Personalizing a Membership form

You have already learned how to create and launch a Membership campaign. However, if this is your first time creating a form, we would like to check every step in more detail with you.

Configure your membership form

Choose the Registration Type

When you create a form for a membership or donation campaign, an event, or an online store, you can select between two types of campaigns: online and offline.

- Online Membership will allow members to sign-up on their own and administrators to add them manually.

- Offline Membership will only allow administrators to add the members

To see how to add a member manually, check out this article.

1. General Information

You need to fill in the title or a name for your campaign and add a description before the campaign can be launched online. We also recommend adding a photo. You can provide further information on the campaign by filling in the terms and conditions or attaching files. 

This section allows you to explain the membership process. Do not hesitate to add maximum information to clarify the process, so your new members feel at ease and are fully informed.

2. Prices and packages

Here, you can set up your different membership offers. To create a new plan, click on +Plan. This rate is obligatory and is the basis of membership registration.

You can choose between two options when setting up a membership registration period: 

• From date-to-date: People signing up will have a membership over a fixed period that you will have defined, no matter their start date. For example, if the end date is set as January 1st, if they sign up in March or July, their membership will still finish on January 1st. 
  
• For a given number of months from the membership start date: People signing up will have a membership over a fixed period starting from the date they signed up. For example, if your membership option lasts 12 months, someone signing up on January 12th will stay a member until January 12th the following year.
• Lifetime membership: people signing up will remain members permanently.

The "Lifetime membership" option must be activated to be available in your forms. To do so, go to Settings > Forms & Campaigns > Advanced Settings section and activate Lifetime membership.

You can further personalize this section by clicking on +Options. Here you can:

• Hide the price of a campaign published online by unticking the Show price box
• Add the user to a group during the membership process if signed up with a specific membership option
• Limit the number of participants for this price 

Price Groups

If you offer a wide range of prices, you can organize them by creating price groups. This article will provide you with more information. 

Discounts

You can give some members preferential rates by creating discounts. The process of creating a discount is described in this article. 

If you need more options, click one more time+NEW and you will have access to other suggested fields

3. Form

Setting Up the Form

This section will allow you to choose which information you want to collect on your members when they sign up. 

When registering, applicants will fill in the fields that are defined in the settings of their profile. The information they provide will be used to create and fill in their profile, which you can access through Community > Contacts > Details. For more information, check out this article. 

You select which information fields the applicant needs to fill in by choosing whether to make them required, optional, or not required. 

Information displayed on re-registration

If someone registers again, the software shows only the information fields that were not filled out previously. This simplifies the process on the candidate's side. 

Sometimes, information from previous registrations needs to be updated; for example, if you offer workshops, members probably won't want to attend the same ones as the previous year. To ask for this information again, there are two options:

• You can delete these fields at the end of the membership period and create new ones. This way, the data in the fields will also be deleted, and the area will show up again during the re-registration.
• You can also create a field per period (i.e., "Workshops 20X9" and "Workshops 20X0").

4. Payment Options

Payment Options

If you are setting up an online campaign, you can offer different payment methods to your future members. 

Online payments are collected through your online account. If you have not yet verified your account, you will only be able to collect 250$ max per transaction and only have up to 2.500$ on your account.

To collect and transfer funds without restrictions, follow the steps in this article to verify your account.

Confirmation Email

You can modify the message sent in the email confirmation, which is a good opportunity to personalize your thank you message. 

Advanced Settings

The advanced settings of this section allow you to:

• Limit the number of memberships on all sales or per person
• Fill in an email address if you want to be notified of each new membership
• Send a tax receipt
• Make the number of sales public

A tax receipt is sent based on the whole purchase. If all the membership options are not eligible for tax receipts, you must create separate campaigns. An invoice will only be created if issuing a tax receipt is deactivated for the campaign. 

5. Publication 

Publishing the Form Online 

As the name suggests, publishing on your Website will post the campaign on a page on your Website. For the campaign to be visible, the page that hosts your form needs to be published (i.e., the page needs to be placed in a website's menu, which you can do from the dropdown Choice of the publication page or by going on Website> Menus and Pages).

The option accessible from a link allows people to access your registration form through an external website or an email. For example, you can share this link in your newsletter. You'll find this link in your campaign's Communication tab.

Choose No online membership if you want only administrators to add members, and not allow members to register by themselves.

For people to access the campaign using this link, you must have selected "published website" in the dropdown menu on the page Website > Settings and Themes.

The campaign will only be accessible to admins if your Website is under maintenance.

No worries if you are not using the website feature - you can still publish your campaign this way! To do this, keep the website tool deactivated under Features and select "published website" in the dropdown menu on the page Website > Settings and Themes. This way, when someone accesses the form, they just need to log in on the first page. 

Access Rights

Just like for a website page, you can restrict access to the campaign to only certain contact categories or groups. 

Form Availability

By filling out the campaign start & end dates, you'll be able to limit the period over which members can register. Once the campaign ends, new registrations will no longer be possible.

You can leave this section blank if there is no end date to your campaign.

Saving the Form

Once all the above steps have been completed, click Save at the bottom of the form.

The status at the top of that same page will then be updated to Published. From this point forward, you can change the status of the campaign to Draft, Sales on hold, or Archived.

If the form doesn't want to be saved, you've probably missed a field, and the software will highlight it in red. You simply need to fill in the required information, press Save again, and you're ready to go! 

Then, go to the Share tab to copy the link of your form and share it with your Community:

• in your communications and social network (Form link)
• on another website (iframe link)
• on the agenda of your website (if you activated it and set starting and end date to your form).