Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

Professional and trade organizations are all about members coming together. So on today’s training, we’ll look at everything related to membership, from your settings to reporting, grouping, updating, and configuring your dues. Let’s get going.

We’ll start with reviewing our settings. Most of these were already configured during your system setup. So we’re going to review a few key settings that may be adjusted after your system is live.

On the Members tab, note the setting to “Send welcome mail to new, active members automatically each night?” Regardless of how your members are added to your system, we recommend having this setting enabled. This ensures that new members receive a timely introduction to your chapter, it provides a link to set their password and access member benefits, and it verifies their email address to confirm their subscription to your marketing emails. Use the “Default Member Welcome Email” drop-down to choose which Welcome Email template you want new members to receive.

In Member Expiry Settings, we can control how the system manages expired members. For organizations that receive updated member rosters from their parent organization, the “Upon Expiration” field should be set to “Do Nothing.” We’ll handle member expirations through imports of those rosters provided by the parent organization, not here. Having other options selected may conflict with the data coming from the parent organization, so we recommend doing things this way.

For organizations that accept member applications and dues payments locally themselves, we recommend allowing a grace period. This grace period can be any length of time that works for your organization, but 30-90 days is the most common range. During the grace period, we strongly recommend setting “Expired members login permissions” to “Login to Dues Payment Screen Only.” When someone in the grace period logs in, they’ll be redirected automatically to the dues payment screen. They won’t be able to access members-only materials or register for events at members-only rates. Basically, they don’t get member benefits during that grace period; they just have an easier way to renew. Once they’ve paid, they’ll have full member benefits again.

After the grace period, they should move to non-members. They’re no longer dues-paying members of the organization. While there is an option to keep them in the roster as expired members, they will not have any login privileges. If you individually review expired members, it could be useful; but for most organizations, it’s just more overhead and it will skew your member numbers. That’s why we recommend setting them to be moved.

If a member who didn’t renew in the grace period wants to renew, they’ll need to re-apply as a new member, or else contact an admin for assistance reinstating their old profile.

If you make changes here, be sure to click Save.

Moving down the page just a bit, we find the Custom Member Fields. All standard fields, such as name and contact information, are already included in StarChapter, but every organization is different. Custom Member Fields lets you create fields for any special information, like certifications, designations, or license numbers. Any custom fields will be part of all member profiles.

Moving to the top of the Membership area, we’re going to review the Member Manager. The Member Manager lists all the members, whether they’re active members who are current on their dues, pending members who haven’t yet been approved for membership, or expired members who haven’t yet been moved to the non-member list. The member table includes some summary information about each member and a few action buttons to the right.

To view a member’s profile, click on their name. While there are Edit links within each section of their profile, we usually don’t recommend making edits here. Instead, if your roster comes from a parent organization, direct your members to update their profiles there. That way your parent organization has the right information, and the updates will flow down to your chapter in a future import. If members pay dues locally, it’s better for the member themselves to log into the member area to update their profile.

You as an administrator may sometimes need to update member groups. Groups have a variety of uses, but essentially they let you define subsets of your membership. They can be used to mark membership types, like students or professionals, or to identify members of committees, or your board of directors. If you import member rosters and information like their member type is included on the roster, it can be imported to assign someone to the right group. You’ll probably have other groups, like committees, that you manage locally. Imports won’t affect those, but we’ll go into groups in more detail later.

Back on the main Member Manager screen, let’s talk about some viewing options. The Status filter will sort the members to show us who’s active, expired, or pending. Pending members are new applicants that haven’t yet been approved. If you import rosters from your parent organization, you probably won’t have any of these, because your parent organization will approve a member before assigning them to your organization.

Let’s take a brief detour to talk about the flow for new member applicants, for those organizations that accept dues payments at the local level. First, the new applicant submits a member application.

In the Form Builder on the application itself, we have the options for handling new members. Once the applicant fills out the form, they go into Member Manager as a pending member and the system sends a notification to the email that we’ve set. The new applicant gets prompted to pay dues from the list of rates associated with the form. Depending on your payment settings, they might be forced to pay dues immediately, or they may have the option to bypass the credit card payment form and pay with a check. We strongly recommend having information either at the top of the application, or on information pages before it, detailing the application process, accepted payment methods, and the membership fees.

Depending on your settings, the member might be automatically approved as soon as they pay, or they might remain in pending status until they’re manually approved.

In the latter case, those pending members will be in Member Manager until they are either approved, deleted, or moved to the non-member list. If a member has paid and is qualified for membership, click on the Approve button on the right. If they still have a balance, they may be sending a check, so be sure to monitor that and approve the member when it arrives.

Keep in mind that a pending member only gets assigned a balance once they pick a dues rate, so someone who abandoned the process before even picking a dues rate won’t show a balance. If we try to approve a member like that, though, we’ll get a warning. In cases like these, we recommend reaching out to the applicant to see what’s going on.

For more filtering options, use the Flexible View. Here, all the member groups are available as filters, as well as options such as join and expiration dates, subscription status, and more. Just like on the other screen, we’ll select what we’re interested in and then click Refresh. Note that there’s a Column option here, too. We can choose exactly what we want to see on the screen or in an exported spreadsheet of the data.

Now, we’re moving to the Group Manager. Groups have been mentioned several times and they are extremely useful in managing membership. Within StarChapter, there are several built-in groups such as Member Types and the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors and Member Groups have special links to front-end pages, and their names HAVE to stay as they are. Use the Board of Directors group for managing your board page, and Member Groups for displaying committee members. Member data is pulled from the profiles and displayed based on a template. This makes managing that page easy, since any profile updates will be immediately reflected on the pages, without extra steps.

We can also create groups for any other subsets of membership. We’ll set up a new group today, so we can walk through all of the options. We’re going to setup a Region group as our example. The Group Type indicates whether the group classifies members or non-members. For regions, we’ll want a Member group. Click Next.

Now we can select the functions we want to use this group for. It may be tempting to turn on everything, but turning it on for things we won’t be using will just clutter up our option lists. We can always change these options later. We’ll probably use this group when selecting email recipients, and we might want it as an Order Manager filter to figure out where most of our revenue is coming from. Where it says “Subscribe to StarChapter Mailings/Notifications,” it refers to StarChapter the company, not your StarChapter system. This is typically checked for the Board of Directors group so that they can receive our newsletters and notices of software updates.

Before moving forward, we can choose “Allow group members to belong to more than one subgroup.” For something like Member Type, we wouldn’t want to offer that option, but it might make sense for Regions if someone is in between two different ones.

If we want members to manage their own groupings, we can allow group members to self-manage their listings. That makes sense for Regions, but it probably doesn’t make sense for other exclusive groups like the board.

On this screen, we can create the subgroups. All groups in StarChapter are set up in a tiered structure. Notice that we didn’t set up a specific region but just a general Region group. The regions themselves will be subgroups, and people get assigned under the subgroup, not the parent group. We can have as many subgroups, or actual regions, as we like. We’ll click Add a Subgroup and then enter the details. We’ll give the subgroup a name, perhaps a description, and choose to show members in this group in the directory. We should also allow imports for these groups. We’ll add one more region for today. We can always add more later.

On the next screen, we’ll add the members to their regions. Click on any one to open it up and add members. The box here will search as you type. Choose the person you want, then click Add. Repeat these steps for other additions. This way, we don’t have to click into the individual profiles. We’ll click Next once we’re done.

It’s also possible to use Import Manager, which we’ll talk about shortly, to assign people to groups in bulk.

This next tool will be of particular use to organizations that receive their member roster from a National or parent organization. The Import Manager lets you import an updated member or non-member list to update profile data, group data, add new members, and move expired members to the non-member list. While any organization could use Import Manager, the ones that get rosters from their parent organization will use it most frequently. We recommend doing an import at least once a month.

First, prepare your roster. Save it as a CSV file and make sure that the fist row consists of column headers. It doesn’t matter what they are as long as you recognize them and they’re consistent from import to import. It’s also important that the roster contain your full member list, not a list of new members, and that the members’ IDs match exactly with the old ones.  Leading zeroes or changes in uppercase and lowercase for the member IDs will cause them to not match.

Here’s why this matters. When we do the import, the system will compare all the member IDs on the incoming roster with what we already have in Member Manager.

• Any new IDs in the spreadsheet are new members. They’ll have new profiles added, and if we’re configured properly, they’ll get welcome emails automatically.
• Any missing IDs in the spreadsheet are dropped members. Those members will be moved to the Non-Member Manager and they’ll be marked as former members.
• Finally, any matching IDs will have their profiles updated if needed.

If an ID doesn’t match—for example, if it had a leading zero before and it doesn’t now, or vice versa—it looks like a different person, and the results won’t be what we want. So let's import some data. We'll assume that I've already prepared my roster.

So let's import some data. We'll assume that I've already prepared my roster. We're bringing in a list of members and then we're choosing the file. There's reminder text on this screen about how the file needs to be formatted. We've gone over that already, so onto the next screen we go.

Here, we choose our import map. This is a set of matches between the incoming roster column labels and the data fields inside StarChapter. We import member lists during implementation, so we’ll always have at least one saved option here with the prior work that we’ve done. The best map is pre-selected, so we’ll click Next to review those matches.

Even though this screen is long, it’s not too complicated. We have:

• A check box option to update a selected field or not. Usually we’ll have everything checked.
• The name of the field in StarChapter.
• A drop-list to select the proper data column from the roster. This takes the column headers from the roster file you uploaded, so yours may be different from what we see here.
• Then there’s the information from the first member’s profile. If you have a mismatch, or if a column has a funny label, this helps you see how the data will come in.
• Some fields have an option to use a fixed value. Usually you won’t need to make modifications here.

We also need to check the member ID field. We have to have this matched appropriately for the import to work properly. If it’s not, we’ll have some big changes—but those will be clearly visible on the preview step.

At the bottom of this screen we have the group maps. Here, we can tell the system to assign someone to, for example, a member type, based on information that’s inside the matching column.

If everything looks good, click Next to review the data.

