This community platform glossary covers the words you will meet while shopping for software or writing a plan for your organization, in the sense they are actually used by chambers, PTAs, churches, nonprofits, alumni offices and support groups rather than in the sense a vendor brochure uses them.
Terms are grouped by what they are about rather than alphabetically, because most people arrive here trying to understand one area rather than one word. Where a term has a fuller treatment elsewhere on this site, it is linked.
On this page
How to use this community platform glossary
Two warnings before the definitions.
First, several of these words mean different things to different vendors. “Members” can mean everyone in your database or only the people who paid this year, and a pricing page that charges per member is worth reading carefully to see which one it counts. Where a term is genuinely ambiguous, that is said below rather than papered over.
Second, a handful of the metrics in this community platform glossary have quietly stopped meaning what they used to. Email open rates and social reach are the two big ones, and both are explained below with the reason they moved.
Membership terms
This part of the community platform glossary covers everything to do with people formally joining and staying joined.
Membership management. Everything involved in someone being a member: applying, being approved, paying, being renewed, lapsing and rejoining. It is distinct from community features, and plenty of tools do one well and the other badly.
Membership type. A distinct category of member with its own rules, such as individual, business, student or family. Different types often see different content, pay differently and have different approval steps.
Membership tier. A price level within a type, such as bronze, silver and gold, or one-year and three-year. Vendors differ on whether you can have several types each with their own tiers, or only one type with several tiers, and this is worth checking before you buy.
Dues. The recurring payment for membership. Annual is most common; monthly reduces the size of the ask and increases the number of failed payments you will chase.
Renewal rate. The share of members due to renew in a period who did. The most honest single number about a membership organization, and the one most often quietly replaced with total membership on the board slide.
Lapsed member. Someone whose membership expired without renewing. Whether your software still counts them as a member is a real question, both for your numbers and for what a per-member price actually charges you.
Grace period. A window after expiry during which someone keeps access. Useful and easily abused: a grace period longer than a couple of months is really just a slower way of not enforcing renewals.
Prorating. Charging a part-year amount for someone joining mid-cycle. Organizations with a fixed annual cycle, such as school-year groups, need this and are often surprised when a tool cannot do it.
Member directory. A listing members can browse to find each other. The main mechanism by which a membership organization delivers member-to-member value rather than only organization-to-member value.
Comp or complimentary membership. A free membership granted to a board member, partner or honoree. Worth tracking separately so your renewal and revenue numbers are not distorted by people who were never going to pay.
Community and engagement terms
These are the words a community platform glossary needs for describing participation rather than paperwork.
Community engagement. How much the people in your organization take part rather than simply belong, across four dimensions: whether they receive what you send, whether they attend, whether they contribute, and whether they know each other.
Active member. Someone who did something in a defined window, usually the last 90 days. The definition is yours to set, and setting it is more useful than arguing about it, because the trend matters more than the threshold.
Engagement rate. Usually distinct active people divided by total membership. Beware any version that divides actions by people, which rises when your most committed few do more and hides the problem you are looking for.
Lurker. A member who reads and does not post. Often treated as a failure and usually not one: in most groups the majority of members are lurkers, and a healthy community is one where a steady trickle of them eventually speaks.
Chapter. A local or regional subgroup with its own leadership and events, common in alumni networks and professional associations. Chapters work when they have real authority and fail when they have the title without it.
Cohort. A group defined by when they joined or started, such as a class year or an intake. Useful because people who arrived together tend to engage with each other more readily than with the organization at large.
Affinity group. A subgroup organized around a shared characteristic or interest rather than geography, such as a professional field or a shared background.
Onboarding. What happens to a member in their first weeks. Whether somebody does anything in their first ninety days predicts most of what follows, which is why this is the highest-leverage part of the whole membership lifecycle.
Moderation. The work of keeping a shared space usable: enforcing norms, handling conflict, and deciding what is off topic. Mostly small and private rather than public and dramatic.
