A membership directory is the list of who belongs, published to the people on it. That last part is what makes it different from the membership list, and it is where bodies get into trouble: a directory is a publication of other people's contact details, made by a body they trusted with them. A membership directory template is therefore not just a layout. It is a set of decisions about what is shown, to whom, and what a member can keep out of it. This page is about those decisions and the fields that survive them.
The fields a directory holds, and the ones it must not
A working directory holds the member's name, the tier or category they belong to, the year they joined, and whichever contact details they have agreed to share. It does not hold what the body knows for its own purposes: home address where only a postal contact was agreed, payment history, arrears, notes about behaviour, or anything a committee wrote down. The membership record holds all of that; the directory is a view with consent applied, which is why a directory built by exporting the whole record is the commonest mistake here.
From membership list to directory
The membership list is the internal one: everybody, with everything, including the people in arrears and the ones who lapsed last month. Turning it into a directory means filtering to current members, filtering the fields to those agreed, and deciding whether the directory is printed once a year or lives online. A printed directory is out of date the day it is delivered and cannot be corrected, which for a body with quarterly renewals means a phone number that has been wrong for eight months.
Where alumni directory software differs
Alumni bodies want the same thing with one difference that changes the design: members find each other by class year, course and location as much as by name, and the directory is the point of the membership rather than a service beside it. Alumni directory software is therefore built around search and profiles, where a club's directory is built around the list. A body whose directory is its main member benefit should look at the alumni tools; a body whose directory is a printed booklet should not pay for them.
Membership templates worth keeping, and the ones to throw away
Bodies accumulate membership templates: an application form, a renewal notice, a directory layout, a card, a certificate. The ones worth keeping are the ones whose content comes from the record and whose wording your body has actually settled: the notice you send, the fields you ask for. The ones to throw away are the layouts you fill in by hand each year, because they are the same work repeated and the place where last year's figures survive into this year's document.
Questions people ask about membership directory template
What goes in a membership directory template?
Name, tier or category, year joined, and the contact details each member has agreed to publish. Anything the body holds for its own administration, including payments and arrears, belongs in the record and not in the directory.
Do we need consent to publish a member directory?
You need it in practice whatever your rules say, because a directory is a publication of somebody else's contact details. The workable pattern is opt-in per field at joining and at renewal, recorded on the member's record so the directory can be generated without anybody having to remember who said no.
Printed or online?
Online if members use it to find each other, printed if it is a keepsake or if your membership is not comfortable online. A body doing both should generate both from the same record on the same day, or the two will disagree within a month.
Is a spreadsheet enough for a membership list?
For the list, often yes. For the directory it is where the consent problem creeps in, because the easy move is to export everything and delete the columns afterwards, and one year somebody does not delete them.