Members and lapses
Membership organisations
A trade where the most valuable thing you own is the length of a relationship, and where most systems delete it the moment someone stops paying.
Three modelling errors
Three things about membership that generic software handles badly
Membership is a period, not a status
Almost every system models membership as a field on a record: current, or lapsed. It is the obvious design and it destroys the thing that matters most, which is the history.
A member of eleven years who lapsed last March is not the same as somebody who joined and left within a year, and they are not the same as a prospective member. Held as a status field, all three eventually look identical, because the field only remembers its current value. Held as a connection with a start and an end, all three are distinguishable at a glance, and so is somebody who has lapsed twice before and come back both times.
This is why the win back campaign in most associations is worse than it should be. It goes to a list of lapsed members with no sense of who was a member for a decade and who was never really engaged, and it treats them identically, which the ten year member notices and resents.
The corporate member is an organisation with people in it
A company takes six seats. Six named individuals use them. Those individuals change during the year without the membership changing at all, and the organisation is the member while the people are the ones who attend, read and vote.
With one contact record per membership, five of the six receive nothing, which means five of the six have no reason to argue for renewal when the finance director questions it. That is not an administrative inconvenience, it is a direct cause of lost renewals.
The organisation holding the membership, with people connected to it under roles, is the shape that survives. Swapping a named person changes a connection instead of the membership. The seat count is a query. Each individual has their own consent, so the ones who want the newsletter get it and the ones who do not are not annoyed into unsubscribing from everything including the renewal notice.
People are several things at once
A member who joins a committee. A committee member who volunteers at the annual conference. A volunteer who is also an employee of a corporate member. In most associations these are the engaged people, the ones worth the most, and they are the ones a single label per person describes worst.
Relationship types you name, several of which one person can carry, is what holds it. One record, one address, one consent position, one history, and as many roles as the truth requires. It is also considerably less work than maintaining three lists that disagree.
Six every year
Six situations an association meets, and what becomes of them
Every association meets all six.
| The situation | What usually happens | What Consonas does |
|---|---|---|
| A member lapses | The record is deleted or archived, taking eleven years of history with it, and the lapsed member is invisible to the win back campaign. | The connection ends with a date. The person keeps every year they were a member, and the lapsed list is a view rather than a memory. |
| A corporate member with six named people | One contact record and five names in a field, so five of the six receive nothing. | An organisation holding the membership, six people connected with roles, each with their own consent and their own history. |
| Somebody moves employer but stays a member | The record is edited and where they used to work disappears, along with the reason a colleague once introduced them. | The old connection ends, a new one begins. The person is continuous and both employers keep their history. |
| Renewals for the year | A mail merge from a spreadsheet, sent after some have already lapsed, with no record of who was contacted. | Tasks with dates, in the daily view ahead of time, and every communication recorded against the member. |
| A member who is also a volunteer and a committee member | Three records in two systems, disagreeing about the address. | One person carrying three types with three connections, one consent position and one history. |
| A subject access request from a former member | Two systems and a spreadsheet searched by hand against a statutory deadline. | One organisation, one search, and tooling built for it, including the history of a membership that ended. |
Renewals
Arriving before the lapse rather than after it
Renewal is the operational heartbeat of a membership body and it is usually run as a mail merge from a spreadsheet, which means it goes out at one moment for everyone and misses whoever fell due last week.
As tasks against the member with dates, renewals appear in a daily view before they fall due, individually, and the work is visible to whoever is covering rather than to the membership secretary who is on leave. Every communication is recorded against the member, so the question of whether someone was actually contacted has an answer.
The measure that matters then becomes available: how many lapse each year, at which grades, and after how many years of membership. Most associations know the total and cannot break it down, and the breakdown is where the decisions are.
Engagement
The history that makes a win back worth reading
Every event sits on the person's timeline: joined, attended, volunteered, renewed, lapsed, rejoined, complained, spoke at the conference. It is written as things happen rather than by someone remembering to log them.
That is what turns a lapsed list into something usable. A member of eleven years who spoke at two conferences and lapsed after a subscription increase needs an entirely different letter from someone who joined in January and never opened anything, and the difference is visible rather than being a guess.
It also answers the question every board asks and few associations can: what does an engaged member actually look like, and how many do we have.