Norms. The unwritten rules of how people behave in your space. Every group has them; writing them down early is much easier than correcting them later.
Churn. The rate at which members leave. In membership organizations it is usually visible only at renewal, which means you find out about a problem up to a year after it started.
Retention. The opposite of churn: the share of members who stay. More useful when split by cohort, because first-year retention and tenth-year retention are different problems with different fixes. There is more in why engagement drops after the first event.
Event terms
RSVP. A sign-up indicating intent to attend. Its real value is not catering numbers but knowing in advance whether the right people will be in the room, and being able to follow up with the ones who did not come.
No-show rate. The share of people who signed up and did not attend. For free events, 20 to 50 percent is unremarkable. A no-show is not a lost cause; most had something come up and would like to be asked again.
Repeat attendance. The share of attendees who had been to something before. The best single indicator of whether a community is forming or whether every event starts from zero.
Volunteer shift. A defined slot with a task, a time and a length. Shifts fill far better than open calls for help, because the person can tell what they are agreeing to.
Run of show. The minute-by-minute plan for an event, including who is doing what and when. Mostly useful for making it possible to hand the event to somebody else next year. There is a template for it here.
Waitlist. An ordered queue for a full event. Worth having for capacity-limited events, and worth actually working, since a waitlist nobody promotes from is just a list of people you disappointed.
Ticketing fee. The charge for selling a ticket, usually a percentage plus a fixed amount. Check whether it is on top of your payment processing fee or includes it, because those are different numbers.
Communication terms
Two entries in this community platform glossary have changed meaning in the last few years, and both are here.
Segmentation. Sending to a defined subset rather than the whole list. The single most effective communication change most organizations can make, because relevance is what stops people learning to skip you.
Deliverability. Whether your email reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder or a promotions tab. It is affected by your sending domain, your list hygiene and your complaint rate, and it fails silently, which is what makes it dangerous.
Open rate. The share of recipients recorded as opening an email. This number has been unreliable since privacy features began pre-loading images: an open can be logged when no human has looked at anything. Apple documents this behaviour in its Mail Privacy Protection materials. Treat open rate as a rough trend at best, and never as proof a message was read.
Click rate. The share who clicked a link. Far more trustworthy than open rate, because a machine pre-loading images does not click things.
Organic reach. How many people see a post without paid promotion. On social platforms this is decided by ranking systems rather than by who follows you, and it is generally a small fraction of a group or page audience. See the hidden cost of running your group on Facebook.
Broadcast versus discussion. Two different jobs. Broadcast is you telling members something and needs a channel you control. Discussion is members talking to each other and needs a space they can post in. Using one channel for both is why most groups have a busy feed and an uninformed membership.
Money terms
Payment processing fee. The percentage, sometimes plus a fixed amount, taken when money moves. It is separate from your software subscription, and on a group turning over meaningful sums it can exceed the subscription.
Gross versus net. Gross is what was charged; net is what reached your bank after fees. Boards routinely compare one year gross against another year net without noticing.
Recurring billing. Automatically charging dues on a schedule. It raises renewal rates substantially and introduces failed payments, expired cards and the need to actually contact people about them.
Dunning. The process of chasing a failed recurring payment. Unglamorous, and the difference between a renewal rate that looks healthy and one that quietly leaks a few percent a year.
Restricted funds. Money given for a specific purpose that cannot be spent on anything else. Tracking this separately is a legal matter for many nonprofits, not a preference.
Software and data terms
The software half of any community platform glossary is where vendor language is loosest, so these definitions are deliberately blunt.
Community platform. Software where members interact with each other, typically with groups, posts, profiles and events. Distinct from membership management, which handles joining, paying and renewing. Plenty of products do one and describe themselves as both.
AMS, or association management system. A category of software aimed at large professional associations, usually combining membership records, dues, events and certification. Powerful, expensive and typically sized for organizations with staff who run it full time.
