Nonprofit Membership Software: What to Look For

When you’re choosing membership software for a nonprofit, you’re deciding where your member and donation records will live for the next several years. A nonprofit membership plugin keeps track of whose joined, what they can see and when they renew, and it works alongside whatever you use to take donations. Most options on the market have many of the same features, but what separates them is how easily you can get at your own records, and whether someone who pays a membership fee and also gives a donation shows up once in your system or twice.

Can you get at your member and donation records?

Getting at your member and donation records is something you should be able to do yourself, whenever you need to, without asking the software company to do it for you. You might need a list of everyone who joined this year to send them something, or a count of members and what they gave for a grant application, or the names of everyone whose membership lapsed before the renewal reminders go out.

There are four things to cover with any supplier before you sign up:

Can you export your members, your donations and your payment history at any time, in a plain format like CSV that a spreadsheet or another system can open?
Can you filter a list before you export it, or does it only come out all at once?
What do the terms of service say about who owns the records?
What happens to the records if you stop paying for the software?

Sharing records with your donation tool is what keeps the same person from appearing twice in your system. Without it, somebody on your team ends up matching a membership renewal in one list against a donation in another. With it, one record shows you that a person is a member, when they renewed, and what they have given separately from their membership fee.

On WordPress, Paid Memberships Pro and MemberPress handle membership levels and who can see what while Give handles the donations, and the thing to check with any combination is whether a payment taken in one of them updates the same person’s record in the other automatically.

Will your membership plugin still fit as you grow?

Whether your membership plugin will still fit as you grow is worth thinking about now, because moving membership software later takes weeks of somebody’s time.

Renewal season and annual appeals put a few hundred people through your site within a couple of hours, all logging in, paying and updating their details at the same time. That is a heavier load than the site handles in a normal month, so put it to the supplier and to whoever hosts your site, and ask both of them what happens on that morning.

Most organizations also add something else within a year or two, whether that is event ticketing, an email tool, or a way to take regular monthly gifts. Ask which of those your membership plugin already connects to, and what setting up each connection involves.

Frequently asked questions

Not necessarily. Plenty of organizations run their membership and their giving on WordPress with no separate system, and a CRM tends to earn its place once you are tracking things a membership record cannot describe, such as a grant application moving through stages. What matters either way is that one person has one record.

Yes, given hosting that suits it. The plugin handles membership levels, access and renewals, while your hosting decides whether the site stays up when a few hundred people renew on the same morning. With WordPress you choose those two separately, which is also what lets you keep your records in a format you can use.

Choosing on the monthly price alone, because the subscription is usually smaller than the staff time spent moving everything across two years later when the software stops fitting. Asking early how you would get your records out is a better guide to the real cost.

Where to start

Start by writing down the questions you need to be able to answer about your members, things like how many joined this year, how many lapsed, and how many of them also donate. Take that list to any nonprofit membership plugin you are considering and ask them to show you where each answer comes from and how long it takes to get.