Contents
What Neon CRM Components Make Up a Membership?
Taking Inventory: What Neon CRM Systems Currently Use My Member Levels and Statuses?
Creating New Membership Levels, Terms, and Pricing
Adjusting System Email (and / or Letter) Conditions
Adjusting Other Neon CRM Systems With Member Pricing or Permissions (if applicable)
Creating New Membership Form(s)
Testing Membership-Specific Directories, Event Registrations, Enrollment Forms, and Web Pages
Setting Deprecated Membership Levels and Terms to "Inactive" Status
Cleaning Up Test Account Transactions
Publishing Your New Membership Form(s)
Frequently Asked Questions
This guide explains how an organization with existing membership levels and terms can migrate some (or all) of their existing membership levels to new levels and terms, a task usually within the context of a price change in membership dues.
What Neon CRM Components Make Up a Membership?
All memberships in Neon CRM use 3 basic systems, with additional systems available depending on the organization's needs in terms of providing member benefits.
At a minimum, all membership organizations using Neon CRM have:
- Membership level and terms settings
- Membership enrollment forms
- Membership renewal reminder automated system communications
Optionally, organizations using Neon CRM can also:
- Publish member directories, with optional members-only access
- Publish landing pages, with optional members-only access
- Publish event registration forms, with optional members-only pricing and/or access
- Publish an online store and accept product orders, with optional members-only pricing
Taking Inventory: What Neon CRM Systems Currently Use My Member Levels and Statuses?
The first step in planning a change to membership levels and pricing is to take inventory of your CRM, and make sure that each system which relies on membership levels and / or membership status is accounted for in a checklist of to-dos, related to the new levels and terms you plan to create.
Questions you need to find answers to include:
- Are we using the built-in Neon CRM membership directory? Is it restricted to certain membership levels, if so?
- Are we using the built-in Neon CRM online store? If so, do we have membership-specific pricing on store products?
- Are we using the built-in Neon CRM event registration forms? If so, do we have any Events open for registration with membership-specific ticket pricing?
- Are we using any of the Neon CRM web pages as landing pages for members-only web content?
- Do we grant complementary memberships based on donation totals?
- Do we have any workflows which automate things based on membership level and / or term?
- Do we have any members on automatic renewing payment schedules? If so, are any of them auto-renewing on membership levels we plan to deprecate?
If the answer to any of these questions is "yes" you'll need to adjust them as you publish new memberships levels and terms, and most importantly you'll need to make a test account in your CRM to test these changes to make sure you've edited the relevant settings correctly.
With your inventory of changes to make, you're ready to get started with new membership levels, terms, and pricing by creating the new levels and terms.
Creating New Membership Levels, Terms, and Pricing
The first step in publishing new membership level and term pricing is to create the new levels you plan to publish. Refer to our guide on creating membership levels and terms. You should pay particularly close attention to submember terms and pricing, and submit a test membership enrollment with a test CRM account to make sure that the new levels and terms work like you expect them to, which is detailed further along in this guide.
If your organization also grants membership by donation totals, using Neon CRM's complimentary membership system, you'll also need to verify that the complimentary membership settings properly account for your new membership levels and terms, rather than the ones you are planning to deprecate.
You can safely work on complimentary membership settings within the scope of a single business day in American time zones, since complimentary membership changes and membership renewal notices are calculated by the Neon CRM scheduler during overnight database cleanup tasks in the early morning hours. Therefore, as long as you make all of your changes in a single day, the CRM database won't do anything to a member by itself while you're working on new levels and terms.
Adjusting System Email (and / or Letter) Conditions
If you have membership renewal system email conditions, for example to omit submembers from membership renewal and membership past-due email notices, you should also adjust these conditions to account for your new membership terms, as well.
System email conditions are commonly used by membership organizations to omit submembers who don't pay dues from notices about renewal payments.
Here's what a typical set of submember-related conditional system email settings would look like:
In plain language, the logic of this condition says: "if someone's membership term is (in range of) any of this list of $0 submember terms, do not send email when this submember's term nears expiration, or passes the expiration date."
Primary contacts on a company or household group membership will pass the above condition without a match, and be sent membership renewal emails and membership past-due emails normally.
If your organization mails printed letters via the Neon CRM system letter option, the above process is exactly the same for printed letters, in lieu of emails.
Adjusting Other Neon CRM Systems With Member Pricing or Permissions (if applicable)
Next, you should adjust the settings on other items in the CRM from your taking inventory step above, to include your new membership levels and terms.
For example, if you have web pages published via Neon CRM with member-only permissions, you will need to update those permissions to include access for your new levels and terms.
Or, if you have any membership directories published, you will need to edit them to ensure that they include members from your new levels and terms.
If you use Neon CRM to handle Event publishing and registration, you will also need to review any conditional ticket pricing groups on active Events which are still taking registrations, to make sure that the new levels and terms you are creating will be included in member-specific Event registration ticket prices.
Refer to the guides linked in the taking inventory section above to accomplish these changes to each respective members-only system in the CRM that you use.
