Suspending a member

You may wish to suspend someone's membership for a variety of reasons. You can also suspend a member to convert the member into a contact.

What you need to know

• Suspending a member will:
  • Remove the membership so that the member become a non-member contact
  • Hide them from any member directory
  • Keep an archive of their membership level and status
  • Keep all their contact information as it was before (e.g. you can still send emails to this person)
• If a member has recurring payments, suspending the member will automatically stop the recurring payments on the former member's card, unless the recurring payments are with PayPal. In that case, you must stop the recurring payments manually.
• When you suspend a bundle administrator, you automatically suspend all the members of that bundle. If you want to suspend just the bundle administrator, first change who is the bundle administrator, then suspend the now ex-bundle administrator.
• Since suspended members are non-member contacts, they continue to count against your account's contact database limit.
• A suspended member – now a regular contact – can apply for membership like anyone else.
• A suspended member can log in, but as a non-member contact. Suspended members may need to log in if they are event registrants or donors, even if they are not members.

For more information on different member and contact statuses, click here.

Suspending members

You can manually suspend a member, or you can set the renewal policy for your membership levels so that members are automatically suspended if they don't renew their membership within a certain number of days. For more information on automatically suspending members as part of your renewal policy, see Membership renewal settings.

To manually suspend a membership, follow these steps:

1. Display the member's contact details.
2. Click the Membership tab.
3. Click the Suspend button.
4. Click OK to confirm.

You can suspend multiple members in bulk by setting the Membership enabled spreadsheet cell to no as part of the process of making bulk changes through importing.

Reinstating a suspended member

If, at a later date, you wish to reinstate a suspended member, you can click on the Resume button within their membership tab.

This will reactivate them to their previous membership level with all their details intact.

The renewal date and payment/approval status will not be changed when a membership is resumed. You may have to manually edit the renewal date to reflect any time that the contact may be owed while their membership was suspended.

The member will not receive a email notification when you resume their membership.

You can reinstate multiple members in bulk by setting the Membership enabled spreadsheet cell to yes as part of the process of making bulk changes through importing.

Searching for suspended members

To view a list of suspended members, go to your contacts list and perform a simple search with suspended as the search string.

or perform an advanced contact search and choose the Contact properties criterion then select the Suspended member value.

If you export the results to a spreadsheet, the suspended member will have the Membership enabled column set to No and the Membership status set to whatever their status was when they were suspended.