You can accept payments for annual, monthly, or weekly memberships and can define multiple membership levels at different price points. You can also make specific pages accessible to members only, and have badges appear next to member's names to show off their level of support. Paid memberships are supported with Paypal and Authorize.net.
To set up paid memberships on your nation you will need to:
- Configure your nation's membership levels
- Create a Donation page for payments (or use an existing one)
- Create a Paid Membership Page
Configure membership levels
The first thing you want to do is create membership levels. Any membership page you create will have access to these levels.
1. From the control panel, click Finances > Memberships > Membership levels.
2. Choose a short Level Name and Badge, and then click "Add membership level"
The badge will be small text which appears next to a members name on your website to show off their level of support.
You will be able to configure more than one membership option per membership level, allowing you to offer different price points for the same membership for different periods of time.
Create a donation page for membership payments
After you set your membership levels, you will need a donation page to process membership payments. You can use any donation page you've already setup, but ideally you should create a new donation page with text tailored to users buying memberships. A dedicated donation page also means you can tag users to easily find them later.
To create a new donation page:
- Go to Websites > New Page and create a new Donation page.
- Under Donation Page Settings, you can select special tags for those who send payments on this page.
- Under Intro blurb, enter a special message.
Create a paid membership page
Now that you've got both your Membership Levels and a special Donation page set up, you are ready to create a Paid Membership page.
- Go to Websites > New Page > and create a new Paid Membership page.
- Configure Membership options. This is where you setup various price points and durations for the membership levels you created earlier, and select which donation page you want to use.
A recurring membership means that the member’s credit card will automatically be charged once his membership expires. For example, you can offer a $15 regular membership for 6 months and a $30 regular membership for 12 months.
You can also create multiple paid membership pages, but the first one you create will become the default. This means that users who are not members and try to access members-only pages will be redirected to the default paid membership page and prompted to sign up.
Membership tips
- 4 membership levels will display perfectly in one line on all official themes, so you may want to aim for that.
- Create a page where only members can interact, or offer exclusive content to members only by setting "Who can view this page" to "member."
- Note that there is only one security level for members, so it does not matter which membership level they are, as long as they are a member they will have access to members only pages.
- Consider offering merchandise like t-shirts, stickers or buttons at certain membership levels to encourage users to sign up, just like public radio fund drives
- Once a membership level has been set for a supporter, the system will not process another membership payment for that supporter until his membership expires. The system prevents members from making a mistake and paying again.
- To see a list of payment processors who currently support recurring memberships within NationBuilder, go to Settings > Bank Accounts > New Account. There is a column “Accepts recurring?” The processors with a yes in this column can be used to process recurring membership payments.
