How does Membership Work?

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This picture illustrates a typical membership setup.  Not all memberships have multiple categories, baby pubs and/or maintenance fees.

Memberships start with the membership organization pub, also called the holding pub also referred to as parent pubs.  This is not what the customer will be fulfilled, rather it is what holds it all together.  For example, AFR, SOV and OXC are all membership organization pubs.  The customer becomes a member to the organization, but what actually gets fulfilled to the customer is the baby pubs associated with the membership category.

Memberships can have multiple categories.  This allows for different levels within the membership.  For example, a membership can have a silver, gold and platinum level.  Each level is individually defined with the number of baby publications underneath.  For example, a customer may only get 2 subscriptions as part of a silver level, 4 with gold and 10 with platinum.  All of this is defined when the categories are set up.  Note that you can also allow customers to select from different categories of subscriptions (up to 2 front-end and 3 back-ends for example) or you can predefine the baby pubs.  Each of these baby pubs get set up as free perpetual comp’d subscriptions. 

In addition to the subscriptions (referred to as baby pubs) that the customer receives as part of their membership, there is generally a maintenance fee associated with the purchase.  For example, the customer may have paid $5000 to start their membership but is required to pay $100 each year after the first to maintain their membership.  This annual fee is done on the maintenance fee pub.  The difference between the baby pubs and the maintenance fee pub is that the maintenance fee pub has money associated with it.  The first year of the maintenance fee is ‘free’ because the customer just paid $5000, then after the first year the subscription renewals at the $100 rate.  

Identifying Subscriptions in Membership

Memberships can be viewed and maintained at the Customer Activity screen.  The screen can be customized to display the Membership Category and Membership Org so you can see that the subscription is part of a membership.  In addition, there are membership fields on the Subscription Information tab at the bottom half of the screen to identify the Membership Organization and Membership Category.

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Membership Maintenance

When a subscription is part of a membership, the Customer Activity screen will display more options for maintenance on the right side of the top list frame and have more options available via the right-click menu than a regular subscription.