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Memberships and Benefits (February 2014): https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/166985
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Overview
In this release, we're introducing two new ways to manage your relationships with your patrons: Memberships and Benefits.
We know that many of our clients sell memberships that encourage patrons to commit to a long term relationship with your organization; many of you also offer benefits to your patrons, either as a direct result of becoming a member or based on some other kind of interaction, like subscribing or donating. Now you'll have the option to offer those benefits as a much more seamless, user-friendly experience for your members.
Let's define these terms:
- Benefits are privileges extended to a patron because of some status he has with you -- a membership, a subscription, a reward for volunteering. Those privileges might be different depending on the level of membership. Benefits might include discounted tickets and early access to purchase tickets before the general public.
- Memberships, in this case, are a simplified version of a Ticketable Event that, when purchased online, can automatically grant benefits to the buyer.
- PatronPortal is the add-on feature that allows your patrons to log in to your ticketing site with a username and password, instead of making an anonymous purchase. There are some aspects of these memberships and benefits features that can be used without Portal, but it's required in order to do the fancy parts involving online access and enablement. You can learn more about PatronPortal here.
Read on for all the details!
Benefits
When a Contact record is assigned a Benefit, that means the patron has access to certain privileges. These privileges are defined by Benefit Levels, which we'll help you set up when you start using this feature. Examples of Benefit Levels are "Gold, Silver, Bronze" or "Friend, Supporter, Sustainer" -- they'll probably correspond pretty closely to your Membership Price Levels if you offer such a thing. (They also might be "Donor, Subscriber, Board Member, Volunteer" if you allow those groups access to different special privileges.)
Version 1 of our Benefits feature supports two kinds of privileges:
- Early Access Dates -- Allow certain groups of patrons to purchase tickets to an event prior to the general public on sale date. Contacts with this kind of benefit can log in to your ticketing site and see events that are hidden from users who are not logged in. (This benefit requires PatronPortal, because it's all about confirming someone's identity online.)
- Automatic Discounts -- You can set up discounts that are assigned to a particular benefit level (eg. "20% off for Gold members, 15% off for Silver"). When a patron logs in and buys a ticket online, he'll automatically receive the appropriate discounts; the discount will also be automatically applied when a box office rep sells a ticket to a patron with this benefit.
You can set up both or either of these privileges for each benefit level.
Benefits can be assigned to anyone! You can choose to offer benefits to all your subscribers, or certain major donors, or to members based on their membership level. Giving benefits to subscribers and donors is a manual process done via a data import (if you have a lot of people who need benefits assigned) or creating them one at a time (if it's just a few) -- but giving benefits to members can be done automatically by using the "Memberships" part of this new feature! Read on...
Memberships
In the context of this feature, a "Membership" is a new type of Ticketable Event. When a patron purchases a membership online via your ticketing site (or when you sell her one over the phone or in person), she will be automatically enabled for PatronPortal, sent a username and password, and assigned the appropriate Benefit so she can immediately log in and start taking advantage of her new access and/or discount privileges.
**You can also use certain aspects of this Memberships feature without using PatronPortal, but remember that in order to offer member benefits online, Portal is required.**
A "membership" is a lot like a subscription or a regular event, but simplified to only have "Price Levels" (no Instances or Allocations):
This is what people will see when they buy that membership online:
And to sell a membership over the phone or in person, you'll start by clicking the new "Add Membership" button on the Create Ticket Order screen:
When the membership purchase is complete, the buyer will automatically receive a confirmation email with the details of his order and (if you're using PatronPortal) login information. Upon receiving that email, the patron will be able to log in to PatronPortal and automatically use his benefits!
When a membership is about to expire (one year after the original purchase), members can easily renew online. When a member logs in within a certain amount of time before her expiration date, she'll see this screen prompting her to renew so she can continue to use her benefits:
Memberships can also be renewed via the Quick Order Form. If the order is pre-qualified and that Contact has an active Benefit, you'll have the option to choose it for renewal when adding memberships to the cart:
If you're currently using PatronManager to track your Members in a different way than we've described here, that's okay! You'll still be able to do exactly what you're doing -- we're not taking away any functionality. But if you're interested in the automation of this new feature, or just want to talk about it and find out if this version of Memberships might be right for you, don't hesitate to be in touch and we'll happily have a conversation with you.
Future Enhancements
Did you catch that we referred to this as "Version 1" up there? We're really excited about this feature, and this is just the beginning. There are many more kinds of benefits that you might want to offer to your patrons, and other ways to sell them, so we're going to continue building enhancements as time goes on. A few things to look forward to in the future:
- Allowing members to get only a limited quantity of free tickets as a member benefit. (e.g. “With your membership you get 2 free tickets AND the rest are 10% off.”)
- Limiting the number of tickets that a member can purchase at the discounted price or as part of the pre-sale access.
- Gift memberships.
- Automatically (rather than manually) assigning benefits based on a trigger other than a membership purchase (such as a subscription purchase, or a donation of a certain amount).
- Upsell a higher level membership during the online ticket purchase process. (eg. prompting a “Silver” member to upgrade to “Gold” and then be able to access additional benefits.)
All this and more! We want to hear from you -- let us know if you're ready to get started using memberships and/or benefits right now, or if you have any questions about it or ideas for the future.