Using Membership Pro as tool to manage membership subscriptions in NGOs

Dear everyone, 

This is my first post here in this forum, and I hope to have chosen the adequate category for my question. 

My organisation is an NGO which is looking to digitalise the application for prospective members, which are NGOs as well. 

I read good reviews about this Joomla! extension and its features seem promising. However, I cannot find examples of applications of Membership Pros outside of the classic gym membership subscription style (aka the boxes with all the information ending with a button "order now" or "subscribe now"), and I couldn't understand if the user has always the freedom to upgrade themself from one membership to the other. This second point, it is fundamental for my organisation because we need to evaluate and decide if upgrade someone/somebody from Trial Member to Full Member. 

Additionally, does Membership Pro have the possibility to build a forum for its members that can use to interact or share documents between each other? 

Of course, I am open to suggestion for more suitable extension that can serve for my needs. 

Thank you everyone that will reply to me! 

Regards, 
 

You can use Membership Pro and eDocman (their other extension) for documents and a forum extension. All would use the core Joomla ACL to work how you want.

Not sure about upgrading a membership on your end. The user could do it. I know you can, as an admin, move people to other plans but I'm not sure if you can charge them directly for it. Depends on the payment gateway I suppose.

Welcome Valeria,

So far I have used Membership Pro in 3 cases, all of them very different to a "classic gym membership subscription style" as well as to each other.
One of them is very similar to an NGO. It's a non-profit university student's club where we also wanted to digitalise the application for registering as a member to the club. Besides, all of the Membership Pro language strings (as well as Joomla's itself) can be overridden, so "order now" or "subscribe now" buttons could easily be eg. "Apply now" or "Join us" etc.

As for the subscription upgrade, I'm not sure I understand what exactly is your process, but I imagine there are numerous ways to achieve it with Membership Pro in combination with Joomla's features. And, of course, subscription upgrade could be done automatically as well as manually, depending on your needs and your corresponding implementation. For example, perhaps you could use two user groups with different permissions, one for trial members and one for full members, each of them being able to see only the content that their specific user group is allowed to see. Membership Pro allows you to define in which user group a user will be assigned to after they fill the form of a subscription plan.