Any member-based entity—be it a club, trade association, chamber of commerce, local chapter or alumni group, or your gym around the corner—needs a straightforward system to manage all of its members, events, money, and content associated with keeping that organization running smoothly. Online membership management services make this task easy.
These cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools are designed to satisfy specific data and people management needs of clubs, associations, and other organizations. Depending on the product and audience, these platforms combine a host of different functionality including member database management, document management, e-commerce, email marketing, website building, a content management system (CMS), donation collection and payment processing, event planning and management, and a host of other functions. Unlike most types of SaaS products that aim to provide a universal set of tools, membership management software is often specialized to handle just the needs of particular types of organizations.
Before you can choose the membership management solution that's right for your organization, you need to have a clear idea of what tasks you need this platform to oversee and facilitate. This review roundup will explain the types of tools available and the features they offer, the factors you should consider when investing in a membership management platform, and how the type of audience and level of customization you require can make all the difference.
What is Membership Management?
The analog days are over: You don't need to run your entire organization's member information and programs through mountains of paper in file cabinets or the same Microsoft Excel spreadsheet you've been using since the 1990s. On a basic level, membership management requires the ability to track basic membership information, communicate with members and prospects, and plan events. To collect donations, dues, and fees, and to process payments, you also need some bits of accounting software thrown in.
Beyond the basics, and depending on the organization you're running, your admin dashboard or membership command center may also sport a number of other features. The tool could help you run your online storefront, manage documents, and conduct member polls and online surveys. The tool could even build your website, helping you customize the look, feel, and user experience (UX) for administrators and members who are using the website.
Back in the mid-1980s, I (Theresa) was the president of a local chapter of a national computer consultants association. As chapter president, I relied on our treasurer to maintain the membership rolls, which he accomplished by using a fairly primitive spreadsheet. Key pieces of information we had to track included the obvious such as name, address, phone number, and email address.
Where we got bogged down was in the billing date for each member's annual dues and determining when we had to drop a member for non-payment. Though we wrote a number of spreadsheet macros to help with this task, ultimately our treasurer had to resort to reading through the entire database—line by line—to make sure nobody had been missed. Once per year, we printed (yes, printed, on paper!) our membership database so we could find one another—assuming one could find the directory booklet itself. Today, the cloud-based membership management software services available would have made this task a snap.
The 10 Contenders
In this review roundup, we take a look at 10 membership management services—360Alumni, aMember Pro, ChamberMaster, ClubExpress, MemberPlanet, NationBuilder, StarChapter, Sumac, Wild Apricot, and Zen Planner—and introduce key concepts to help ease your buying decision. But, before you decide which one will work best for your club, organization, athletic facility, or camp, you'll need to prioritize the tasks you want completed and define a budget.
Your first step is to figure out what is causing your association the most trouble given your current management system (which may be a spreadsheet, a box of index cards, or an unwieldly pile of papers). What answers do you need that your current system doesn't provide enough of? Identify those major pain points and find the solution that eases those first. The remaining features, including the price you'll pay, will fall into line.
Like most cloud-based software services, you'll pay a monthly fee based on the number of people who will log in as well as on those who will serve as administrators. Most of these services also have a limit to the number of members your association can carry based on the price level. The majority of the tools we tested—including ChamberMaster, MemberPlanet, StarChapter, Sumac, Wild Apricot, and Zen Planner—price this way, with clearly delineated tiers based on content volume, member capacity, and website scale. Some services, such as ClubExpress, price more flexibly based on usage, while those like 360Alumni price by custom quote. Membership management software aMember Pro is sold by one-time license.
There are some add-on costs to most systems (such as transaction fees) when members pay their dues or buy event tickets, or send an email or text blast, depending on the number of contacts. Sumac's value is based almost entirely in its list of available add-ons for specialized use cases, on top fo integration fees for adding membership management features to your existing website. Website creation and customization will always cost you, depending on how much coding work you need or how much of the customization is self-service using widgets or a plug-and-play CMS like a WordPress website. Every chapter, group, or institution's bespoke website and organizational needs are different, so get those spelled out before you buy.
While considering budgets and features, take a look at the software you're using now for tasks such as accounting and customer relationship management (CRM) and see whether or not the available packages can be linked to them. Most vendors have application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the passing of data back and forth, but some would prefer you convert everything you're doing to their system.
