organization. Some members may need to manage accounts for others within their organization.

Fundamentally, there are a lot of things that they may need to manage within their membership, and each organization may have different needs and capabilities.

Interactive Environments

Some of our membership organizations include restricted access environments where credible and successful organizations can share knowledge with each other. They benefit from sharing industry best practices with each other within a restricted environment.

By being members of this organization, they’re able to help each other within this select group to achieve peak performance within their respective industry. To do this, they need access to forums, webinars, white papers, checklists, standard operating procedures, and other resources.

They also need access to training and resources, or essentially an LMS within this membership resource. They need to be able to interact with other members in a robust, consistent, and intuitive way that doesn’t require a lot of time.

These are opportunities for membership management. It’s important feature-wise to give people access to the appropriate areas and make sure that they can engage with their community.

Analyze Engagement to Improve Membership Features

You also want to be able to track things and ensure that members meet certain milestones to ensure high retention rates. It’s important to be learning and improving the value of the membership itself.

Your membership management software or association management software needs to provide this milestone-based tracking and analytics of individual members and whole organizations.

Then, you can see how they are progressing in their utilization of the membership platform. If they aren’t progressing, then you need to adjust so they can benefit from the membership features.