This article looks at all the initial steps to get up and running with Memberships in GoodCRM, from installation, to configuration and onwards.

If you don't already have the Memberships add-on installed, go ahead and install it from the App Store.

1. Access the App Store from the top-right menu

2. Navigate to Memberships and click Install

Follow the steps and Memberships will be available in your CRM 🙌

Access your membership settings from the Tools & Settings section.

1. Access Tools & Settings from the top-right menu

2. Navigate to Memberships

3. You'll need to complete a number of items before you can use memberships

To add your payment settings, please refer to: Connecting your payment providers

To configure your email settings, please refer to: Email template settings

To add a membership plan, please refer to: Creating membership plans

Once all of the above have been completed, you should see a full set of green ticks:

Once your core membership settings are in place and your have four green ticks, you will see the Sign-up and Member management links.

You will need to add these two links to your website. One link for members to sign up and one for members to manage their memberships.

There are various settings you can change to customise your memberships.

The first setting in the Settings section allows you to specific an email address to be notified when a membership begins. Use this to notify a staff member of new sign-ups, plan changes and cancellations.

Next we can choose the forms our member will fill in when they sign-up or edit their profile.

You may wish to use the same form for sign-ups and profiles, but you might prefer some fields to only be filled in upon sign-up and then not updated later, in which case you can use separate forms and omit these fields from the profile form. To add / edit these forms, head over to Tools & Settings > Forms.

These forms will be used by default for all membership plans, however, you can override this on a plan-by-plan basis in the Membership Plan settings.

By default the terms Member and Memberships are used in GoodCRM. But you can change these to refer to things like Friends, Supporters, Subscribers, etc.

You can alter the text that appears on your sign-up page and the heading that appears above your list of membership plans. To see where this text appears, click on your sign-up link towards the top of your Membership Settings page.

You may also change the heading and content displayed after a member signs up. The member will also be sent an email after sign-up which you can personalise too – see below.

Emails are sent to Members at various times. For members paying by other methods, you must send notifications and reminders. See later section.

Activation Email
This is sent to all members 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. 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. Members who ‘rejoin’ after cancellation start a new membership and will incur any one-time setup fees.

For each of the emails listed above, you can add your own content to personalise the messages for your organisation and processes.

Within Plan Settings you can change what happens if the prices of a plan changes and allow members to change their membership plan.

If this setting is on then existing GoCardless and Stripe Subscriptions will get automatic price increases if you change the price of your Membership Plans. Price increases will take affect at the next renewal date. Members may receive emails from Stripe or GoCardless as soon as you change plan prices.

This setting only appears if Automatically Update Subscriptions is on.

If on, members will be able to change their plan via their membership home-screen.

If you have specified an email for New Member Sign-up notifications, this email will be notified of the plan change.

Enable this option if some of your members will make payments outside of GoodCRM.

If you have the Online Donations functionality on your account, you can register membership fees as donations, and optionally collect GiftAid declarations for them.