On the Preview screen, make sure to review the changes before proceeding, especially the numbers. We’ll see how many new members are going to be added, how many members are going to be dropped, and how other many profile changes will be happening. Note that this number doesn’t include changes to group assignments. In the table, those updates, new members, and dropped members are all color-coded.

If you ever see a large number of new members roughly equal to the number of deleted members, that usually indicates that the member IDs aren’t right. We recommend re-checking the prior screen for errors. If everything looks OK here, we’ll click Next and click OK to confirm.

The All Done! screen repeats those same numbers. If you’ve made a mistake and they aren’t right, send us a support ticket along with the file that you uploaded. Within the first few days, we can undo a prior import.

For those of you who don't do imports and who charge dues locally, let's go into Membership > Dues Manager. Here, we have all the dues rates that we’ve set up. Some might be unpublished or past dues rates, and those aren’t available for purchase. We can set up rates early if we want, and then publish them when we’re ready.

While it’s tempting to just change the year on an old dues rate, we don’t really recommend it. It causes problems if there are any existing but unpaid orders for that rate. Plus it makes the View Orders button on the right a bit harder to use, because it will only show you the orders for the rate as it exists now. For similar reasons, if your membership runs by calendar year, you should always include the year in the name of the rate, to make it easier to find in the future if you’re ever doing audits.

To see only rates that are currently available, use the status filter to find the published ones. While last year’s rates won’t be available for purchase, we recommend unpublishing them too, just to keep the view cleaner.

Let’s add a new dues rate using the button at the top.

Enter the name of the rate. If we want to make it available right away, we’ll check the Publish box and then click Next.

Here we’ll enter the dollar amount and choose an associated member type. The “Applies to” option can be used in two different ways. You can use it to restrict the availability of a rate, so that only members in the selected subgroup can pay with this rate. Or you can say that someone should be assigned to a subgroup automatically after they pay this rate. Keep in mind that if you’re entering a dues order through the admin area on a member’s behalf, the member must be assigned to the subgroup first.

We have a few choices under the Paid Through Date area.

• For memberships that renew on anniversary date, choose Fixed Monthly Rate and enter the number of months, usually twelve. New members that join will pay for a year of membership. Current members who are renewing and use this rate will get twelve additional months of membership. There are two advantages of this method: first, we get dues revenue throughout the year, and second, we don’t have to create new rates every year.
• If we want members to renew on their anniversary date, but need that date to be pushed to the first of a month, we can choose the Fixed Monthly Rate with Forced Start Date. The member’s renewal date will be pushed either back or forward based on the break date that you enter.
• If memberships run by calendar year, fiscal year, or program year, choose Fixed End Date. Enter the expiration date here. The advantages with this method are that all the members are renewing at once, and the treasurer is only handling dues during a portion of the year. But the disadvantages are that we’ll need to create new dues rates next year, and that new members may not join in the middle of the year if they still have to pay full price.
• That’s where the Fixed End Date with Proration comes in. We’ll still have everyone expire at once, but new members will pay only for the time they’re using, until the renewal date. So someone who finds the chapter halfway through the year pays half the dues amount. We’ll need to enter the starting and ending dates for the dues term, so that the system can do the math. We can set the proration to calculate either monthly or daily, and we ALWAYS want to calculate based on the expiration date, not the purchase date. That option only applies for expired members who are renewing. If we had a three-month grace period, and this option were set to calculate based on purchase date, and then someone renewed, we’d be essentially giving that delinquent member a twenty-five percent discount to reward their late renewal. And that’s no good. We want to calculate the fees based on when someone actually expired, not the date when they purchased dues for their renewal.

Once we’ve made our selections, we’ll click Next and review the details. If we didn’t select the Publish option before, we’ll want to do that now, assuming that it’s time. Otherwise, we can come back once our new program year starts and publish it when we’re ready.

There is one more step to make a new rate available for new members. We need to add it to the member application. The rate has to be published first, then we’ll go to Content > Page Manager > Form Builder.

Find your application here. If you use the Type filter to find all Member forms, you’ll see all your applications. Then click on the form, and in the Type section, click Edit. If you’re offering dues when someone applies, you’ll see a list of rates. Check the boxes for the new ones, and un-check the boxes for the old ones. Click Next to apply the changes. Once the old rates have been removed, you can go back to Dues Manager to unpublish those rates.

Now that the rate is set up, we will need to manage dues payments. Typically, members will pay online with no intervention from you. When they do, their expiration dates will be automatically updated. If you do receive a check payment or a member wants to provide a credit card number by phone, you will need to enter that through the Dues Manager. Find the appropriate rate for your member and click Enter Dues Order. Start typing the member’s name and the system will search as you type. Pick your member here. If they don’t appear in the list, then either they aren’t in Member Manager and they need a profile, or they aren’t assigned to the proper group and so eligible for this rate. In the latter case, you’ll need to edit their profile and assign them to the right group, and then come back.

When we do select the member, all of their information will populate and we can click Next. Enter their payment information and click Save to complete the transaction.

If we now click View Orders, that new order and all other past orders will be included.

And that’s what you need to know for membership management. There’s a lot more you can do, though. For strategies to build your membership numbers and master member retention, visit our blog at StarChapter.com or check out StarChannel in the admin area.