When your organization belongs to the association, several people from your organization can sign in to the Portal and act on its behalf. What you can do depends on the contact role your organization gave you, unless your association marked that role as administrative. Depending on your role, you may be able to join, renew or reinstate, update details, choose who receives benefits, or set up automatic renewal.
If Your Role Is Administrative
If your contact role is marked administrative, you can complete all organization membership tasks covered in this article. This access is broader than any single permission below, so it overrides the role-specific rules.
What Decides Everything Else
For every other contact role, your association decides which of these five actions the role can take:
| Action | What it lets you do |
|---|---|
| Sign up for membership | Start a join application for your organization |
| Renew membership | Renew or reinstate your organization's membership |
| Manage membership privileges | Choose which of your organization's contacts receive its membership benefits |
| Update membership info | Change your organization's membership details |
| Set up organization auto-renewal | Set up or change the card used to renew your organization's membership automatically |
Update membership info takes you to the Update Memberships page, where you can change fields such as the membership's parent membership, join date, package, bill method, and bill organization.
Your association can grant these actions to specific contact roles, such as billing contact or primary contact, or to every contact of the organization regardless of role. Automatic renewal has one extra requirement: you see setup only when your own role is specifically granted that action. If you cannot start a task described here, your role usually does not have that specific permission, even if a similar role does.
You do not need to be a paying member yourself, and you do not sign in through a special organization account. An organization's membership does not have its own separate login, so you always sign in with your personal Portal username and password. Your association can grant an action to any contact role it names. Billing works the same way: a contact does not have to be the primary or billing contact to bill the organization, or its parent organization, if your association allows that.
Adding and Managing Your Organization's Contacts
If your contact role lets you edit the organization's contacts, such as a group contact or primary contact role, you can add people from My Organization › Manage Organization Contacts in the Portal. People can also join your organization's contact list on their own by entering their basic profile information, choosing a username and password, and verifying the new account from the email they receive. A role that allows membership sign-up, such as a Primary Contact role in many associations, can also add brand-new members to the organization instead of choosing only from people who already have Portal accounts.
Each contact must be assigned to your organization as their own organization before the Portal recognizes them there. If someone you expect to see is missing from Manage Member Contacts, check that their contact record names your organization before assuming it is a permissions problem.
Warning
Having the right role does not guarantee the member contact list will appear. For an organization with a very large number of associated member contacts, Manage Member Contacts can show no list at all. This is a display limit, not a sign that your role lacks permission. If this happens, contact your association or Rhythm support.
If updating your organization's membership fails, or you get an access-denied error while managing its contacts, first check whether the membership record still has a current contact assigned. A contact who has been removed from the organization can block the update. If the access problem continues, ask your association's staff whether they can add the people you need manually while it is investigated.
Why You Can Renew but Not Choose Who Receives Benefits
Your association grants these five actions separately. A role that can renew or reinstate your organization's membership does not automatically manage benefit recipients, update membership details, or set up automatic renewal. If you can do one task but not another, ask whoever manages your association's Membership settings which of the five actions your role has.
Renewing your organization's membership and paying its invoices are controlled separately, too. Your association can let you complete a renewal without also letting you pay invoices. It can also let a contact who receives the renewal notice view an invoice without permission to pay it. Which recipients can pay by card in the Portal, and whether card payment is available at all, is configured separately from who can start or complete the renewal.
Choosing which contact receives your organization's benefits is separate from renewing for a reason. If anyone could reassign a covered contact without restriction, an organization could repeatedly swap in a new person to claim a benefit, such as a free event registration, after the previous contact already used it. Your association controls this action carefully for that reason.
Joining or Renewing
If your role allows it, you can start a join, renewal, or reinstatement application for your organization the same way you would for a personal membership. The application offers your organization's record instead of your own.
Whether you see a join, renewal, or reinstatement path depends on your organization's membership status at that moment. For example, the renewal path appears only while the organization's membership is inside its renewal window, and the reinstatement path appears only during its reinstatement period.
If your own membership comes from your organization instead of from your own purchase, you cannot renew it yourself. Someone with renewal permission must renew the organization's membership, and your membership renews along with it. For this kind of membership, your association usually expects the primary contact and billing contact to complete the renewal for the organization, though it can grant the action to other roles too.
Tip
The renewal path typically does not appear until your organization's membership is within 90 days of its expiration date, so no renewal option well before then does not mean your role is missing permission. After a renewal is completed and the expiration date moves forward, the renewal path disappears again until the next window opens. An invoice that has already been paid cannot be paid a second time.
A terminated organization membership does not show a standard renewal option. Depending on how your association set things up, you continue it through reinstatement or a new join application instead. Likewise, after your organization's membership has expired, you may need to use its specific renewal action to begin reinstatement instead of looking for a general join-or-renew option on the record.
In some associations, starting an organization renewal means choosing a corporate membership option first, which then leads to a form where you choose the specific organization membership type. Your association can also limit its Organization Renewal process to certain membership types. If a type that exists for your organization does not appear during renewal, it may have been left out of that process. That is a setup choice rather than a sign that renewal is unavailable to you. The same is true for an individual membership type marked hidden from the portal: it will not appear as a self-service renewal or automatic-renewal option even though it still exists.
Renewing lets your organization choose which member contacts are covered, even when the current contact assignments on the membership are incomplete or missing. The contacts you choose start receiving membership benefits after the renewal is completed.
How the purchase is processed also matters. Completing it as a membership application lets you choose the organization, so the membership attaches to the organization correctly. Processing the same purchase as an ordinary online store order can attach the resulting membership to the individual who bought it instead.
Your association may configure join, renewal, and reinstatement as separate packages and application processes, so a change made to one path does not automatically apply to another. The Portal also has no single component that shows your organization's membership status directly. You can usually tell its state only from which paths are currently offered to you, or by asking your association to check it in its staff tools.
