Nonprofits
Technology planning

Membership management software: The essentials

If your nonprofit has a membership program or is looking to start one, it’s essential that you look into membership management software as part of starting or improving your program. Software can not only strengthen your operations now, but as your membership grows it will become a non-negotiable management tool. Whether you’re looking to invest for the first time or potentially switch from your current system, we’re sharing all the essentials you need to make the right choice. 

What Is Membership Management?

Membership-based nonprofits exist to serve their members – whether by providing resources, convening gatherings, or offering continuing education, products, or services of interest to members.

Because you often offer so many different things to your members, there can be a lot to manage beyond simply registering members and collecting dues. While it can be difficult, it’s crucial to find an effective system in order to give your members the experience they’re expecting (and paying for). The best way to do this is with robust membership database software for nonprofits

How Do You Create a Membership Database?

To effectively create a membership database, you’ll need membership database software. Besides simply keeping track of who your members are, membership software can offer many other perks. For example, the right software can not only give you and your team more functionality, but can also enable your members to sign up, manage memberships, and more. 

Some additional benefits of using membership database software are that you can: 

  • Streamline administrative tasks
  • Allow members to manage their accounts
  • Facilitate an easy sign-up process for new members
  • Automatically sync information from member sign-up forms into your database
  • Easily send communications to all members
  • Organize and store data to improve future acquisition, engagement, and management strategies

With Salesforce, you’re guaranteed to have all of these benefits included in your membership database. Once these tools and features are in place, you will be able to streamline tasks and provide a far more positive membership program experience for internal staff and members alike.

The Best Solution for Nonprofit Membership Management 

Salesforce allows nonprofit organizations that have members to manage all facets of membership, including tracking membership status, start and end date, current and prior membership levels, key contacts, and other custom data points.

Automation can also be configured to kick off tasks related to membership renewal, including member journeys, or Engagement Paths in Marketing Cloud or Pardot. Reports and dashboards provide immediate insight into membership health, enabling staff members to view members who are nearing their renewal date as well as those within a grace period following a membership lapse.

Furthermore, Salesforce Experience Cloud implementations can provide easy-to-use, web-based member portals to support member collaboration, access resource libraries, create member directories, provide a single spot to update your profile, and publish calendars of webinars, conferences, and other events. 

Additionally, Salesforce supports all kinds of member models – including affiliated/federated models, individual memberships, corporate/organizational members, varying levels of membership, and rolling or annual renewals, to name a few.