Managing New Members Using Dashboard > Membership

The Dashboard > Membership page allows you to pull up new members quickly so you can take action. From Dashboard > Membership, select the date range to view in the top left corner. The "New Members" box will display all members who joined in that date range. You can click on each name in the list to pull up that account, or you can also click on the box title to pull up all the accounts listed in order to email them as a group or export their information.

Managing New Members Using Membership Level Actions

You can use membership level actions as part of your workflow to approve new members, or to separate your members into different chapters. Membership level actions are set up under each membership level in Labels & Membership > Membership Levels. You can find more information about Membership Level Actions here.

Creating A Process For Approving / Vetting New Members

To do this you should first create a Folder to place your pending members:

• Log in as the primary administrator on the account.
• Go to MembershipWorks > Folders.
• Click on + Create New Folder.
• Type a title such as Pending in the folder tab.
• Click Create.

After following these steps, go to the Actions tab in each membership level in MembershipWorks > Labels & Membership > Membership Levels. In the section titled When member signs up online, select the Pending members folder instead of the Members Folder and click Save & Close at the bottom of the page. Note that the selected Folder(s) will be highlighted in green.

Once this is set up members who join will automatically be placed in the pending members Folder. Be sure that you have the email address of the person who needs to approve a membership added to the Notify email  field on the first page of the membership level or in the Membership notification email field at Organization Settings > Integration > Email Notifications. Once the member is ready to be approved, you can approve them by moving the account to the Members and/or appropriate approved member folder(s).

Billing considerations with an approval process

The second option is to use Automatic Recurring Billing and setup a trial period to allow for the approval process. With Automatic Recurring Billing, new members will be required to enter a credit card, but with the trial period, their card will not be charged until the trial period ends. If the member is not approved, you can simply cancel the membership billing to prevent the user from being charged. If approved, move the member into the appropriate Folder without changing their membership billing, they will automatically be billed at the end of the trial period. You can also adjust the renewal date if you need the charge to occur sooner (note that it can still take 1 business day for most payment gateways).

The third option is to allow members to sign up without a credit card using a separate free membership level. Once approved, change the member’s Membership level to the appropriate level, and ask the member to sign in on your website to make a payment. This is not recommended as it requires additional effort from the member and final conversion rates will be lower.