Extending Your Membership Benefits to Employees

I'd like to provide some insight into how our new member platform manages individuals in relation to companies and their employees.

In case you are not aware, our organizational memberships are able to extend their member benefits to a certain number of people. This number is based on your organizational membership type. Our new platform uses a seat system to keep track of which users are inheriting benefits from a paying company.

Here’s how it works:

If you are in one of the management roles for your company (more on this later), you’ll have a link on your Dashboard to manage the People in your list:

That page will have a list of everyone who has a user account with your company listed as its “parent” employer or organization, if they were imported from our prior member platform. People from your organization who are not in a benefit-inheriting seat who are in your list, can receive our newsletters and use our website features. These people will not have access to member-only areas, or member-specific pricing on items for sale. From this page you can:

• see how many of your seats are currently in use, 

• remove people from your company list, 

• add people to your list, 

• assign any unused seats, 

• purchase add-on seats, 

• assign the special role for Management Access, if someone else in your list also needs the above abilities.

There are a few things that only we can do as admins:

• designate a Billing Contact (gets the renewal reminders for your company and can log in and see / pay invoices),

• change the Primary Contact for your company,

• remove a benefit-inheriting seat from someone, but leave them in your company list,

• edit the first name, last name, or other non-user editable fields on profiles.

Just contact me and I’ll be happy to assist with these requests.

One last bit of good news for those of you who have a lot of employees: Your Primary contact, Billing Contact, and other people you want to grant Management Access to do not need to use one of your membership benefit seats. This perk, along with the ability to have non-inheriting employees live in your list should cut down on the shuffling of people in and out of member lists that used to be necessary on our previous member platform.

Feel free to reach out with any questions you may have.