Nobody sets out to chase people for money. It happens because the renewal date lives in a treasurer’s head, the reminder is a personal favour, and paying requires the member to remember something on a day they weren’t thinking about your organization.
Learning how to collect membership dues without chasing is mostly about removing the human from the reminder, not about being firmer. Here’s the mechanics of how that works, what the payment options actually cost, and the arithmetic most organizations never do.
On this page
Why chasing happens
Four causes, in roughly the order they bite.
- The date is invisible. If renewal dates live in a spreadsheet only the treasurer opens, the reminder depends on somebody remembering to look.
- Paying is a separate errand. A reminder that says “dues are due” and doesn’t contain a way to pay asks the member to go and find one. Most won’t that day, and then it’s gone.
- The reminder is personal. When a volunteer has to message people individually, chasing feels rude, so it gets delayed, so it gets more awkward.
- Nobody knows who has paid. If reconciling means matching a bank export against a spreadsheet, you’ll avoid finding out, and you’ll chase people who already paid. That’s the one that damages goodwill.
Notice that none of these is about members being unwilling. In most organizations the money is there and the process is what leaks.
How to collect membership dues without chasing: four mechanics
- Put the renewal date on the record, not in a person. Each member has their own date, the system knows it, and the reminder fires whether or not anyone remembers.
- Make the reminder the payment. The message contains the link. Paying takes one tap and no decisions. This single change does more than any wording.
- Send a sequence, not a message. Something like thirty days before, seven days before, on the day, and one follow-up a week later. Written once, sent automatically, so no volunteer has to feel like a debt collector.
- Reconcile automatically. The person who paid is marked as paid without anyone typing anything. This is what makes the whole thing safe to automate, because the worst possible outcome is a reminder sent to someone who already paid.
A fifth, optional and powerful: offer recurring payment. A member who sets it up once stops being a renewal problem entirely. Not everyone will, and it should never be the only option, but the ones who do quietly disappear from your chase list forever.
What it costs to collect membership dues online
Every option takes a cut, and the cut has two parts: what the platform charges, and what the card processor charges on top. Some vendors publish both, some publish a single blended number, and a couple never say which one they are quoting. Here they are on the same basis, all-in on card, September 2026.
| Platform | Platform fee | Card processing | All-in on $20,000 of dues |
|---|---|---|---|
| Group.app | 0% | Stripe standard, 2.9% + $0.30 | $700 |
| Kannect, Starter and Launch | 2% | Stripe standard, 2.9% + $0.30 | $1,100 |
| Cheddar Up, Pro or Team | 3.59% + $0.59, processing included | Included in the rate | $954 |
| Cheddar Up, free plan | 3.95% + $0.95, processing included | Included in the rate | $1,170 |
| Join It, Starter | 3% | Stripe standard, 2.9% + $0.30 | $1,300 |
| Raklet, Essentials | 3% + $0.60 | Stripe standard, 2.9% + $0.30 | $1,540 |
| Memberful | 4.9% | Not stated | $980 if processing is inside that rate, about $1,680 if it is not |
| Skool, Hobby | 10% | Not stated | $2,000 if processing is inside that rate, about $2,700 if it is not |
Two more are worth knowing about, and both publish a single headline rate without breaking out processing: SignUpGenius at 5% + $0.50, and PTOffice at 7.9% with a tip-jar option at no cost. Ask either one whether card processing sits inside that number before you budget, because the answer moves the total by about three points.
Note Cheddar Up’s default too: it passes fees to the payer rather than to the organization, so your $20,000 arrives whole and the family pays the 3.59%. Several others let you do the same. Whether that is a good idea depends entirely on how your members would feel about being charged to pay you.
Cheddar Up is also the cheapest way to simply take money, at $15 a month on Pro. It is a payments tool rather than a membership system, so it will not hold your roster, run renewals or send your announcements. That is the trade most groups are actually making when they compare these numbers.
The spread on the same $20,000 is roughly $700 to $2,700. That’s a volunteer stipend, or a season of equipment, decided by a choice most boards make in an afternoon.
Flat fees, percentages and which hurts you
The shape of the fee matters as much as the size, and it depends entirely on your typical payment.
- A flat per-transaction fee is excellent on large payments and brutal on small ones. PayHOA’s $2.45 per bank transfer is 0.6% of a $400 assessment and nearly 10% of $25 dues.
- A percentage is the reverse. It barely registers on small dues and scales painfully as the amount grows.
- A percentage plus a flat component, which is most card pricing, is worst at the small end. Cheddar Up’s 3.59% plus $0.59 is about 6.5% on a $20 payment.
- Bank transfer, where offered, is usually much cheaper and badly under-used. Cheddar Up’s eCheck is 1.95% against 3.59% on cards.
