The Membership Overview page opens first when you go to the Membership Console. It shows the built-in membership figures unless your association has turned on its own configured dashboard. Use this page to check which dashboard you’re seeing, refresh a built-in count when you need a newer number, and open the records behind a figure.
Before You Begin
Prerequisites
- You can open the Membership Console. You do not need a specific permission to see the built-in Overview figures.
- To open the records behind a figure, you need access to the Query Center.
Open the Overview
Go to Membership & Committees › Overview. You’ll see one of two layouts, depending on how your association set up the page:
- The built-in figures. You see three count tiles — Active Members - Principal, Dropped Members, and Expired Members Receiving Benefits — plus a Members by Type chart. Every account sees these figures unless a configured dashboard is turned on and working.
- Your association's own dashboard, if one has been set up and turned on for Membership. It replaces the built-in tiles on the page, and it can show a Customize button above it if you’re allowed to edit it.
Tip
If your association’s own dashboard is turned on, you may briefly see the built-in tiles while the page checks which dashboard to show. Those tiles may even start loading their own figures, which is expected while the page loads.
For what each built-in figure actually counts, see Read a Membership Count or Breakdown.
Get a Fresher Number
Each built-in count tile keeps its number for a few minutes before Rhythm recalculates it, so the number you see can be a few minutes old. Click the sync icon on a tile when you want Rhythm to recalculate that figure right away instead of waiting. Even a freshly recalculated number can still trail live records, because the tile pulls from a reporting copy of your data that updates on its own short cycle and can lag by roughly 30 to 60 seconds. If a tile’s number differs widely from the count you see after opening its list, the likely cause is this kind of staleness, or a delay updating a related record, not a limit on how many records the list can show.
Warning
Recalculating a tile replaces the stored figure for everyone at your association, not only for you. The next person who opens the page sees the number you just requested, not the previous one. The Members by Type chart has no refresh control: Rhythm draws it once when the page opens, and only reloading the page updates it.
When you reload the page, the Members by Type chart usually reflects a new membership application within about five minutes of processing, which is faster than when it refreshed only hourly. The chart also picks up a newly created membership type once a package is linked to it, though a brand-new type can take a little while to appear. Some overview charts on this page have been reported to lag much further behind at times, by as much as a day. If a chart still looks stale well after you expected it to catch up, give it more time and reload again.
A chapter’s or section’s own Members figure on its 360 page works differently. Clicking its sync icon asks for the figure again, but it still returns the same stored copy until that copy expires on its own. Refreshing it does not force an immediate recount the way the tiles on this Overview page do. After a large bulk update to a chapter’s or section’s members, expect the total to take some time to catch up. Checking back after the stored copy has had time to expire usually shows the corrected count.
Open the Records Behind a Figure
Click a tile’s number, or its loading indicator before the number appears, to see the records it counted:
- On the Overview page, click the count you want to review.
- Rhythm takes you to Membership & Committees › Queries, the Membership Query Center.
- The matching question runs automatically and shows its results as a list you can refine, sort, or export.
Result
You now have the records behind the count as a query, and you can adjust and save it like any other Membership query.
When you adjust or save a query this way, be specific about what you mean by a period such as "members in 2023." Rhythm can filter for members who are currently active, who joined during that year, or who renewed during that year, and each option needs different criteria. Decide which group you want before you narrow the query.
A chapter’s or section’s Members figure works the same way from its own 360 page. Click the number to open that chapter’s or section’s active members as a query in the Query Center.
Warning
The question a tile opens is written and stored separately from the number on the tile, so they do not always count exactly the same records. The query behind the Active Members figure can also carry an additional restriction, such as limiting results to a specific origin, that isn’t fully visible when you open it in the query designer. That means the criteria you see there can look broader than what the tile actually counted. See Read a Membership Count or Breakdown for where a tile and its opened list can disagree.
After a membership is dropped or its status otherwise changes, the Dropped Members and Expired Members Receiving Benefits queries can take a little while to catch up with each other. A member who just changed status may briefly still show up in one of these two lists, or not yet show up in the other, until the underlying data finishes updating.
A deleted record can also continue to appear in query results for a while, including in the Active Members query or the Expired Members Receiving Benefits query. If a record you open this way fails to load because it no longer exists, or a deleted record is still showing as an active member, you can usually clear it by selecting that record in the query and deleting it from there.
The Members by Type chart has no drill-through, so clicking a slice does nothing.
Expected Result
You can tell which dashboard you’re looking at, refresh a built-in figure when you need the latest number, and open the records behind a figure as a query.
If a Figure Won't Load
If a tile’s number never appears and the tile stays on its loading indicator, the request behind it likely failed. Click the tile’s sync icon, or reload the page. The page does not show an error message. If your association’s own dashboard fails to load or has been switched off, the Overview page falls back to the built-in figures without explaining why.