Associations will occasionally offer an extended membership as a way to attract new members.

This guide takes you through how to achieve this with both rolling/anniversary and cyclical style memberships.

Rolling/anniversary based memberships

The length of a membership is configured directly within the Membership Type for rolling/anniversary styled memberships.

To change the membership length go to Configuration & Settings > Membership > Membership Types, find the relevant Membership Type and click Edit (Detailed instructions can be found in the User Guide).

On the Configuration tab, go to the Membership Period field and adjust the number of months accordingly, then click save.

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Cyclical memberships

Unlike the rolling/anniversary style memberships, cyclical memberships will require you to make changes to the Membership Price Period to offer an extended membership period.

A cyclical membership is valid for a set period of time, generally set by the association's constitution with all memberships expiring on the same date. In a cyclical membership the Membership Price Period has two functions, it sets the price of the membership and also the Paid Through or expiry date.

The Paid Through or expiry date on a membership is determined by the system according the End Date you have set for a Membership Price Period. To set up an extended membership offer, you will need to amend the Start and End Dates for the current and upcoming Membership Price Periods.

In this example we are using a financial year based membership cycle, the current cycle is 2020/2021. All current memberships are set to expire on 30 June 2021.

Any new member who joins the association will automatically be given a Paid Through Date of 30 June 2021, regardless of when they join throughout the timeframe of 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021.

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To create an extended membership offer, we need to adjust these start and end dates.

In this example, we will adjust the dates to offer up to 3 months extended membership to any new members.

As you cannot have overlapping Membership Price Periods, we will need to edit the start and end dates of both the 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 membership price period.

Firstly, change the End Date on the 2020/2021 period to end on 31 March 2021.

Next, change the Start Date on the 2021/2022 period to start on 1 April 2021.

Now anyone who joins your association between 1 April 2021 and 30 June 2021 will have their Paid Through Date automatically set to 30 June 2022 which is the end date of the next membership period and they won’t receive a renewal notice when they are generated.

A new member who joins on the 1st of April will receive the full 3 months of free membership, however someone who joins at the start of June will only receive 1 month of free membership.