Member or contact? The question that makes quotes incomparable

When an association starts comparing membership platforms, the quotes tend to arrive in a similar shape. A monthly figure, a member number attached to it, and a list of what is included. It looks like something you can lay side by side and read off.

It usually is not, and the reason is a single word that almost nobody defines.

The word is "member", and it rarely means what you think

Every membership platform prices against a number in your database. What differs - and it differs more than you would expect - is which number.

Some platforms price on contacts. Every person in the system counts toward the plan: current members, lapsed members, prospects, the person who registered for one webinar in 2023, the newsletter list you inherited. Others price on member records, which sounds narrower, though the definition is frequently left unwritten on the pricing page.

That gap matters because the two numbers are rarely close. An association with 500 financial members might reasonably hold 2,000 or 3,000 people in its database once you count lapsed members it would like back, prospects, event attendees and subscribers. If a platform counts all of those, the plan you actually need is not the plan the headline number describes.

Why the gap is easy to miss

The awkward part is that you often cannot tell from the outside. A published tier will say something like "1,000 member records" and stop there. Whether a lapsed member consumes one of those records, or whether an event attendee who never joined does, is not stated - and it is the difference between one tier and the next.

So the comparison a board is shown is frequently not a comparison at all. It is two numbers that were measured with different rulers, presented as though they were the same.

For what it is worth, we price Agend on members and include four contacts for every one of them, so a 500-member plan carries 2,500 contacts. I am not suggesting that is the only sensible way to do it. I am suggesting that a platform should tell you which way it has chosen, because you cannot budget against a term that has not been defined.

The question to ask, before anything else

There is one question that sorts this out quickly, and it is worth asking every vendor on your shortlist in the same words:

• Does a lapsed member consume a record?
• Does someone who registers for an event but never joins?
• Does a newsletter subscriber?
• What happens when we cross the tier - do we move up mid-term, or at renewal?
• Can we archive people we want to keep but not pay for?

Five plain questions, and the answers make otherwise incomparable quotes comparable. They also tell you something useful about the vendor. A platform that can answer them immediately has thought about how associations actually accumulate people over twenty years. One that has to check tends to be quoting from a template.

It affects more than the invoice

There is a second-order effect that is easy to overlook. When a platform charges per contact, associations quite rationally start deleting people to control the bill.

That is a genuine loss. Lapsed members are the single most likely group to rejoin, and the history of why they left is the thing that makes a win-back conversation worth having. Prospects who attended an event are the warmest audience an association has. Deleting them to fit a plan is an expensive way to save money, and the cost does not show up on the invoice - it shows up in a re-engagement campaign two years later with nothing behind it.

So the unit question is not only a procurement question. It quietly shapes what your association is able to remember about the people around it.

Where this leaves a shortlist

None of this means the cheapest quote is wrong, or that a per-contact model is a trap. Plenty of associations are well served by a light platform with a simple contact count, and the arithmetic works out fine.

It does mean that a spreadsheet comparing monthly figures is not finished until every row has been normalised to the same population. Pick a number that reflects your actual database - not your financial member count - and ask each vendor what they would charge to hold it. The answers tend to reorder the list.

If you are partway through that exercise and the answers are not lining up, I am happy to talk it through, including where Agend would not be the right fit. Our own guide to making the switch covers the rest of the evaluation.