Cost of Customizing
There's a trade-off you'll have to consider between the functionality of the software in its generic state and the costs of customizing it to your organization's needs. Many smaller associations, especially new ones that don't yet have their processes set, might be happy with off-the-shelf (or web-based) software. Larger organizations that have been around for years, and that have specific ways of doing business, might be better off ponying up the additional funds for customizing the platform. Customization does come at a cost, though. It will take several conversations with their salespeople to get a complete picture of your possible bill. 360Alumni creates a custom-branded website for every college or higher educational institution it services, but this comes at a relatively steep one-time website customization cost.
Most of these systems offer add-on features such as payment processing, event ticketing, and email marketing—some are available for free while others come at an additional cost. There are also e-commerce packages that let you sell your organization's t-shirts online, accept donations online, or periodically add new bells and whistles to your website (either in self-service fashion or by requesting customization from the membership management vendor).
Zen Planner, for instance, offers a significantly more expensive monthly package for its website bundle to build and maintain your website. ClubExpress charges a one-time startup fee ranging from $150 to almost $2,000 depending on the level of website coding and customization you require. ChamberMaster's one-time startup fee ranges from $600 to $7,000. Wild Apricot, on the other hand, includes free website building, web hosting, API access, and WordPress integration at all tiers. Then there are tools such as MemberPlanet, which offer little to no customization but come at a far lower overall cost. Sumac includes no website building or content management, but there's still a one-time fee of $700 plus $50 per month for a website integration with its software.
As soon as you add money to the system, though, you have to also choose a payment processor. These companies act as intermediaries between your website and your members' banks and credit cards, securely processing the payments. They do take a percentage out of each transaction, though, averaging about 2.5 percent. Many incur per-transaction fees of 20 to 50 cents as well. Check into the payment processing features and charges before you link one up to your membership management platform, especially if your fees are low or if you accept installment payments. Those per-transaction fees will take a big bite out of small payments.
A final important factor to consider is mobile functionality. Some membership management solutions offer dedicated apps for Android and iOS. Others have responsive websites that resize dynamically depending on the screen size of your smartphone or tablet; other platforms such as Sumac still provide only desktop access. The standouts here are ChamberMaster, MemberPlanet, and Zen Planner, which not only offer mobile apps but have built separate, dedicated apps for staff and for members.
In Zen Planner's apps, for instance, members can view schedules and register for classes, pay bills, and even track workout results and daily leaderboards as part of the platform's gamified member experience. In the staff app, admins can track attendance; create, manage, and contact member profiles; or facilitate secure billing or document transactions within their app.
The ClubExpress mobile apps also bear mention here. The company doesn't separate admin and member apps but it will custom-build and brand a mobile app for each club—and publish the app to the App Store and Google Play store as part of a one-time $100 fee (plus $2 per member to download). Conversely, several of the products reviewed in this roundup offer no mobile-optimized access. If robust mobile capabilities are an important factor for your organization, then bear that in mind when considering a desktop-only, e-commerce-focused tool such as aMember Pro.
Different Audiences
The membership management platforms we look at here serve a number of different and specific audiences—from gyms and summer camps to professional associations and career education services. These nine platforms support different needs as a gym wouldn't need features for candidates for public office, for instance.
Wild Apricot covers a variety of club and association types, including non-profit associations and clubs that need to keep tabs on their members and bill them for dues and events. MemberPlanet supports managing memberships in smaller organizations such as non-profit associations, religious groups, schools, boosters, PTAs, and Greek and alumni groups (the latter of which is the main audience of 360Alumni). ChamberMaster services local Chambers of Commerce while StarChapter is geared toward local chapters, non-profits, and associations. Sumac is geared toward non-profits but has add-ons for everything from course registrations and job searching to tour booking. ClubExpress is a platform for all manner of clubs and associations while aMember Pro's software is suited specifically to online e-commerce and online membership websites. NationBuilder is geared towards non-profit associations, political campaigns, musicians, artists, restaurants—virtually anyone trying to generate an online following. We tried to review YourMembership.com (which supports large groups with multiple locations) but they did not have a demo or trial period available.
We give our current Editors' Choice nods to two services: ClubExpress and Zen Planner. ClubExpress is an all-in-one membership, events, e-commerce, and website management platform for local clubs and associations. Zen Planner offers gyms and workout studios an easy-to-use system that doesn't look like a CMS from the last decade. We found that the other membership management services reviewed will all get the job done adequately, but none quite equal ClubExpress and Zen Planner in design, seamless UX, or breadth of features.
Every organization is different and designed for a different purpose, each one serving a unique constituency of members and having discrete needs, tasks, and goals to achieve its mission. The membership management space mirrors the patchwork nature of the customers to which its software caters. Keeping all of the factors mentioned in mind, you can be sure that one of the tools in this review roundup will be just the right fit for your organization.