Membership & Subscriptions

"We have a very particular set of Membership Categories."

Doesn't everybody? myClubhouse allows you to have as many Membership Categories as you like, each with its own criteria and characteristics:

• Memberships with any duration (specified in days, weeks, months or years) or perpetual.
• Memberships restricted by age (min, max, or range) and/or gender.
• Memberships that are only available to new members, or existing members, or both.
• Memberships that are only available by invitation; for example, honorary membership.
• Trial memberships that can be extended into full memberships.

For age-limited categories, you can specify exactly how the age is calculated. For example, the age can be calculated on the day of registration or at a point relative to the start or end of the season or year. This allows you to base the age around, for example, the school year.

"... and all our Subscriptions end on 30th April."

Ok, so you have a defined 'season'. You can define your season end date in the general club settings. You can then define whether Subscriptions for each Membership Category should align with the season end date or not. In fact, you can anchor the start and/or end date of any Membership Category on any dates in the year or you can indicate that a Subscription should run for a defined duration from whichever date the applicant specifies.

"... and some of our memberships run along school term times."

You can define a Membership Category as starting and ending on "named dates". So, for example, you could create dates called "Summer Term Start", "Summer Term End" etc. You then set up your Membership Category to use reference these named dates. Separately, you then define where these dates land on each year. This means that, when new term dates are announced, you can then simply add these to the system once and it will automatically use them where indicated.

"... and we offer a reduced rate for those joining near the end of the season."

For situations where the duration of a membership is variable (for example, when the user can select the start date but the end date is pre-defined), you can define the rules that should be applied where that duration is less than a year. These are very flexible. For example, you could say that the rate is reduced to 50% if joining 3 months before the end of the season. Or you could say that the rate reduces by £5 every week, starting from 6 months in. You can also say that, for very late joiners, the system should offer a membership that extends to include the next season.

"... and we need to approve all applications in advance."

You can choose whether requests for particular Categories of membership require approval or pass straight through; it's your choice. For the former, the Membership Secretary will receive an email indicating that there is a new request and can then sign in to myClubhouse to approve or reject it. At this point, they can adjust dates and costs as necessary. The applicant is notified of the offer and can then go ahead and pay.

"We charge a joining fee for the first year and allow members to pay in monthly instalments."

Each Membership Category can have a joining fee if you wish, and this is only applied for the first year's Subscriptions. You can explicitly set the ways in which members can pay for the joining fee and Subscriptions. You can offer a variety of Payment Plans including one-off single payment, monthly instalments, deposit and balance; anything you can think of really. You can even charge a surcharge for, say, paying in instalments.

"... and we like to offer a discount to early payers."

Yes, it's good to offer a bit of an incentive to get people paying on time! Each Category can have an 'Early Payment Cost' which is the rate that members pay if they pay by a certain date. You can set the deadline in days before or after the start of the Subscription. The system automatically selects the appropriate rate according to when they pay.

"... and we have special membership that we offer to families."

myClubhouse explicitly supports group memberships which can be any combination of a number of individual memberships. For example, you could have a family membership of 2x adults and 3x children for a fixed price. You can also use group memberships to offer blocks of membership; for example, 10x single memberships for a fixed cost. You can control whether members can be moved in and out of groups, and how often this is allowed to happen.

In addition, you can offer discounts on groups of individual memberships (or indeed any combination of products). So, you could define a discount that applies when somebody buys two adult Subscriptions and one or more junior Subscriptions. The discount can be specified as a percentage (e.g. 10% off total or cheapest), a flat rate (e.g. £20 off), or a total (e.g. £250 in total).

"The committee sets each season's costs a few months before."

Each Category can have a number of different rates that apply for memberships that start on different dates. So, for example, you can set next year's Subscription rates in advance by entering rates that only apply for memberships starting on or after the next season's start date. You can also choose exactly when these rates are publicly advertised to your members.

"Renewals have been a real pain for us to manage."

Managing renewals for a large membership can be a real chore. myClubhouse can help you in a couple of ways:

• The Bulk Renewal feature allows you to create and issue renewal Subscriptions across your entire club (or any subset of it) with just one click.
• This is particularly useful when you have a standard season, with a lot of Subscriptions ending on the same date.
• You can set Subscriptions to automatically renew, on a Category-by-Category basis. This would be the best option if you don't have a fixed season, with memberships renewing constantly throughout the year.

In all cases, members are automatically emailed with the details of their new Subscription and the system allows you to keep track of those who do not wish to renew, making sure you don't bother them unnecessarily.

"... especially where, say, people have outgrown their junior membership."

With myClubhouse you can explicitly define which Categories members should move on to when they are no longer eligible to remain in their current Category. This can be used to:

• Roll juniors into student or adult Categories.
• Roll new joiners on from their first-year-only Membership Category.
• Roll junior members up through school year age groups (U8, U9, U10, U11 etc.), using their age at a defined point in the year.

"... in fact, what we really want is for members to set up an ongoing direct debit."

myClubhouse allows you to offer repeat-billing options at almost any regularity - monthly, 3-monthly, annual etc. Payment Subscriptions can be set up on GoCardless (for Direct Debit) or Stripe (for credit/debit cards). For annual memberships with a pro-rata first term, the system will automatically bill the pro-rated amount with a payment Subscription set up to follow on. Just set back and watch the membership fees flow in!

If you think this feature is right for your club, click to GET STARTED