Crm membership management
- Hours a year keeping the list by hand
- 78
- Fields the record has to hold
- 13
- Renewals falling due in a year
- 420
Every figure on this site comes from the numbers you enter and the method printed beside them: your members, your tiers, your renewal period, your joiners and lapses, your minutes per renewal. Where a guide names a published document it names the document and the date it was read. This site publishes no vendor's price and no body's dues.
CRM membership management is a phrase that hides a real decision: whether your members are best held as a CRM's contacts with a membership attached, or as a membership record that happens to hold contact details. The two look alike in a demo and behave differently at renewal. A CRM is built to track a relationship over time, with pipelines and activities; a membership record is built to answer who belongs today, at what tier, until when. This guide is about which one your body is actually asking for.
Open the Free membership database template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Decide what the record is FOR
If the question you cannot answer today is who is in arrears and who lapses this month, you want a membership record. If it is who spoke to this major donor last and what was promised, you want a CRM. Bodies that buy the wrong one usually discover it at renewal, when the tool has no idea what a renewal is.
Keep one system of record for the person
Whichever you choose, one of them owns the person and the other reads them. Two half-maintained lists is the state most bodies are already in, and it is the state that puts a lapsed member on the newsletter and a current member on the arrears list in the same week.
Make the renewal date a first-class field
In a CRM the renewal is a custom field somebody has to remember to fill in, and its absence is silent. In a membership record it is the field the whole year turns on, and the tool can be loud about it. That difference is most of what a membership body gets out of buying the right category.
What a membership administrator asks before running the Crm membership management
Can I just use a general CRM for members? Yes, and plenty of bodies do. It works while renewals are simple and one person keeps it. It stops working when tiers, lapses and arrears need to be visible to a committee, because those are membership concepts a general CRM has no opinion about.
What does a membership CRM hold that a spreadsheet does not? A history. A spreadsheet shows today's state and quietly overwrites yesterday's; the record keeps that somebody was a member from 2019 to 2024, lapsed, and rejoined at a different tier, which is the question a committee asks and a spreadsheet cannot answer.
Do we need both? Some bodies do: a membership record for the list and a CRM for major-donor relationships. If so, decide which one owns the person's contact details before you connect them, because the answer to that decides which one you fix when they disagree.
Does Duesvo do pipelines and activities? No. It keeps members, tiers, renewals, dues and cards. If you need a sales pipeline, buy a CRM and keep the membership here.
Ask us about Crm membership management
Tell us how many members you have, how they are kept today, and what happens at renewal time.