Approving memberships is useful for when your organisation requires potential members to be approved before they're able to become a member of your organisation but you don't want to process memberships and payments manually.

With Tidy, you can assess applications and then 'release' the membership registration forms to the successful applicants. Putting you in control of who can register for your organisation and letting the member complete the registration and payment themselves. 

Or..."Isaak's Method" - video.

This article assumes you've set up your paid membership levels previously and have an understanding of how the 'visible to' feature works. Here we focus on the parts of the process: setting up restrictions for membership levels, enabling people to complete applications and the processing of those applications.
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After setting things up, and by following this article, your membership application process will look like this:

We'll first need to create the contact groups that you'll use to keep track of application process.  We'll create three groups, one for each step of the process; Membership Applications - Pending, Membership Applications - Denied, and Membership Applications - Approved outlined in detail below:

Now we have our groups set up, we'll set up the visibility of the membership levels so that only the contacts in the correct group will have access to our membership forms. 

Head to the Access & Sharing section of your membership level settings, set 'visible to' to 'groups' and add the group(s) you want to allow access. By default, any new membership level that is created is set to 'Admin only' - which is hidden from the public. In our example, we'll restrict the membership level 'General - 12 Months' to the group we've setup: Member Applications - Approved. This means that contacts in the 'Member Applications - Approved' group will now be able to access this level via the public pages. 

Tip: You can double check your visibility settings for the membership level via the Memberships > Membership Levels area, shown here: 

Note: admins will still be able to manually assign this membership level to any contact they choose, if needed.

We'll set up a Membership level to use an application form – collect any data you want in the application form, but in our example, we're just collecting the basics: First Name, Last Name and Email address. 

Basics done. Now we'll set up the rest of the application form:

Hit save and now you'll have a membership application form visible on your public pages - ready to share. 

You're ready to share your form and start accepting applications. You can find the shareable link under the membership level settings > Access & Sharing section. 

You're now ready to process and manage applications. New applicants will be added to the 'Member Applications - Pending' group – ready for review. If they're approved, add them to the 'Member Applications - Approved' and they'll now have access to the membership levels. In our case, they'll now have access to the 'General - 12 Month' membership on the public pages.
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Don't forget to remove the contact from the 'Member Applications - Pending' group once you've processed the application to avoid double handling.
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​Tip: make sure to move denied applicants to the 'Member Applications - Denied' for recording purposes. 

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