Built for whoever gets handed this next year.
The person running a chapter website is usually a volunteer with a full-time job who did not ask for the role and will hand it on within two years. Almost everything about how this was built follows from that one fact.
$129 a month, locked for two years, and a $2,000 website build. That is the whole price.
The officer rotation is the real problem
Chambers have staff. Most chapters have a board, and the board changes. Whoever set up your current system has very likely already handed it on once, possibly twice, and each handover loses something — a password, a process, the reason a thing was set up the way it was.
So the back end has one screen per job, tells you what it is about to do before it does it, and never nags anybody about an event flyer they chose not to upload. Deleting an event asks first, and puts it back if you change your mind. Importing your roster can be undone. None of that is clever; it is just what you need when the person doing the job this year has never seen the system before.
The board screen keeps your own history. Officers have terms with start and end dates, and when a term ends that person moves into a past-board list rather than being deleted. Chapters lose track of who served when, and it is usually the first thing a new president asks.
Your members are not your contact count
This is where most chapters are quietly losing money. Most platforms in this market bill on contacts — the mailing list, lapsed members, everybody who bought a ticket to one event in 2019. A chapter with 450 members can easily carry 2,000 contacts, and you can guess which number the invoice is written against.
Look at how the tiers are written on whatever you are using. StarChapter’s, for instance, are published as 150 members and 1,000 contacts, 300 members and 2,000 contacts. Both ceilings are real, and for a chapter that markets itself properly the contact ceiling arrives first. You get moved up a tier for doing good outreach.
Ours doesn’t count members at all, and it’s $129 a month for up to 10,000 contacts — past attendees and newsletter subscribers included. Unsubscribed or bounced addresses don’t count, so you can keep every address you have ever collected instead of deleting your own history to duck under a cap.
The full comparison, with sources, is in what membership software actually costs — including StarChapter, Wild Apricot and MemberClicks.
Education events, handled properly
An association’s calendar is mostly programming, and programming has a lot of small awkward requirements that general event tools ignore.
- Named ticket types with member and non-member rates, seat limits per ticket and a room capacity that is separate from them.
- Hidden tickets for invited guests and comped seats for sponsors, so a speaker’s registration does not have to be arranged by email.
- Questions you can count. Meal choices come back as Chicken 18, Fish 7 — not a comments column somebody reads at nine the night before.
- Guests, handled like grown-ups. Decide per event whether members may bring people, how many, and whether you need every name or just a headcount for the bar.
- Confirmations that turn up, each with a calendar invitation attached. For an online session the joining link goes in there and nowhere public.
- Check people in at the door on a phone, without a printed list.
The roster is the board’s, not the membership’s
There is deliberately no member-to-member lookup. A roster every member can browse is a prospecting list waiting to happen, and nothing makes somebody regret joining faster than the sales calls that follow.
The board can search the roster — by company, title, city, or the groups you tag people into. Members cannot shop it. For an association whose membership includes both buyers and the people who sell to them, that distinction is worth more than it sounds.
When we are not the right answer
If you need to run a certification programme, track continuing education credits, or operate a learning management system with courses and quizzes, we do not do that. Those are real requirements for a lot of professional bodies and you should buy something that does them rather than squeeze us into the job — MemberClicks is the honest place to start looking.
Below about 250 members with a modest contact list, StarChapter also costs less than we do over five years, and we publish that math rather than hide it.
Have a look before you talk to anybody
The demo is a complete, invented professional association — roster, events, registration, board, documents. You can sign in to the back end and move things around. Nothing is permanent and nobody asks for your email first.
Open the association demo → or tell us when you renew and we will hold a build slot.