How to know the number of active members at a specific date

If you want to know the number of active members in your account, you can check the Statistics submenu which gives this information in real time. But how do you find out how many members were active on a past date? This is possible by searching in the Membership List.

Difference in the search between Members and Memberships

It is possible to search by membership status in the Members List and in the Membership List. However, the Members list only searches for the current membership. This means that members who have renewed after the date of your search will not be included, which will skew your results. The member list search is used to find out the numbers in real time.

The membership list search, on the other hand, uses the complete history. This means that a member who renews every year will have one membership per year and these can be searched.

Floating date memberships

To search the past, we will use the start and end dates of the memberships, since these determine how long the member has been active.

Since floating date memberships have varying start and end dates, it is fairly simple to find out how many memberships are active on a particular date.

In this example, we will look for the number of active members on March 1, 2021. The criteria to use are as follows:

• Membership start: we want to know the memberships starting before March 1st
• Membership Expiry: We want to know about memberships that end after March 1
• Membership status: Adding the status allows us to not count cancelled memberships. Be careful not to forget to include expired memberships!

Fixed date memberships

Since fixed-date memberships have the same start and expiration date, the previous search will also count new members who joined after March 1 and late renewals. In order for the search to be accurate, an additional field must be added to the search form, Membership - Date of Subscription.

With this field, it will be possible to search with the same criteria as for floating date memberships but with the addition of the date of subscription before March 1.