Member Status

Member Status is an optional value that may help provide additional information about a customer's membership. This value is not applicable for all associations. Member Status are associated with a particular Member Type. Each Member Type can have its own set of statuses.

Managing Member Status States

Member Status records can be added and associated to a Member Type from the Association profile, Membership tab, member types child form, as shown in the image above or through Membership Setup.

When you add these records, you will select the status and flipped status which is what the status changes to when the membership dates are enacted. You can add as many status codes as your Association deems appropriate per Member Type.

Use Cases

The initial status of a Membership is defined on the Membership Package. This is the status prior to the membership dates being updated by the system. For example, a membership record might have an initial status of 'pending payment'. When the membership activation terms are met that have been set in the update dates when field (as defined on the Member Type of the package), the initial status will automatically change to the 'flip status' (also defined from member type status). This status is retained by the membership until it is changed, either manually by an authorized user, or by a netFORUM process. Two processes may change the status of a group of membership records: the Mass Status Change process and the Mass Drop process.

Example: Member Type = Regular, member dates update when 100% paid

Possible Statuses are:

Pending Payment (flip status: Active)
Active
Past Due (flip status: Active)
Terminated

Scenario:

A customer mails in a membership application, but does not include a payment. The prospective member is entered into netFORUM, and a membership invoice is created. Since the membership invoice is unpaid, the customer's member flag remains 'no', and all dates on the membership are left blank (join date, effective date, expiration date). The customer's Member Status field is currently 'Pending Payment'.
The customer remits payment for the invoice. As soon as the payment record is saved in netFORUM, the customer's Membership Dates are updated (according to the rules defined on the Member Type). The Member's status changes to 'Active' automatically since the flip status of Pending Payment has been set to Active and the Member Activation terms have now been met.
The customer is sent a renewal invoice, but does not pay it. The Association has a 1 month Grace Period. For this example, the customer's membership expires on 1/31/09. On 2/1/09, an Association staff person runs the Status Change Process to change the status of all members with an expiration date of 1/31/09 to 'Past Due'.
During this one month grace period, the customer will still have a member flag of 'yes', and will have full access to all member benefits that consider only the member flag and not the member status. If the association wishes to prevent the past due member from receiving certain benefits, this may be done by requiring a member status of 'Active' in addition to a member flag of 'yes'. For example, the customer might be prevented from registering for the annual convention at the member price until their status was returned to Active.
If the customer pays the outstanding membership invoice prior to termination, then the member status will automatically flip to 'Active'.
If the customer does not pay the outstanding membership invoice, then the customer will be terminated when the mass drop process is run on 3/1/09. The Association staff person who runs this process will choose the status of 'Terminated' to be given to newly terminated members, the Terminate date will be populated, and the member flag changed to 'no'.

For some associations, the status may be used to track a prospective member's approval status. These changes would typically be made manually; the Member Status will only change automatically as described above.

Important! Although the Member Status can be a very useful field, a significant number of Associations do not use it. For these Associations, one is either a member or not a member; there is no in between. For this reason, Member Status is not a required field.