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Activate a prospect by hand
Most prospects become Active on their own: they open Subscribe in the member app, choose a membership type and pay, and the moment their payment settles they move from Prospect to Active automatically — see Prospects and joining → Joining. If a prospect can pay online, sending them the link is quicker than this recipe and needs nothing from you.
This recipe is for the exception: activating someone by hand, without them going through that wizard — because you've taken their payment another way, you're honouring a goodwill arrangement, or a sign-up has genuinely got stuck and they need to be on the roster today.
Who: Club Admin or Membership Manager. Where: admin panel. Takes: about a minute.
Before you start
Manual activation skips the joining wizard entirely, so nothing it would normally have collected — emergency contacts, medical information, agreements, a membership type — is asked for as part of activating them. If your club needs any of that on file, get it before or straight after, from the member's own record.
Steps
- Open Members → All Members. The Prospects tab narrows the list to people who haven't joined yet.
- Open the prospect's record.
- In the page header, click Activate Member.
- Read the modal — it reminds you that members are normally activated automatically when they complete a paid subscription, and that this is for exceptional cases only — and confirm with Activate Anyway.
What happens next
The member's status changes to Active straight away. If they'd previously opted out of renewal invitations, that's cleared too, so they're included in the club's next renewal campaign like anyone else. The activation is written to their activity log.
Nothing is emailed to the member as part of this action — it's a status change only. If they don't already know they're in, tell them yourself, or send them a link to finish anything the wizard would have collected.
If it does not work
There's no "Activate Member" button
It only shows for a member who's Prospect, Lapsed or Resigned. Someone already Active, or in a status like Deceased, doesn't get it — check their current status at the top of their record.
I activated the wrong person
There's no undo button on the action itself. Open Edit Profile on their record, and under Membership, set Status back to Prospect. This edits the status directly rather than going through the lifecycle action, so do it deliberately: it won't reinstate a renewal-invitation opt-out or anything else the proper action would have handled, only the status itself.
The member was activated but can't sign in
Manual activation doesn't create a login on its own. Check whether they have one at all — see Members and households → Give a member a sign-in.