Being marked inactive as a contact does not by itself stop you from purchasing or renewing a membership. Inactive contact status mainly affects whether people can find you in searches, not your ability to buy or renew. Also note that, unlike event registration, an administrator or another user cannot sign up or renew an individual person's own personal membership for them. The member must do that themselves.
Parent and Child Organizations
If your association groups organizations into parent and child relationships, and your role at the parent organization has permission to manage its child organizations, you can view those child organizations' contacts and each one's membership status from the Portal.
That access does not let you act for a child organization's own membership. A parent organization's contact cannot submit a join application, renew membership, or reinstate membership for a child organization. Each organization's own contacts have to do that themselves, even when the parent administers the relationship.
There is no page in the Portal that directly shows your organization's overall membership status to an individual contact. Instead, you can tell what is currently possible by which options actually appear to you. If you need the exact status, ask your association.
Setting Up Automatic Renewal
Automatic renewal for an organization's membership is a separate, more specific permission than the general renewal permission above.
Warning
Automatic renewal setup is offered only to a contact whose own role is specifically granted that action. If your association granted it only to "every contact" instead of naming specific roles, that broader grant does not extend to automatic renewal setup. Your own role still needs to be named for this action. This feature also depends on a capability your association may not have turned on, so if you never see the option, ask your association whether it has been enabled.
Automatic renewal can be turned on for your organization's membership only while an organization join, renewal, or similar checkout application is being processed. You cannot turn it on afterward from the Membership Overview once the membership has already been paid, through a staff update, or through a mass query-based change. If your organization has already paid without enrolling in auto-renewal, the only options are to have the current membership cancelled and reapply with auto-renewal selected, or to wait and choose it at the next renewal.
Whether the auto-renewal option appears during the application depends on your association's setup. Some application forms include a built-in Renew Automatically field you choose during checkout, while some membership packages are configured to renew automatically unless a member explicitly opts out. If you see the option somewhere else in the Portal, ask your association which source controls it: the application form, the package setting, or the Membership Overview component.
Setting up auto-renewal always happens through one of your organization's application processes. There is no way to enable it for an organization outside that flow. If a membership package was originally set up not to renew automatically, the organization-level option will not become available afterward until someone re-enrolls with the correct setting, or the package itself is changed to allow it. Having auto-renewal enabled on your own individual record does not mean the organization's billed membership is enrolled, because the two are tracked separately.
Your organization's 360 record shows Renew Automatically as enabled only when the organization's own membership was purchased with auto-renewal and payment card information during that organization membership application. Enrolling an individual contact who receives membership through flowdown in auto-renewal does not make the organization's own record show auto-renewal. Turning on auto-renewal as an individual contact, even a primary contact, from the Portal can update only that person's own record rather than the organization's.
An administrative contact can still manage the organization's card information or opt out of automatic renewal through the Portal for the organization's own membership. That existing path depends on whether your association allows auto-renewal updates in the Portal at all, which is a separate setting from the specific-role grant described above.
If your role allows it, set up automatic renewal by going through your organization's renewal process. Choose the option to renew every year, add a credit card if one is not already on file, and complete the order. Automatic renewal is turned on as part of that process rather than from a separate settings screen.
Warning
An indicator that automatic renewal is turned on can show up on your own contact record even when it was your organization's membership that was set to renew automatically, not you personally. Your own auto-renewal indicator and your organization's membership auto-renewal status are not always the same thing, so don't assume one tells you the other.
If You Cannot Do Something You Expect To
- Confirm your contact role with your organization's administrator, and ask them to check with the association's Membership staff which of the five actions your role can take.
- Remember that renewal and reinstatement options appear only while your organization's membership is inside the relevant window. If you cannot renew today, your role is not necessarily missing permission.
- If your role should be administrative for your organization, ask your organization's administrator or the association to confirm that the role is marked administrative. An administrative role bypasses the rest of this article.
- Renewal eligibility can also depend on configured criteria evaluated against saved answers on your profile or your organization's profile. This includes criteria tied to the billing organization contact or the primary organization contact, not just your role or the renewal window. If you believe your organization should be eligible but is not offered the option, ask your association to check those criteria.
- You need to be linked as a contact of the organization itself, in addition to holding the right contact role, to see its renewal, sign-up, or other organization options. A role assignment alone is not enough if your contact record is not associated with that organization.
- A membership package can pass your association's internal eligibility check and still not be selectable when you try to choose it in the Portal. If a package you expect to see does not appear, ask your association's staff to check it instead of assuming the same rules apply in both places.
- Changing a membership's origin to a fully independent, individual-based membership, or removing an existing organization membership record to expose that process, is not something you can do yourself in the Portal. Your association's staff must make that change in their staff tools.
- If you update payment information on a declined organization installment invoice in the Portal, that only updates the invoice. It does not change the payment method stored on the installment schedule itself. Future installments keep billing to the old payment method until your association's staff update the schedule directly.
- Opting your organization out of the membership directory is available only while completing a membership application or a Change Affiliation process. It is not offered as a stand-alone, year-round setting elsewhere in the Portal.
- Before you can update your organization's membership details, such as its expiration date, a contact needs to be selected at the top of the organization's membership record. If an update fails, check that the record still has a contact assigned and ask your association to add one if it does not.
- If you should have access to your organization's membership content but it no longer appears on your record, ask your association's Membership staff to check the organizational membership. In some cases, removing your contact from the membership and then adding it back has restored the connection, though this is not a guaranteed fix for every cause of the problem.
Related
For what you can do with your own personal membership instead of your organization's membership, see the Related articles listed with this page. To start or continue an application for your organization once you know you are allowed to, see Fill Out and Submit Your Application Form.