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. Especially as you grow, software will be non-negotiable. 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. The right software can only give you and your team more functionality, but can also enable your members to sign up, manage memberships, and more.
Some benefits of using membership database software are that you can:
- Streamline administrative tasks
- Allow members to manage their accounts
- New members can easily sign up
- Information from their forms automatically gets synced into the database
- Communications can easily be sent to all members
- Data can be stored and used to improve strategy in the future
With Salesforce, you’re guaranteed to have all of these benefits included in your membership database. This helps you and your members all have a positive experience with your membership program.
The Best Solution for Nonprofit Membership Management
With Salesforce, nonprofit organizations that have members can 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 be configured to kick off tasks related to membership renewal, including member journeys, or Engagement Paths in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) or Marketing Cloud Engagement. Reports and dashboards provide immediate insight into membership health and allow staff members to view members who are nearing their renewal date and those within a grace period following a membership lapse.
Salesforce Experience Cloud implementations can provide easy-to-use, web-based member portals to support member collaboration, access resource libraries, publish calendars of webinars, conferences, and other events, member directories, and provide a single spot to update your profile. Salesforce supports all kinds of member models – affiliated/federated models, individual memberships, corporate/organizational members, varying levels of membership, and rolling or annual renewals, to name a few.
