Our Next Gen Membership product, available now in beta, is now integrated with Race Registration for Membership discounts and becoming a member. Our old Club system has had this for years, and the new system works both for legacy Clubs as well as the new Membership product. We will be adding support for discounts on a per level basis, as well as adding it to Tickets in the future.
For member organizations, offering Membership discounts provides a way to encourage people to become members. For existing members it provides a reminder of the benefits of being a member. For non-members, it is an opportunity to upsell a person from a single event to become a member.
For Races looking to expand and motivate clubs to sign up for their race, this is also simple to do. You can pick specific clubs or search for clubs within a certain radius of a zipcode, or search for particular clubs.
This is what appears in the registration process.
Non-members get to select which Membership Level they want to sign up for, and any custom questions associated with Memberships are also included in the registration process.
The Membership is clearly marked on the checkout page, along with any Membership sales tax due as well as the processing fee for the membership. Note that all the membership financial information and money will flow to the Member organization:
This is what appears when a current member is signing up:
Setting Up Membership Discounts for Races
The setup page has a number of options, but the first thing to do is click the green button to add a discount:
Note the three choices for clubs to give a discount to:
- All clubs on RunSignup, which can be useful for races looking to incentivize and attract running club members from across the US will find it useful (over 250 clubs and about 150,000 members and growing).
- The membership organizations tied to the same user – useful for organizations that put on their own events.
- Picking specific clubs
For picking specific clubs, you can search for a club:
Or search within a radius:
There are a number of options for refining the membership requirements, including it is required for each participant, and if it is required for specific events:
There is also a date validation for being a member on the date of the race. Most events will want to leave this off as members might auto-renew between when they signup for the race and when the race happens. If this is checked, then the system is smart enough to make them renew and if your membership is configured properly, it will extend the membership from the expiration date. For example if they sign up on February 10, their membership expires April 1 and the event in May 1, it would renew their membership extending from April 1 on the date they sign up.
You can also suggest 1 club membership to join if they are not a current member. This is perfect for organizations who hold events and have a membership offering:
Financials
When signing up for both an event and a membership, the transaction is split into two transactions. This allows for full reporting of revenue, sales tax and processing fees (note, because it is viewed as two transactions in our system the processing fee is calculated as 2 transactions so it gets the calculation for that event and that membership). The benefit is that the event can be paid their part directly and the member organization can be paid directly – so independent races can be a revenue and member source for clubs.
In the initial membership signup shown towards the top of this blog,
Kip signed up for the 8K and became a member, as you can see in the Membership Report in the Membership Dashboard:
The transactions report shows the details in the Membership Dashboard:
Note that if Kip had purchased a Family type of membership and multiple people had signed up for the race, that would have worked as well.
Summary
The Next Gen Membership system is shaping up to be a great resource for both races who want to create ties with races, as well as clubs that want to put on events and reward their members. We can’t wait to see all the creative ways membership organizations and events use this powerful feature.