Membership tiers

A membership tier is a level of membership your organization offers -- Supporter, Full Member, Sustaining Member, Student, whatever shape your membership takes. Tiers are where you describe each level and, if you charge for it, where the price lives.

Find them in your workspace under Administration, then People, then the Membership tiers card, and choose Manage membership tiers. Only workspace owners and admins can reach this. Because Administration is a web-only section, tier management is not available in the mobile app.

The tier list

The list shows every tier you have defined, with its description and two badges where they apply: Active or Inactive, and Default. Each row has Edit and Delete. If you have no tiers yet, the page says so and offers New tier.

Creating and editing a tier

New tier and Edit open the same form, in three parts.

Details

• Name, required, up to 64 characters.
• Description, up to 256 characters. This is what members read, so it is worth writing properly.
• Display order, a number. Lower numbers sort first wherever tiers are listed.

Pricing

• Monthly dues
• Annual dues
• One-time / annual fee

Leave all three blank for a free tier. You can price more than one -- a tier with both a monthly and an annual price offers members the choice.

When the one-time field has a value, a One-time validity choice appears with three options: 1 year, 2 years, or Lifetime. Those are the only terms available.

Entering a price does not by itself start collecting anything. Charging dues requires your organization's payments to be connected and able to accept charges; until that is done, prices sit here inert and a member who tries to pay is told payments are not set up. See Membership dues for the rest of that picture.

Status

• Active -- inactive tiers stay defined but cannot be assigned to members. Use it to retire a tier without deleting it.
• Default tier -- new members are placed in this tier. Only one tier can be the default; turning it on here turns it off wherever it was before.

Save with Create tier or Save changes. The button stays disabled until the tier has a name.

Deleting a tier

Delete asks you to confirm, and tells you what happens: members currently in that tier will no longer have a tier assigned. They stay in your organization; they simply have no membership level until you give them one.

If the tier you are deleting has a price and members are actively paying it, sort out their dues first. Deleting the tier does not stop anything that is already in motion.

Assigning a member to a tier

Open a member from People and look for the Membership tier card on their profile. The dropdown lists No tier plus every active tier, in your display order. Changing it takes effect immediately.

This control is owner and admin only, and it is the only place in the workspace where you can change one person's tier. There is no bulk reassignment, no tier column on the member roster, and no per-tier member count. The one place you can see tiers across people at a glance is the dues roster, which shows each member's tier alongside their payment status.

How new members get a tier

Most people never pick a tier. When someone joins your organization without choosing one, they are placed in your default tier -- provided that tier is both marked default and active. If you have no active default, they join with no tier at all, which is a quiet way to end up with a roster full of unassigned members.

On your public organization profile, the join dialog shows a tier picker only when you have more than one active tier. With exactly one, it is chosen silently.

Members cannot change their own tier afterwards. If someone wants to move up a level, an owner or admin makes the change from their profile.

What the member sees

On their My Membership page, a member sees their tier's name and description, when they joined, and -- if the tier has a price -- their dues status, renewal or expiry date, and the controls to pay, update a card, cancel or resume.

If their dues lapse, what happens next comes from your organization's lapse policy rather than from the tier itself.

Why this matters

Tiers are the backbone of a membership organization: they are what someone is joining, what you charge them, and what you can later report on. Two settings do most of the work. Your default tier decides what happens to everyone who joins without thinking about it, which is most people -- get that wrong and new members land nowhere. And Active lets you retire a level cleanly, so a tier you stopped offering in 2024 stops appearing in the join dialog without erasing the history of everyone who was ever in it.