Two practical moves follow. If your dues are small, push bank transfer and avoid flat-fee-heavy pricing. If your dues are large, a flat fee per transaction is your friend. And if the platform lets the payer cover the fee, which several do by default, that changes your economics entirely, though it’s worth being honest with members about it rather than burying it.
The awkward cases
Every organization has these, and they’re the reason spreadsheets survive.
- The member who pays cash at a meeting. Record it the same day, in the same system, or your records fork permanently.
- Household or family memberships. One payment, several people. If the system can’t model that, someone maintains a mental map, and that person eventually leaves.
- Hardship and sliding scale. A discount that’s applied quietly and recorded properly is kinder than an informal arrangement only the treasurer knows about.
- The member who paid last year and vanished. Decide in advance how many reminders before they move to lapsed. Write it down. It stops being a judgment call every year.
- The founding member who has never been asked. Every long-standing organization has one. Software won’t solve this. A conversation will.
For a wider look at what these platforms charge overall, we compared twelve of them in the best community engagement platforms, and the guide on what community software actually costs covers the same ground from the budgeting side.
Where Kannect fits
Kannect is our product, so check the pricing page yourself. It’s a community engagement platform for membership organizations, staffed or volunteer-run.
Memberships, properly. One membership type with multiple pricing tiers on every plan, or multiple membership types each with their own tiers on the higher plans. Custom application forms, manual or automatic approval, and a welcome flow that drops a new member straight into the conversation. Discounts and renewals are built in, which is the part that matters for this article: the early-bird rate, the household rate and the hardship rate are settings rather than notes in a spreadsheet.
And the rest of the organization. A member directory with unlimited listings, groups and programs for chapters and committees, a people database members keep current themselves, events, broadcast email, a community website and a member app.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | People | Admins | Emails/mo | Platform fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $29 | $276 | 500 | 3 | 5,000 | 2% |
| Launch | $69 | $660 | 2,000 | 5 | 20,000 | 2% |
| Growth | $149 | $1,428 | 5,000 | 10 | 50,000 | 1.5% |
| Scale | $299 | $2,868 | 15,000 | 25 | 150,000 | 1% |
Payments run on Stripe. You connect your bank once, and money from events, memberships, programs and donations lands in your own account, usually within three business days. Kannect never holds your money. The platform fee is 2% on Starter and Launch, 1.5% on Growth and 1% on Scale, and registered nonprofits pay 0% on donations.
On the chasing specifically: renewal dates sit on the member record, reminders fire on their own, the reminder carries the payment link, and paying marks the member as paid without anyone reconciling anything by hand.
Most organizations start with one job, usually events, payments or the directory, and bring the rest across as they need it. Setup is self-serve at no cost, with an optional one time setup service starting at $150.
Frequently asked questions
How to collect membership dues without chasing people?
Put the renewal date on the member record rather than in a person’s head, make the reminder itself the payment by including the link, send a short automatic sequence rather than one message, and reconcile automatically so nobody chases a member who has already paid. Offering recurring payment removes the most reliable payers from your chase list permanently.
What does it cost to collect membership dues online?
Published platform fees in September 2026 range from 0% to 10%, on top of payment processing. On $20,000 of dues that is roughly $400 at a 2% platform fee and $2,000 at 10%. Bank transfer is usually far cheaper than card where it is offered, for example 1.95% against 3.59% on Cheddar Up’s paid plans.
Should members pay by card or bank transfer?
Bank transfer is almost always cheaper for the organization, and it is badly under-used. The exception is a flat per-transaction bank fee on small dues: a $2.45 flat fee is fine on a $400 assessment and close to 10% on $25 dues. Match the fee shape to your typical payment size rather than to the headline rate.
How many reminders should we send before dues are late?
A workable default is thirty days before, seven days before, on the day and one follow-up a week later. The important part is deciding it once, writing it down and letting it run, so that no volunteer has to make a judgment call about whether chasing a particular person feels rude.
How do we handle members who pay cash?
Record it the same day in the same system as everyone else. The moment cash lives in a different place from card payments, your records fork and reconciliation becomes a manual job again. Most platforms allow a manual payment to be logged against a member.
Can we ask members to cover the payment fee?
Several platforms default to this and many organizations do it. It changes your economics substantially, especially at higher fee rates. The thing to avoid is doing it silently. Members generally accept a clearly labelled processing fee and react badly to discovering one.
Where these how to collect membership dues figures came from
Every platform fee above came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 6 September 2026. They change, so check before you choose.
- Cheddar Up pricing
- SignUpGenius pricing
- Join It pricing
- Raklet pricing
- Memberful pricing
- PTOffice pricing
- Group.app pricing
- Wild Apricot pricing
Related reading
- 12 best community engagement platforms, with verified pricing
- What membership management software costs for nonprofits
- Why members join and then go quiet
- Member onboarding in the first 30 days
- What community software actually costs
- How to collect trip payments from parents without chasing them
- Membership tiers that renew
- The Stack Audit calculator