Setting Up a Membership Campaign for Chapters

Some nonprofits have legal entities — such as companies or organizations — among their members. This is common in professional associations, where businesses rather than individuals hold memberships.

For these nonprofits, the Structures feature is especially useful — it enables memberships for legal entities. Here's how it works:

• How Membership Campaigns work
• Creating a Membership Campaign for Structures
• Manually adding a Structure to a Membership Campaign
• Online membership

How Membership Campaigns work

The Membership Campaign for Structures works exactly the same way as the one for individual members.

It lets you:

• Accept online memberships (submitted by the Structures themselves) and/or manually add Structures as an Administrator,
• Collect information that will be saved in your Community, under the Structures tab,
• Offer different membership tiers and payment methods,
• Automatically record memberships in your accounting, and more.

Creating a Membership Campaign

Setting up a Membership Campaign for Structures is similar to setting one up for individual members.

Go to the Memberships feature (from the left sidebar) and click "Create a new campaign".

When asked "Who are your members?", select "Structures":

If this option isn't available, make sure the "Structures" feature is enabled (from the left sidebar).

Once you've made that selection, you'll land on the configuration page for your Structure Membership Campaign. Follow the steps and fill in:

• A title, description, and photo to make your Membership Campaign appealing,
• Membership tiers and any additional options,
• The information you need to collect from member Structures — it will be saved in each Structure's profile,
• Accepted payment methods, and more.

If you choose to allow online memberships — which we recommend to reduce your workload — don't forget to publish your Membership Campaign. You can edit it at any time.

For more information on creating a Membership Campaign, check out this article.

Manually adding a Structure to a campaign: offline memberships

Just like with individual member campaigns, you can manually add a Structure as a member through a Membership Campaign. Here's how:

Go to Community > Memberships > Registrants:

1. Add a member

In the Registrants list, click the "+Add a member" button.

2. Select the membership tier

3. Fill in the Structure's information

At this step, you can edit the Structure's contact form.

Note that you cannot add information about individuals linked to this Structure at this stage.

4. Add payment information

Case 1: You've already received the membership payment

If you've already received an offline payment from the Structure for its membership, enter the details now. Fill in the payment method (check, wire transfer, etc.), the amount, and the bank account affected. Don't forget to save.

The corresponding accounting entries will be generated automatically.

Case 2: You haven't received the membership payment yet

If you haven't received the membership payment yet, simply check "Deferred payment" and save.

Once you receive the payment, go back to your Membership Campaign:

• In the member list, find the Structure that sent its payment (use the "No payment" or "Partial payment" filter if needed),
• Click the eye icon on the right of its row,
• Click "New" next to the "Payment" line and fill in the details.

Note: Once a Structure is recorded as a member, it appears in your Community as such, with an active yellow badge — regardless of whether payment has been received.

Online membership

Just like individual members, Structures can join online if you enable that option.

The main benefit is time savings: you don't have to enter the information yourself — the person signing up on behalf of the Structure does it. They simply follow the link to your campaign and complete the steps.

The process is similar to that for individual members. Here's an example with online payment:

Learn more:

• Setting up payment methods for a Membership Campaign
• Creating a Membership Campaign
• Why and how to complete E-wallet Verification