What Are Family Memberships & How Can They Help Your Club?

Family memberships are an excellent way to enhance the value of your club for your members and increase your club's revenue at the same time. It can make your club more inclusive and convenient for many people, increase your member numbers and earn you some extra cash. So, with that in mind, let's delve deeper into family memberships, their usefulness, and how they can benefit your club.

What Are Family / Group Memberships? 

Family or group memberships allow members who share an association with one another to have a joint membership. This takes the form of one primary member who is in charge of managing and renewing their secondary members. This can be super useful for families as it allows parents to be the primary members who take care of everything for their kids while still allowing the kids to be registered members.

This arrangement allows the primary member to select and pay for multiple secondary members within the club. The primary member is in charge of keeping all the secondary members' information up to date, renewing their membership, and making any necessary changes if a secondary member wants to leave the club.

Family memberships can be useful in a variety of situations, including: 

• So parents can manage their child's membership
• So one adult can manage the membership for their partner and kids
• So adult children can manage the memberships for their elderly parents
• So business who are members can manage their employees as secondary members

For more information on how group memberships can work for businesses that are members of your association, please read How To Make Extra Money With Corporate Memberships.

What Are The Advantages Of Having Family Memberships? 

This membership setup offers several advantages for the primary member and your club. Primary members can include several family members in the club at a reduced cost compared to individual memberships, plus family memberships make it easier for people to manage their friends' or families' memberships.  

Introducing family memberships can really help your club. It expands your membership base, providing more opportunities to promote and sell products, merchandise, and newsletters and promote your club. Additionally, maintaining accurate member information falls on the primary member so your administrative team can breathe easily. 

Think about it this way, a husband and wife want to join your club, but they are trying to save money. So, only the husband joins, and the wife just occasionally comes along as a guest. If you have family memberships, the husband could join as normal, and the wife could join for a discounted price as a secondary member. This way, they save money, and both get to be in the club; you get extra membership dues, plus you have another person who can buy your event tickets and merchandise. Not only that, but you can now communicate with those secondary members via emails, newsletters and the mobile app. Giving you yet more contacts to market to. 

Secondary Member Permissions 

You can choose if you want to allow secondary members to have a login for your club. If you enable them to have a club login, it will be up to their primary members to decide if they get a login on a case-by-case basis. This is great as it allows the primary member to give their partner a login but not give one to their kids. 

Secondary members do have a few limitations of what they can see and do though, so please keep the following in mind. Secondary members cannot view invoices between primary members and your club and won't receive membership renewal notices. The primary member will be responsible for renewing their membership and keeping track of invoices. Primary members can also register their secondary members for events from their primary account. That registration will then show under the secondary member's account, and their digital membership card will be able to be scanned at event check-in.  

As an administrator, when you look through your membership, you can filter by primary and secondary, primary only, or secondary only. This allows you greater control over whose information you see and who you market to.

How To Set Up Family Memberships

Setting up family memberships for your club is pretty straightforward. You can do this from the “Membership” tab on the admin side of your website. 

You will need to set up a new member level in the system's backend. In this level, you will need to add a new member product. This product will be your new family membership product. For this new product, you will have the option to choose how many secondary members are available as part of the product. You can also decide whether or not secondary members will receive a login to your member-only pages and app. You will also have the ability to edit the price of this member product. You can also choose what information you collect from the primary member and any of their secondary members. 

 

 

You can create multiple variations of family memberships, all with different allowed numbers of secondary members and all for different prices.

If you want to know more about setting up group memberships for your club and how to get the most out of them, look at either of the following Help Articles: Setting Up Group Membership and Managing Group Memberships. 

In the “General Settings”, you also have the option of assigning which “Group Relationships” are available as part of the member product in question. This allows you to set which types of secondary members a primary member can add. The types of secondary members available are as follows: 

•  Child
•  Co-Owner
•  Dependant
•  Employee
•  Other
•  Partner

Again this is great if you are planning on using a few different kinds of secondary memberships, ie. one for kids and one for partners. 

Family Memberships For Your Club: Conclusion  

As we’ve already covered, adding secondary members to your club can increase the number of people in your club who can buy tickets, attend events, and just generally spend money in your club. It can also allow you to get more accurate event registrations and attendance figures, as secondary members (like kids) can now be registered and signed into events. 

All in all, the ability to add secondary members to your club is not only a valuable and powerful tool, but it could go a long way in offsetting the cost of the price increase. 

How To Start Using Family Memberships 

Setting up family memberships is quick and easy. You can find all of the details on how to do so here: Setting Up Group Membership.  

However, your members must know how family memberships work and how to use them. A helpful starting point is our Help article on Group Membership - As A Primary Member. Take a look at it yourself first and then either share it or summarise it for your members to ensure they understand how to use group memberships correctly.

I hope you found this article helpful; now go have fun sorting out how to benefit from family memberships.