What your member record should actually hold
Useful when you are setting a system up, and useful as an audit of one you already have. The test for any field is whether a decision changes depending on what is in it. If nothing does, it is a field somebody has to maintain forever for no reason.
The ones you cannot reconstruct later
- 01
Join date
Not "member since" as a year — the actual date. It drives tenure, milestone recognition, and every retention number you will ever be asked for. It is also the field most commonly lost in a migration, and it cannot be derived from anything else.
- 02
Renewal date, separately from join date
These diverge the moment anyone renews late, changes membership type, or is given a partial year. Systems that infer one from the other quietly go wrong within about eighteen months.
- 03
Membership type, and its history
Someone who moved from student to full membership is a different retention story from someone who has been full throughout. The current type is easy; the change is the interesting part.
- 04
Status, with a lapse date when it applies
Active, lapsed, resigned, archived — and when. "Lapsed" with no date is almost useless: you cannot tell a member who left last month from one who left in 2019, and those need completely different emails.
The ones that cause problems if you skip them
- 05
A household or organization link
Two people at one address on one subscription, or four staff at one member business. Decide how this is represented before you have five hundred records, because retrofitting it means touching all of them.
- 06
Communication preferences, per channel
One "do not email" flag is not enough the moment you also send post, or send both a newsletter and renewal notices. Someone who does not want the newsletter still wants their renewal reminder.
- 07
Who to contact in an emergency, if your organization needs it
Relevant for sports clubs, and for any organization whose members are on premises. Not relevant for most trade associations. Worth deciding explicitly rather than collecting it because a form had a field.
- 08
Consent and its date, where you rely on it
Not a checkbox that was ticked at some unknown point — what they agreed to and when. This is the field you need exactly once, in a dispute, and it cannot be created retrospectively.
The ones not worth collecting
- 09
A second address nobody maintains
A field that is wrong is worse than a field that is empty, because someone will use it.
- 10
Free-text notes as the primary record of anything
Notes are fine for context and terrible as data. If you find yourself searching notes for "paid by cheque", that is a field asking to exist.
- 11
Demographics you have no plan for
Age, occupation, how they heard about you — all reasonable to collect if a decision depends on them, and all pure liability if collected because the form had room. Every field is a promise to keep something safe.
Free to use, adapt and hand to whoever does this job next. If something here is wrong or missing, tell us and we will fix the page — contact us.