CRM. Customer or constituent relationship management: one record per person with their history attached. In a membership organization the useful version has statuses such as member, alumni, donor, staff, parent or student, so the same person can be several things at once.
All-in-one versus point solutions. One tool that does most jobs adequately, or several tools that each do one job well. Point solutions win on individual features and lose on the seams between them, which is where records get lost and admin time goes. The stack audit calculator is one way to compare the two honestly.
Integration. Two systems exchanging data. Check whether an advertised integration is genuinely two-way and how often it syncs, because a one-way nightly export is a very different thing from live data.
Data portability, or export. Your ability to take your member list and history out. This is the question to ask before you sign, not after, and it is the main practical difference between a group you own and a group you rent.
SSO, or single sign-on. Members signing in with an existing account such as a school or company login. Common in higher education, rarely needed by small organizations.
Seat or admin limit. How many people can administer the system. Volunteer-run organizations hit this sooner than they expect, because committee turnover means more people need access over a year than are active at any one moment.
Where Kannect fits
Kannect is a membership and community platform for any organization that has members, which in the vocabulary above means it covers both the membership management side and the community side rather than one of them.
- People CRM. One record per person with statuses such as member, alumni, donor, staff, parent or student.
- Groups and programs. Chapters, committees, cohorts and affinity groups with their own spaces.
- Events with sign-ups. RSVPs, volunteer shifts, attendance and no-shows recorded on the event.
- Full membership management. One membership type with multiple pricing tiers on every plan, or multiple membership types each with their own tiers on higher plans, plus custom application forms, manual or automatic approval, a welcome flow, discounts and renewals.
- Email to your own list. Segmented announcements to the people you choose rather than to whoever an algorithm decides to show them to.
- A member directory. One directory with unlimited listings on every plan, and multiple directories on higher plans.
Pricing is public and there is no free plan. Every plan includes a 7-day trial and a card is required to start it.
| 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% |
Payment processing is 2% on Starter and Launch, 1.5% on Growth and 1% on Scale. Donations to a registered nonprofit are processed at 0%.
Here is a short look at how it works:
Related reading
- What community software actually costs
- The five tool community stack
- How to reach every member
- Guides and posts for chambers
- Guides and posts for nonprofits
- Membership tiers worksheet
Community platform glossary: common questions
What is the difference between a community platform and membership management software?
A community platform is where members interact with each other: groups, posts, profiles and events. Membership management handles joining, approval, dues, renewals and lapsing. Many products do one well and describe themselves as both, so it is worth checking which side a tool is actually built around before you buy.
What is an AMS and do we need one?
An association management system is software aimed at large professional associations, typically combining membership records, dues, events and certification. It is powerful, expensive, and generally sized for organizations with staff who run it full time. Most chambers, PTAs, churches, booster clubs and support groups do not need one.
Why are email open rates unreliable now?
Because privacy features pre-load images, so an open can be recorded when no human has looked at the message. Apple documents this in its Mail Privacy Protection materials. Click rate is a far better signal, since a machine loading an image does not click a link, and attendance or sign-ups are better still.
What does organic reach mean for a group or page?
It is how many people see a post without paid promotion, and on social platforms it is decided by ranking systems rather than by who joined your group. That means the size of your group tells you very little about how many people will see any given post, and it can change without notice.
What is the difference between a membership type and a membership tier?
A type is a distinct category of member, such as individual, business, student or family, often with its own rules and approval steps. A tier is a price level within a type, such as bronze, silver and gold. Vendors differ on whether you can run several types each with their own tiers, and that limit is worth checking before committing.
What should we ask a vendor about data before signing?
Ask how you export your member list and history, in what format, and whether it includes past events, payments and messages. Ask how many administrators are included. Ask whether integrations are two-way and how often they sync. Data portability is the practical difference between a community you own and one you rent.
Where these definitions came from
Useful references behind the terms above: