Membership tiers

Tiers are the products students choose when they join. Each one you define has a name, price, description, and perks — plus a few settings that do real work.

Tier settings worth knowing

Duration — rolling (a number of days), fixed (valid until a set date, e.g. end of semester), or lifetime.
Auto-accept — whether people join instantly or you review each request. See Membership applications below.
Automatic renewal — on paid rolling tiers, let members opt in so their membership renews itself instead of lapsing. See Automatic renewal below.
Require phone number — force everyone on this tier to give a phone number and share it with you. See Requiring a phone number below.
Require verified university affiliation — restrict this tier to people who have a verified university email for your university. See Requiring a verified university affiliation below.
Max members, display order, and a Recommended badge to steer people to the tier you want.
Welcome email — a custom message sent the moment someone’s membership activates.
Active — an inactive tier is hidden from your public join page and won’t take new public sign-ups. You can still assign members to it yourself.

Link a tier to a WhatsApp group and members are added automatically. Set the group on the tier and new members flow straight into the right chat — no manual adding, no chasing phone numbers. See Communicating with members.

The hidden “staff tier” trick. Board members hold a role, not a membership — so if you run a free tier alongside a paid one and later create an event that excludes free-tier members, your own board can get shut out. The fix clubs use: make a staff tier, set it inactive (hidden), and give it a price of 1 — not 0. Because “free tier” means exactly price 0, a tier priced at 1 counts as paid, so staff you assign to it are never caught by a free-tier exclusion. Assign board members to it manually.

Automatic renewal

Turn on Automatic renewal and members can choose to have their membership roll over on its own instead of quietly expiring. It’s available on paid rolling tiers only — fixed-date and free tiers don’t offer it.

Here’s what members experience once they’ve opted in:

About two weeks before their membership ends, they get an email with a payment request to continue — and a one-click link to cancel auto-renewal if they’d rather not.
If they pay, the new period picks up exactly where the old one ended, so there’s no gap in their membership.
If they don’t pay, nothing is charged and the membership simply lapses on its end date, as it would have anyway.

No surprise charges. Auto-renewal never debits a saved card — every renewal is a fresh payment request the member actively completes. That keeps refunds and disputes off your plate.

Opting in is the member’s choice: it’s off by default, and they turn it on when they join or later from their account. You control only whether the tier offers it.

Requiring a phone number

By default members do share their phone number with the clubs they join — but it’s their choice, and they can switch sharing off in their own privacy settings (or simply never add a number), which is why a phone can show up blank on your roster. See Why a number might be blank.

Require phone number on a tier overrides that for anyone joining it. When it’s on, a member can’t complete joining that tier until they’ve entered a phone number and turned sharing on — the join form won’t let them past it, and neither will assigning them the tier from the panel. From then on their number shows on your member list and detail view, and it keeps showing to your club even if they later turn off sharing elsewhere — they’ll be told your club still sees it.

This is the setting for tiers built around a group chat or where you genuinely need to reach people.

Chasing numbers for WhatsApp? There’s a better way. Requiring a phone is worth it when you truly need the number, but if the goal is just to get members into a WhatsApp group, you don’t have to collect anything by hand — put an invite link in the tier’s welcome email, or let the WhatsApp integration add members automatically (nothing to share around, and only members end up in the group).

It’s a per-tier switch, not a club-wide one. If you want a number from every member, turn Require phone number on for each tier. A tier without it stays optional.

Requiring a phone applies as members join — not retroactively. Turning the setting on now doesn’t reach back to people who joined the tier earlier; it only binds people joining from that point on. (Once someone has joined a require-phone tier, though, their number stays visible to your club for as long as that membership is active, even if they change their sharing preference later.)

Requiring a verified university affiliation

Turn on Require verified university affiliation and only students who have proven they belong to your university can join that tier. It’s the setting for a genuine “students of our university” tier — a discounted rate, an exclusive chapter, anything that shouldn’t be open to the general public.

“Proven” means the student has added and verified a university email in their UniClubs account (they click a link sent to that address). UniClubs already knows which university each email domain belongs to, so verifying @unisg.ch establishes an affiliation to that university automatically — students who signed up with their university email are typically verified without doing anything extra.

When it’s on, a member can’t complete joining the tier until they’re verified. On the join page they see a Verify your university email prompt that links straight to their settings; once verified, they return to the link and finish joining.

Like the phone requirement, this applies to public self-join only and only from the moment you turn it on — it doesn’t touch people who joined earlier, and you can still assign the tier to someone yourself from the panel.

Cross-listed on more than one university? Any of them counts. If your club appears in several universities’ directories, a verified affiliation to any of those universities satisfies the requirement — so an exchange partnership listing keeps working, and a student verified at either university can join.

Membership applications

Whether someone joins a tier instantly or has to be approved by you comes down to one setting on the tier: Auto-accept.

Auto-accept on — anyone who joins becomes a member straight away, with nothing for you to review. This is the setting for open, self-serve tiers.
Auto-accept off — each request becomes an application you approve or reject. Use it for tiers that should be vetted, typically alumni or exchange.

So if new members shouldn’t have to apply, turn Auto-accept on for that tier.

Applications land in Members → Applications — empty for most clubs, since only approval tiers fill it. There you see each applicant’s details and answers and make the call. If the tier is paid, approving isn’t the same as paid: once you accept, the applicant has 7 days to pay before their membership takes effect.

Questions vs. approval

These two are easy to mix up, and they’re independent:

Membership questions (set under Settings → Membership Questions) are custom questions you attach to all tiers or specific ones — including auto-accept tiers. They only collect information; adding a question does not create an approval step.
Auto-accept is what decides whether you review anyone at all.

In other words: questions control what you learn about a member; auto-accept controls whether you review them. A tier can ask questions and still admit people instantly, or ask nothing and still require approval.