Obligations
Consent per channel, and erasure that reaches everywhere
A renewal notice is not marketing. A committee circular is not a newsletter. Consent held per channel with a date and a source is what lets you send the first two to somebody who has declined the third, which is both lawful and what they actually asked for.
Every send from the marketing module checks consent again for that individual at the moment of sending, so a list built for the conference cannot reach somebody who withdrew after it was built.
Erasure removes a person from every place they appear instead of the one you were looking at, including audiences, message history and files. The audit trail keeps the fact that an erasure happened without the content, which is the shape the law expects and the thing you will need if anybody asks. The Information Commissioner's Office is where a member goes when they are unhappy with the answer, and where the guidance behind that shape is published.
Before the import
The six decisions that outlive the import
The membership as a connection with a period is the decision that determines whether this works. Get it right before the import.
- Relationship types
- Member, lapsed member, corporate member, named contact, applicant, committee member, trustee, volunteer, supplier. Most associations need at least six and are offered one.
- Membership as a connection with a period
- The single most important decision here. A membership runs from one date to another. When it lapses the connection ends instead of the record being deleted, so a member of eleven years who lapsed last March is still eleven years of history.
- Corporate membership
- The organisation holds the membership and named individuals sit under it. Connections with roles, so the people change without the membership changing and the seat count is a fact rather than a spreadsheet.
- Renewal dates
- The operational heartbeat. Tasks against the member with a date, in a daily view before they fall due, instead of a mail merge that goes out after half of them have already lapsed.
- Consent per channel
- A renewal notice is not marketing. A committee circular is not a newsletter. Held per person and per channel with a date and a source, and checked again at the moment of sending.
- Custom fields
- Membership number, grade, joined date, qualification, region, branch. Few and specific. Anything about a member's professional record probably belongs in whatever system awards it.
A member of eleven years who lapsed last March, somebody who joined and left within a year, and a prospective member all look identical in a system that only remembers the current value.
Which is why a membership is a connection with a start and an end rather than a field that says current or lapsed.
The boundary
What this is not
Not a membership management system
It does not take subscription payments, does not run direct debit, does not produce an invoice run, does not reconcile a bank account, does not run elections or ballots, and does not host events with ticketing.
Several of those are the core of dedicated membership platforms. If subscription billing is the thing you most need solved, you need one of those and we would rather say so on this page.
There is no member self service portal
The customer portal on the higher plans lets somebody sign in and see their own matters, and it is designed for service enquiries rather than for updating membership details, downloading certificates or booking events. If a full member portal is central to what you need, this is not it today, and it is not on the roadmap either. Saying it is coming would be easier and it would not be true, so the honest position is that we are not building one and you should choose accordingly.
What associations use it for alongside those
The relationship side, which membership platforms frequently handle as a mailing list with a payment attached. Who is actually engaged. What a corporate member's people look like. Why someone lapsed. Which branches are growing. The conversation that preceded a complaint. Those are usually in an inbox and a spreadsheet, and they are what determines whether renewals hold.
First decisions
What a membership organisation should do first
About an hour, and the first decision is the one that determines whether history survives.
Model membership as a period, not a status
A member who lapsed in 2022 and rejoined in 2024 has two membership periods and one continuous relationship. A system that holds membership as a flag on a record cannot describe that, and the history is what makes a lapsed member worth contacting.
Put the renewal dates in as tasks with lead time
Not on the renewal date. Before it, with enough notice to have a conversation. Membership renewal is a decision people make by inaction, so the only thing that changes the outcome is contact before the deadline rather than a reminder on it.
Record how someone joined
An event, a referral from another member, a search, a campaign. Membership organisations spend on recruitment and very few of them can say which channels produce members who renew, as opposed to members who join.
Model the committee and volunteer roles as connections with periods
Who chaired which committee, when. This is the institutional memory of a membership organisation and it is almost always held in the minutes rather than as anything queryable.
Get consent right per channel before any mailing
Members consent to organisational communications and that is not consent to everything. Consent is a fact per channel and per purpose here, and membership organisations generate more complaints from this confusion than from anything else. A renewal notice and a newsletter also sit differently under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, which govern electronic marketing in the United Kingdom.
Four years, one seat
One corporate seat, four years, and the renewal that was lost in year three
Invented, and invented deliberately, because the cost of holding a membership as a status field is invisible on a screen and obvious over four years.
None of this happened
What follows is a composite of things membership bodies describe, not a customer. There are no nameable customers to write about and we are not going to invent one, which the customers page sets out at greater length. The organisation is a professional institute with a small staff, the sort where the person who administers membership also runs the conference. The member is a manufacturer that takes six named seats for its engineers, and the membership runs from the first of April.
Year one, and the four facts worth recording
The manufacturer joins after two of its engineers attend a regional talk. Four things are worth recording at that moment. In most associations one of them is.
The one that usually is: a contact record in the name of the human resources manager who signed the form and pays the invoice.
The three that usually are not. The membership itself, as a connection with a start date and a renewal date, held against the manufacturer rather than against the person who signed. The six engineers, connected to that membership with their own roles and their own periods, each carrying their own consent per channel. And the fact that the manufacturer arrived through a regional talk, which is the only fact in the list that tells the institute whether regional talks recruit corporate members or merely fill rooms.
Year two, when the named people change and no one outside the manufacturer knows
One engineer leaves for a competitor. Another moves to a different site and stops attending. The human resources manager who signed the form is promoted and no longer reads anything the institute sends.
Where the six seats are six connections, this is three small pieces of work. One connection ends with a date. One begins for the replacement. The engineer who left keeps their own record and their own history, because they are still an engineer in this trade and may apply in their own name later. Where the six seats are a number in a field beside one contact record, nothing happens at all, because none of it is visible from outside the manufacturer and no one has any reason to ask.
Year three, which is when the renewal is actually lost
Everything the institute sends goes to the person who signed the form, who does not read it. The five engineers still at the manufacturer receive nothing. So when the finance director asks what the subscription buys, the only person inside the manufacturer who is asked is the one with no answer beyond the invoice.
This is the moment the renewal is lost, a full year before it is recorded as lost. Nothing visible has gone wrong, the subscription is paid, and every measure the institute has says the manufacturer is a member in good standing. The five engineers connected to the membership, each receiving what they consented to receive, is not a nicety. It is the only mechanism by which anyone inside a corporate member has a reason to defend the subscription when it is questioned.
Year four, the lapse, and what is left afterwards
The renewal date passes and the manufacturer does not pay. In the spreadsheet version the row is deleted or the status field is set to lapsed, and four years of attendance, two conference talks and a working group seat held by one of the engineers now hang off a record whose only remaining content is the word lapsed.
Held as periods, the membership connection ends with a date. The four years remain four years. The engineers remain six people with six ended connections instead of one deleted row. The talks and the working group are still on the timelines of the people who gave them, because those events happened to people and not to a subscription.
Two years later, which is the part that decides whether any of it mattered
One of the engineers applies as an individual member. In the first version she is a new applicant with no history, and she is written to as one, which she notices. In the second she is someone who was covered by a corporate membership for four years, spoke at two conferences and sat on a working group, and the person answering the application can see all of it before replying.
The letter to the manufacturer is a different document too. Not a general appeal to lapsed members, but a note to a business whose engineers attended and contributed, sent to someone other than the person who stopped reading in year two.
What was actually lost, itemised
The joining channel, so the institute cannot say whether regional talks work. Five of the six people, so the subscription had one defender and lost. Consent held per person, so the institute could not have written to the engineers even if it had wanted to. The reason for the lapse, which was a finance review and not dissatisfaction, and which determines what you write two years later. The working group year, which is institutional memory. And the continuity of one engineer, who is now a stranger to an organisation she has been part of since her second job.
None of that is recovered by better letters. It is recovered by deciding, before the import, that a membership is a period held against the organisation and that the people under it are people.
Off the old database
What survives the export from a membership database, and what you will retype
Associations rarely arrive from a CRM. They arrive from four or five things at once, and the joined dates are usually in the worst of them.
What is actually in use before you start
In most membership bodies of this size the record is spread across a membership platform with subscription billing attached, a spreadsheet kept by the membership secretary, an events or ticketing tool, a mailing tool with its own list, an accounting package holding the invoices, and frequently a database written years ago by a volunteer who has since stood down. Each of them holds a piece of the truth and none of them holds the relationship.
The important thing to establish first is which of these is the one somebody actually trusts when two of them disagree. In practice it is often the spreadsheet, because a person maintains it and no one maintains the others.
What every system on that list exports
Names, email addresses, postal addresses, the current membership status, the current renewal date, the membership number, the grade, and the branch or region. Those are columns in every system on the list and they map onto a record, a membership connection with an end date, and two or three custom fields without much argument.
Invoices and payments stay where they are. Consonas does not take subscription payments and does not reconcile a bank account, so the finance system keeps being the finance system and there is nothing to migrate.
What does not come across, in order of how much it hurts
Prior membership periods. This is the one that matters most and the one almost no source system holds, because it modelled membership as a status field and a status field only ever remembers its current value. A member who lapsed in 2019 and rejoined in 2021 exports as a member who joined in 2021.
The reason somebody left. Resignation, a subscription increase, retirement, a change of employer, a complaint that was handled badly. Where it exists at all it is in an inbox.
Consent provenance. Most mailing tools hold a subscribed flag and nothing about when it was given or where it came from. A flag is not a consent record, and this is the single most common gap between what an association believes it holds and what it holds.
Committee and volunteer terms. These live in minutes. Who chaired what and between which dates is the institutional memory of a membership body and it is almost never in a system at all.
The structure of corporate memberships. Exports usually flatten these into one row per named person or one row per company, and neither shape survives the round trip. This is normally rebuilt by hand and is worth the afternoon.
The joined dates are worth reconstructing by hand
This is the unglamorous recommendation on this page and the one that pays for itself. Original joined dates and prior periods can usually be recovered from old subscription ledgers, from certificates, from long service awards, and from the minutes of the meetings at which admissions were approved. It is tedious and it is finite, and it is the difference between a lapsed list you can sort by length of membership and one you cannot.
If it cannot be recovered for everybody, recover it for the members who have been in longest, because those are the ones where the difference between eleven years and unknown changes what you would say to them.
Keep the old system readable for one full year
Not one month. An association's year has a shape that only shows itself over a complete cycle: the renewal peak, the AGM, the conference, the branch programme, the point at which student members become full members. Something in the old system will turn out to have been carrying one of those quietly, and you find out when that month arrives.
Export continues to work free on any plan, in both directions of this argument. It is the reason you can commit to an import without committing to us permanently, and the reason we can tell you to keep the old system open without it costing you anything here.
Renewal shapes
Common renewal date or anniversary renewal, which are two different operations
Almost every difficulty an association has with renewals traces back to which of these two it runs, and to whether it chose.
The two shapes, and why the choice is not cosmetic
A common renewal date means everybody's membership runs to the same day, usually the first of January or the date of the AGM. An anniversary renewal means each membership runs a year from the day that member joined. Membership bodies frequently believe they run one and actually run both, because a common date was adopted at some point and everybody who joined afterwards was quietly put on their own anniversary.
With a common date the entire year's income arrives in a few weeks and so does the entire year's administration, and everybody who is going to lapse lapses at once. With anniversaries the work is level across the year and the income is level with it, but there is no moment at which anyone looks at the whole membership, so lapses are noticed one at a time or not at all.
Both are legitimate. What is not survivable is not knowing which one you run, because the two demand opposite things from the people doing the work.
What a common renewal date needs from a system
A period of concentrated, dated work that several people share. Renewals as tasks against each member with lead time, visible in a daily view to whoever is covering, matters far more here than at any other point in the year, because the membership secretary being on leave for a fortnight in the renewal window is the difference between a good year and a bad one.
It also needs the grace period to be an explicit decision rather than a habit. Most constitutions allow some interval between the renewal date and the point at which someone ceases to be a member. Held as a membership connection with an end date, the lapse is a fact with a date on it. Held as a status field someone updates when they get round to it, the lapse date is whenever the spreadsheet was last touched, which is the reason so many associations cannot say how many members they had in March.
What anniversary renewal needs instead
A steady daily habit and one moment in the year that a common date gives you for free: an occasion on which somebody looks at the whole membership at once. That has to be scheduled deliberately, because nothing in an anniversary year forces it.
The compensation is that anniversary renewals are conversations rather than a campaign. Contact before the date, individually, with the person's own history visible, is achievable when four fall due this week and impossible when four hundred fall due this month.
The rest of the association year, which collides with all of this
The AGM, with its notice period and its papers. The conference, which for many bodies is both the largest recruitment event and the largest administrative month. The branch programme, which starts in the autumn and stops for the summer. Awards and honours, which run on their own nominations calendar. The point at which student and graduate members become full members, which follows the academic year rather than yours. And the subscription review, which happens at one meeting and determines the lapse rate at the next renewal.
Two consequences for how the system gets used. First, the recruitment channel worth recording is seasonal, so a channel that produces nobody in February may be your best one in October and you cannot tell without the date. Second, the moment to work the lapsed list is not the renewal peak, when the same people are already occupied, but the quiet stretch after it, when the reason each person lapsed is still recent enough to answer.
The one dated thing this does not do
It does not run the ballot. Elections, nominations and voting at the AGM are not part of this product. That is stated elsewhere on this page and it is worth repeating in a section about the year, because for a membership body the AGM is the busiest dated event of the lot.
Payers and branches
The employer who pays, the branch that recruits, the register that tells you nothing
An employer pays the subscription, a branch does the recruiting, and the register that lists your members is kept up to date by someone who does not work for you.
The employer who pays for an individual membership
Distinct from a corporate membership, and frequently confused with it. The member is a person, the membership is theirs, they take it with them when they change job, and someone else's finance department pays for it. Model it as the person holding the membership and the employer connected to the person for the period they work there, which is the shape that survives the day they move.
The failure it prevents is the common one: the membership recorded against the employer because the employer paid, and then the member changes job and appears to have left.
The branch, region or chapter
Usually volunteer run, usually holding its own list, and usually the part of the organisation that actually recruits. Held as a field on the member it is a filter and nothing more. Held as an organisation record with committee members connected to it under roles and periods, the branch has a history: who chaired it, when, and what it ran while they did.
There is a decision here about what a branch volunteer should be able to see, and it is a decision to make deliberately before anyone is given a sign in rather than afterwards. The related failure, where a committee term ends and the access does not, is common precisely because in a volunteer run body nobody owns the removal. Holding the term as a connection with an end date is what makes the question askable at all.
The awarding body, the university, and the regulator
Members arrive holding qualifications awarded elsewhere and are frequently on a statutory register maintained by somebody else. None of those systems will tell you anything. They do not notify you when a qualification is awarded, when a registration lapses, or when someone is removed.
The practical position is to hold as a custom field only what you were told and by whom, and to treat the awarding body as the authority rather than pretending your copy is current. A membership body that lets a stale copy of someone's professional standing sit in its own database has acquired a liability, not a feature.
Affiliated societies and reciprocal bodies
Many institutes have arrangements with sister organisations, at home or abroad, under which members of one get something from the other. The person is not your member and you cannot treat them as one, but they attend your events, receive some of your communications and appear in your correspondence.
That is a relationship type of its own, and naming it is cheap. The alternative, recording them as members with a note in a field, produces a membership count that is wrong and a mailing that goes to people who never asked you for anything.
Sponsors, exhibitors and the trade
The conference brings organisations that are not members and do not want to be: exhibitors, sponsors, advertisers in the journal, recruiters. They are worth holding properly because they recur annually and because the person who books the stand moves employer as readily as anyone else. They are also the population most likely to be mailed something they did not consent to, since they arrive through a booking form instead of a membership application.
Honorary officers, and the people who are three things at once
A past president who is now a trustee. A branch secretary who is also an employee of a corporate member and a conference speaker. These are the most valuable people in the organisation and the ones a single label describes worst. Several relationship types carried by one person, each with its own period, is the only arrangement that holds them without producing three records that disagree about the address.
Two neighbouring pages overlap with this one and are worth reading beside it. An association that is also a registered charity, with donors and grant funders alongside members, will want charities for the fundraising side. An institute whose subscription carries courses, examinations and certificates will find that dated, cohort shaped work described on education and training.
Saying member
Where association vocabulary and the product's vocabulary disagree
You can carry on saying member, and no one will stop you. Two of these distinctions are worth arguing about anyway, because the vocabulary is where the modelling error starts.
Member, and why the product says person
You say member. The product holds a person, with a relationship type of member, and a membership as a connection with a period. That looks like pedantry until someone lapses, at which point the person is still a person and the membership is what ended. A system whose smallest unit is a member has nowhere to put a former one.
This is the first of the two distinctions worth adopting. Say person and membership separately when you are configuring, and go back to saying member everywhere else.
Subscription, which is two different things in one word
In an association subscription means both the money and the entitlement. Consonas holds the entitlement as a period and does not hold the money at all. So when someone asks whether the subscription is current, they may be asking whether the membership period is open, which is here, or whether the invoice is paid, which is in the finance system. Those two answers can disagree for weeks and both are correct.
In good standing, which has no field
Most constitutions define good standing as a combination of a current membership and no arrears. The arrears half is not held here, because payments are not held here. If good standing gates something in your rules, it is a question you answer by looking at two systems, and it is better to know that in the first week than to look for a field that does not exist.
Lapsed, resigned, struck off, retired, deceased
The trade has five words and most systems have one status field. Every one of those five ends a membership period, and every one of them implies a different answer to whether you may write to the person again and what you would say. Holding them as ended connections with a recorded reason keeps the distinction. Holding them as one word called lapsed loses it, and the visible consequence is a win back campaign that writes to the estate of someone who died.
That is the second distinction worth arguing about. Lapsed is not a synonym for former.
Life member and honorary fellow
A membership period with a start and no end, which is a different thing from a period whose end date no one has filled in. Decide which of your grades genuinely have no end date and record them that way deliberately, because the two look identical afterwards and only one of them is correct.
Grade, class, category, section, division
Trades disagree with themselves here and so do institutes of the same trade. Whatever you call it, it is a field, it belongs on the membership rather than on the person where it can change at renewal, and it is worth checking whether yours changes with the membership or with the individual before you decide where to put it. A grade that follows the person and a grade that follows the subscription are different fields that happen to share a name.
Engagement, which everyone uses and no one defines
In most association conversations engagement means email opens, because that is the number a mailing tool produces. In this trade the useful sense is attendance, contribution, committee service and length of membership, which are events on a timeline instead of a metric. If you adopt one piece of vocabulary from this page, let it be that engagement is a set of recorded events and not a percentage.
Plain answers
Asked by associations
Does it take membership payments?
Not as a subscription system. Consonas does not take card payments, does not run direct debit mandates, does not reconcile a bank account and does not raise a year's renewals in one run. Where the invoicing module is bought it will raise an individual invoice, number it at the moment it is sent and record what was paid against it, and it records that a membership exists and when it runs to. Where you have a payment platform or finance system doing the money properly, the intention is to read from it rather than replace it.
Can it handle different membership grades?
Yes, as a field on the membership connection or on the record depending on how your grades work. What it does not do is calculate progression between grades or hold an assessment process, because those are specific to each organisation and a system that guesses at them is wrong for everyone.
What about corporate memberships with a seat count?
The organisation holds the membership and the named individuals are connected to it with roles. The seat count is then a fact you can query rather than a number in a spreadsheet, and swapping one named person for another does not disturb the membership itself.
Can members update their own details?
Not today, and it is not on the roadmap. There is a customer portal on the higher plans where somebody signs in and sees their own matters and bookings, and it is designed for service enquiries rather than for self service membership administration. If a full member portal is your central requirement, this is not it and we are not promising it will be.
How do we handle a member who lapses and rejoins?
The first connection ended and a new one begins. The person is continuous throughout, so the years of history are intact and the gap is visible as a gap instead of being erased. For an association that cares about length of membership, that distinction matters.
Is there a discount for a not for profit association?
Every allowance is a value held against your organisation rather than a constant in our code, so any of them can be raised for a single organisation without a release. For a registered charity we say yes almost automatically. For other not for profit bodies, ask and say what you do.
Can we send the newsletter from it?
On the plans carrying marketing, yes, with audiences that keep themselves current and consent checked for each person at the moment of sending rather than when the list was built. That last point matters for an association more than most, because a renewal notice and a newsletter are different things and members are entitled to want one without the other.
What happens if we stop paying?
You drop to the free plan rather than out. Nothing is deleted, everything stays readable and searchable, and export continues to work free on any plan. For an organisation whose income is subscriptions and therefore seasonal, that is worth knowing before you start.
Start with the lapsed list
Import your members with their joined dates, and see what your lapsed list looks like when it is sorted by how long someone was a member.
Three people, a thousand relationships, no card and no time limit.