Membership Types / Tiers

[heyakyra]

Many nonprofit organizations and associations have defined members, levels of membership, and dues. In some cases it is a requirement for recognized nonprofit status. It should be possible to define memberships and the members of each type.

[wwahammy]

Welcome to Houdini @heyakyra!

I think membership what is an area where Houdini is ripe for improvement. Membership can be sort of simulated right now in Houdini using two features: widgets for recurring donations for receiving the dues and tags for highlighting which supporters are in each category of membership.

Widgets allow you to preselect the amount of the recurring charge as well as allow you to preset tags on any supporters which create that charge. This allows you to provide a different widget for every membership level, i.e. $50 a month for premium member, $10 a month for member, $5 a month for student member. Depending on your nonprofits needs, it does work. Unfortunately it has limitations:

• If the recurring donation is stopped or the card fails, the tag stays on the supporter. At some point, you need someone in the organization to remove the membership tag for those individuals.
• Widgets can't handle non-monthly recurring donations. This is possible to do in the recurring donation dashboard but not via widgets
• There's no way to easily invoice someone for a membership and drop their membership if they don't pay.

Ultimately, the pieces of a membership system are more or less in Houdini but we need to figure out how to put them all together.

What do you think is necessary for membership that hasn't been mentioned?

[heyakyra]

I would address this in terms of user stories:

• As a supporter, I should be able to fill out a convenient form with payment processing to join an organization.
• As the representative of a group, I should be able to join a special tier of membership on behalf of my organization.
• As an organization, I should be able to see keep track of individual and organizational members, to communicate with these members, to see their standing (active with dues paid, or inactive), and to collect dues.
• As a supporter, I should be able to automatically have my membership dues collected on a monthly or annual basis.
• As an organization, I should be able to define the types and limitations of different tiers of membership and optional benefits offered to each (General, Organizational, Student, Gold, etc.)

If this can be done with some hidden tags I don't think that's a problem, so long as the user workflows are clear and distinct in the UI.

[wwahammy]

@heyakyra I like this, very good stuff! I generally think it'd be better to build out functionality in the database for handling the memberships versus tags. Tags are so general that I think we'd run into issues making sure subscriptions worked just right.

Is this a feature you'd be interested in taking on, even at a prototype level?

[wendylbolm]

Related to this, these changes would be helpful for memberships:

-Ability for nonprofits to set recurring terms for donor-facing modals related to donate forms and campaign pages, ex. = monthly, quarterly, and 1 year recurring options at minimum -We need to think through a way to differentiate between official memberships (like Lions Clubs, orgs with dues) and unofficial memberships, like recurring donations that are labeled memberships with no membership requirements/process.