How to manage group memberships (e.g., families)

Group memberships let you register multiple people from the same household — such as a family — with tailored discounts and one profile per person. This article is for administrators setting up membership plans and discounts for their nonprofit.

This article walks you through the most common questions on the topic, along with our recommendations:

• What are the prerequisites for managing group memberships?
• How do I set up family discounts?
• How do I find and manage children's information?

What are the prerequisites for managing group memberships?

As a reminder, to properly distinguish between individuals in a family or group membership, you need to:

To properly distinguish individuals during a family or group membership, two prerequisites are required:

• each person has their own profile (1 person in real life = 1 profile);
• a unique identifier is configured: this identifier should not be the email address when families are involved, since children and parents may share the same email address. For more details, see the article Setting up a unique identifier for your Community.

To help you build your pricing and discounts, we also recommend checking out this page, which covers different scenarios and approaches: Building membership pricing with discounts.

How do I set up family discounts?

To learn how to set up discounts, we recommend reading our dedicated article first: Setting up discounts on a Campaign

Setting up equal family discounts starting from the 2nd person

Example: all memberships cost $100. The first person pays $100; the 2nd person and each additional member receive a $10 discount on their membership.

Solution:

• Create a simple Membership Campaign, with your membership plans in step "2 - Pricing and membership plans";
• Use the following calculation tool: Per-person discount starting from the 2nd registrant
• Go back to step 2 of your Membership Campaign, click "Apply a discount", and configure the discounts using the results from the spreadsheet.

1. Create a simple Membership Campaign and fill in your membership plans at step 2 - Pricing and membership plans.
2. Use the calculation tool Per-person discount from the 2nd registrant.
3. Go back to step 2 - Pricing and membership plans of your campaign, click Apply a discount, and configure the discounts using the results from the spreadsheet.

Family discounts will now apply automatically from the 2nd registrant onward.

Example: your first membership is $100. For the 2nd registrant, membership is $90; for the 3rd, $80; and so on.

Solution: set a different discount for each additional registrant.

In our example, you set a $5 discount starting from 2 registrants: since the discount applies to all prices, $5 × 2 = $10 will be deducted from the cart (as if only the 2nd membership were reduced by $10).

For 3 registrants, set a $10 discount: $20 will be deducted from the cart in total. Add $5 increments for each additional registrant ($15 for 4, and so on).

Membership plans with different pricing

Setting up complex discounts with membership requests

• apply discounts when you receive the membership request;
• approve the request, then send a Payment Link.

To learn more, see our article: Managing campaigns with membership requests.

How do I find and manage children's information?

When a parent signs up their child to your community or a campaign, it can be hard to know where to find information about the child or the parent. It is currently not possible to link profiles together, but here are our recommendations for the most common situations:

The parent creates an account on your platform (see the article Member sign-ups to the community). Once their account is set up, the parent registers their child through a Membership Campaign by entering the child's first and last name, while staying logged in to their parent account. This results in:

The parent creates an account on your platform (click here to learn more about member sign-ups). Once their account is set up, they can sign up their child through a Membership Campaign by entering the child's first and last name, while staying logged in to their parent account. This results in:

• a profile being created for the child, with a membership linked to it;
• the membership purchase appearing in the parent's profile.

A parent and child can share the same email address, as long as your community's unique identifier is set to a field other than the email address (see the "What are the prerequisites for managing group memberships?" section of this article).

When logging in to your platform, the person simply chooses whether to sign in to the parent account or the child's account. The parent account gives access to the membership purchase information; the child's account gives access to the membership itself.

When logging in to your platform, users will simply choose whether to sign in to the parent account or the child's account. Depending on which profile they access — using the example above — they will be able to find purchase information (parent profile) or membership information (child profile).

Further reading

• Building membership pricing with discounts
• Managing membership plans
• Managing overly long pricing grids
• Setting up discounts on a Campaign