Membership types summary

Summary

There are two main membership types:

1. Fixed anniversary dated
2. Start-when-you-buy dated

The way these are paid can be set in either of two ways:

1. Upfront; Pay-when-you-buy
2. Monthly; Pay a monthly fee

If method 2 applies in both cases, then the membership is considered "rolling" and continuously extends on a monthly basis until it is stopped. Otherwise, a new membership has to be bought at the expiry the old.

Fixed anniversary dated

These types of membership are more complex than start-when-you-buy types. Consider, for example, the situation where the club has a fixed membership period of a year from start June to end May. What happened if you buy in December? You then have to consider or introduce pro-rata arrangements. What happens if you buy in the middle of May? Are you buying a membership for half a month in May or are you buying a membership that starts in June, or both?

As result of these conundrums, MMM has a number of features available to the membership secretary to customise behaviour.

These memberships can also be used, for example, to start and end over other specific periods. For example from the start of a month to the end of a month. A six months membership could be set so that it always starts at the beginning of the month of purchase and ends 6 months later. Or a single school-term membership that would start and end on the anniversary of each school term (i.e. 3 per year).

So whilst these have their uses, they are generally mainly setup by clubs that have a legacy membership cycle that they are not ready to break.

Start-when-you-buy dated

These are much simpler than Fixed anniversary dated memberships for both the club and the member. There are no complications. You buy your membership today and it starts today and lasts for the duration of its extent - which may be a month, several months, a quarter, a year, 3 years or forever - there are many permutations in setting the extent of a membership

Upfront payment

This is the simplest means of payment. You make one payment when you buy the membership and you then hold that membership for its entire extent.

Monthly payment

There are added considerations when paying monthly. Do we require an initial deposit? Do I see my schedule of future payments and can they change? Could I stop my monthly payments? For example, just as someone who bought an annual membership upfront is protected from a fee increase mid year, so is a monthly payer - their schedule of payments over the year is fixed and a change in price of the underlying product would only affect payments in the year following. But there are ways to configure things so that this need not be the case.

As a result of these considerations, MMM has further features available to the membership secretary to customise behaviour for monthly payers.