Creating New Membership Form(s)
Next, you should create a new membership form, which includes your new levels and terms in addition to any existing levels and terms that you plan to keep active.
Refer to our guide on how to create a membership form for this step.
Tip: It would be helpful to initially create your new membership enrollment form with "pay later" as a payment option. This will allow you to submit the new form with your test account without the need to add a payment to the form, to ensure that things like submember enrollment and household creation are working properly (in the case of a household group membership option, for example). You can always disable "pay later" as a payment option after you've verified that the form settings are correct, before you publish the new membership form on your website.
Note: If you have auto-renewing members on automatic payment schedules in levels that you plan to deprecate, you may want to make a specific membership form that accommodates their existing membership level, rather than completely deprecating their existing membership level. You can do so by conditionally linking them directly to a particular membership form in their renewal notice, rather than routing them to the Constituent Login Portal at renewal.
Testing Membership-Specific Directories, Event Registrations, Enrollment Forms, and Web Pages
After creating your new membership form, this is a good time to test all of your changes in the previous steps as if you were a new member in your organization. Submit the membership enrollment form, apply a dummy payment to the membership you created to make it active, and go through the directory, an Event registration, any member-only landing pages, or other such things you had to adjust, while logged into your test account.
By doing so, you can test all of your changes, and find any errors you may have made which require a fix in the relevant settings.
Setting Deprecated Membership Levels and Terms to "Inactive" Status
When you're satisfied that all of your adjustments to other membership-related items in the CRM are complete, you're ready to deprecate any old membership levels you plan to eliminate.
Note that if you have any auto-renewing members on payment schedules, it might be preferable in this step to preserve those levels as active for now, but omit those levels from the public-facing payment forms rather than setting them to inactive status. Since you can have multiple variations of a particular form, you could accomplish this by having another conditional system email which routes people renewing at a certain term directly to a particular membership form which includes their old level and term, instead of the Constituent Login Portal.
In any case, this step will not delete the old membership payments, nor will it delete the to-be-deprecated membership levels. In simple terms: you are making changes that will happen in the future, everything in the past remains the same.
By setting a membership level to "inactive" as in the screenshot below from Global Settings -> Membership Levels and Terms, you're leaving historical and current memberships alone, while simply preventing anyone from renewing at the inactive level in question in the future.
While deprecating the membership levels that you are eliminating, do take care to make sure that new membership levels replacing them have a proper "rank" if you use complimentary memberships based on donations. The system uses the ranking numbers to determine whether someone should be upgraded to a new level if they pass a new donor threshold which grants them a higher membership tier.
Cleaning Up Test Account Transactions
Next, you should clean up any test transactions you made while testing your new membership levels and terms on your test account(s).
Finding all of those transactions is a relatively simple thing to do, presuming you are accomplishing all of these tasks in the span of a single day, as recommended earlier in this guide.
Run a Financial -> Transaction report in your CRM, identifying transactions in the following way:
For any test transactions belonging to your test account in the output list, you can click on the transaction ID report output (the columns highlighted in yellow in the screenshot below), and delete the transaction in question:
Publishing Your New Membership Form(s)
If you made it this far, you are almost done! Your last to-do is to publish your new membership enrollment forms, and your membership level and price changes are complete.
If you enabled the "pay later" option on your new membership enrollment form, per this guide's suggestion above, you'll need to disable that payment option. Refer to our pay later guide for a reminder on how to do this.
There are two places (at least) to publish the changes to your new membership enrollment form:
- Your organization's website
- The Neon CRM Constituent Login Portal
For the first, refer to the guide on how to connect Neon CRM forms to your website. For the second, our guide on configuring the Constituent Login Portal details how to change the forms which are used in the Constituent Login pages for donations, memberships, and member account profile changes.
Reminder: if you have any auto-renewing members on a level you plan to deprecate, you might want to leave that level available on a particular form, and conditionally send it to people who auto-renew at that level and term, while omitting the deprecated level from public-facing forms, see the Setting Deprecated Membership Levels and Terms to "Inactive" Status section above.
After your new membership enrollment form is published, you are done!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need to change any data in my old membership transactions, such as moving old member data to the new levels and terms?
A: No, you do not need to modify any of your existing member data. Historical members will still have accurate membership levels and terms, relevant to the time when those memberships were current.
Q: Will the changes detailed in this guide affect my current members?
A: No, current membership records will not be affected by your changes. When current members reach their renewal time in the future, they will be prompted to choose from the new list of levels and terms that you published in the last step of this guide.
Q: How could I communicate a planned membership level pricing change to members before it takes place?
A: Neon CRM has a built in report which identifies current members. You could send everyone on your "Current Member Report" a campaign email to notify them of upcoming changes to membership dues pricing, before the changes are enabled.
Q: What if I have some members on auto-renew payment schedules in these levels we're deprecating?
A: If maintaining those auto-renewing payments is a higher priority than replacing those levels, you should leave those levels as active, and omit them from your public-facing membership enrollment form(s) rather than setting them to "inactive." Present those members with a different renewal notice (and different renewal form, if desired) via System Email Conditions.