Whether you’re a charity using memberships as a fundraising tool or a full-blown membership organisation, GoodCRM is designed to make light work of managing your memberships.

In a nutshell, here’s what GoodCRM offers for membership management:

We use four statuses for memberships during their life-cycle:

Pending
When a member signs up they become Pending until such time as their first payment is made. For those paying by card, the payment tends to be made immediately. For those paying by Direct Debit, the payment can take around 3-5 working days. For people paying via any other method they are pending until you log their payment.

Active
​As soon as the initial payment is made (or logged) a member becomes Active and remain active until their membership is cancelled, or becomes lapsed due to an issue capturing the membership fee.

Lapsed
​A membership becomes Lapsed when we have been unable to collect their annual or monthly membership fee on their renewal date. That might happen when a payment card has expired, a Direct Debit mandate is cancelled or if a manual payment hasn’t been logged on the system two-weeks after it is due. Members remain lapsed for four months* (by default) before their membership is cancelled. *If you would like to change the number of months a membership remains lapsed, please contact support.

Cancelled
A membership becomes cancelled when: The membership has been lapsed for more than four months*, or the membership has been cancelled by the member or by your organisation.

Lapsed members can update their payment information and continue with their membership at any point until their membership is cancelled.

Cancelled members can start a new membership and will have to pay any setup fees again.

If you use our WordPress Memberships Plug-in, Lapsed or Cancelled customers are automatically redirected to their membership management page upon login to your membership website.

We send the following emails to your customers (they may also receive emails from GoCardless and Stripe). Please note that Renewal and Lapsed reminders are only sent to customers who pay via Stripe or GoCardless. For managing communications for members who ‘pay offline’ see Memberships with Offline Payments

Activation Email
This is sent to a member when they join. It provides a link for them to ‘activate’ their membership. Activation just means setting a password for their membership and there isn’t an issue if they do not complete this step.
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​Renewal Email
This is sent to members on an annual membership roughly two weeks before their renewal is due. It reminds them that their renewal is coming up and gives them a link to make changes to their membership or Payment Details.

Lapsed Email
This is sent to members after their renewal date if we haven’t been able to take payment. This is sent one week after their payment was due and each month until cancellation. By default we cancel memberships which have been lapsed for four months. If you wish to change this schedule, please contact support. Members who update their payment details whilst they are lapsed are charged the membership fee and can continue as members.

Cancellation Email
This email is sent when a membership is cancelled. By default we cancel memberships which have been lapsed for four months. If you wish to change this schedule, please contact support. Members who ‘rejoin’ after cancellation start a new membership and will incur any one-time setup fees.

You can customise the look and feel of your membership emails and you can alter the content of your membership emails.
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GoodCRM is designed to do most of the hard work for you. Here’s what you need to do: