Membership CRM is a category name doing a lot of work. Sold to a large association it means a contact database with campaigns, segments and activity histories. Sold to a body with four hundred members and one part-time administrator it usually means somewhere to keep members that is not a spreadsheet. Those are different products at different prices, and the word CRM tells you nothing about which one is in front of you. This page is about the questions that separate them, and about the ones a body of any size actually has to answer at renewal.
What the CRM half is for
The CRM half of a membership crm system is history: who spoke to this person, what was promised, which appeal they responded to and what they gave. That is worth paying for when a body has staff who cultivate relationships, which usually means major donors, corporate members or sponsors. A body whose interactions are a renewal notice and an annual meeting has almost no history to keep, and pays for the CRM half in complexity rather than money.
What the membership half is for
The membership half is state, not history: who belongs today, at what tier, until when, and whether they have paid. It has to be right rather than rich, and it has to be readable by whoever is chasing renewals this year. Bodies that buy a general CRM and add membership fields discover the gap at renewal, because a renewal date in a CRM is a field somebody has to remember to maintain and its absence is silent.
Member relationship management as the honest middle
Member relationship management, as the phrase is used by small bodies, is neither: it is the record plus enough history that the person chasing a renewal knows this member wrote in last year about a fee they disputed. In practice that means notes against the member and a payment history, which is what membership crm software for small bodies actually ships and what the rest of the CRM vocabulary is decoration around.
What crm for membership organizations should cost
Category pricing is where a small body loses. A CRM priced per contact costs more the better your body does, and a membership tool priced per member does the same. Price whatever you are considering against your renewal spike, not your feature list, and prefer one price for the body: on this site that is $35 a month whatever the membership does, because the work the software saves does not scale with the size of the list.
Questions people ask about membership crm
Is a membership CRM the same as membership management software?
Not quite. Membership management software is built around the record and the renewal; a CRM is built around the relationship and its history. Small bodies usually want the first and are sold the second, because the CRM category is larger and better marketed.
Can we use Salesforce or HubSpot for members?
You can, and bodies with staff and a consultant do. Alone, a general CRM has no idea what a renewal is, so the membership logic becomes your custom fields, your reports and your responsibility to maintain when the administrator changes.
What is member crm in a small association?
Usually the member record plus notes and payment history. If somebody offers you segments, campaign attribution and lead scoring for a body of four hundred, they are selling the wrong half of the category.
Do we need both a CRM and a membership record?
Only if you cultivate donors or sponsors as well as keeping members. If so, decide which system owns the person before connecting them, because the one that owns them is the one you fix when they disagree.