A membership can belong to more than one chapter and section. Use this article to choose a member’s primary chapter and maintain their record of past chapter and section memberships.
Before You Begin
Prerequisites
To add a chapter or section history entry, you need permission to edit memberships. Correcting or removing an existing entry does not have its own permission check.
Chapter editing on a membership record depends on your setup. Chapters must be turned on in Other Settings, and the membership page layout must include Chapters. If you do not see chapter editing on a membership record, check that configuration first.
When you remove a chapter or section from a membership through the edit form or an order, Rhythm records it as a past holding. Use the steps below only to add history from before you used Rhythm, or to fix a mistake in an existing entry. This includes an order that changes a member’s chapters or communities. The order can replace the member’s full set of chapters instead of only adding the newly selected one, so any chapter left out of the new selection is end-dated even though the member did not remove it directly.
Rhythm uses the same automatic recording when you remove a chapter or section from a membership through the edit form or an order. Use the steps below only to add history from before you used Rhythm, or to fix a mistake in an existing entry. This automatic recording has also been observed for imported memberships that have no matching order in Rhythm. Dropping one of those memberships moves its chapter into chapter history the same way.
Chapter changes use this same history tracking. When a chapter assignment looks wrong, check the membership’s current chapter and chapter history together, because a change can appear in one place before it appears in the other. Current chapter data and chapter history are also separate in a more basic way: letting a membership expire or drop does not move a chapter into history by itself. Rhythm adds chapter history only when the chapter itself is removed through the edit form or an order.
Change a Member's Primary Chapter
Chapter preference belongs to the member’s own membership record, not to an organization or group record. Each member chooses their own primary chapter; it is not set once for a whole organization or controlled by a group leader.
- Open the member’s own record, then Edit Membership.
- In the Chapters table, select Primary next to the chapter you want.
- Click Save Changes.
Result
That chapter now appears first in the member’s chapter list, and Rhythm treats it as the member’s primary chapter from then on.
Tip
Primary Chapter is mainly used for reporting. Changing it does not, by itself, affect when the membership expires or how it is billed.
Warning
This option is available only when the membership is current and active. If the membership has an open balance or a pending banner, you cannot change the chapter affiliation.
See a Member's History
Open the History tab on the member’s own record. If the member has more than one type of history, use the buttons to switch between Membership, Chapters, and Sections. Each button shows the number of entries in that list.
- Membership shows each change Rhythm recorded for the membership itself, such as joins, renewals, and drops. Each entry includes its dates, the package before and after the change, and a link to the related order when there is one. You cannot add, edit, or remove individual entries in this list by hand. The only way to clear Membership history is to delete the membership record itself.
- Chapters and Sections show the chapters or sections the member used to belong to, including when they joined and the period each entry covered. You can add, correct, or remove entries in these lists. Renewing a membership while staying in the same chapter does not add a new entry here. Rhythm records an entry only when the member’s chapter actually changes, so the earlier chapter entry runs from the original join date to the date of the change.
Tip
If you are writing eligibility criteria or another expression that needs to check whether a member used to belong to a specific section, test the section history directly. For example, use arrayIncludesPropertyValue(membership.past_section_memberships, 'section_id', 'SECTION1'), replacing SECTION1 with the section’s own ID. If the member does not have that section in their history, a process using this test will not appear for them in Console or Portal.
Warning
Merging duplicate contact records can affect this history. The surviving record is expected to keep the historical membership and chapter information from the merged record, but a currently active chapter is not part of history. That means the chapter can be present on the surviving record without appearing in the Chapters list above. If the record you merged from had only current-cycle membership and no historical entries, the surviving record can correctly show that current membership with no new chapter or section history added, because there was nothing historical to carry over. If both contacts already belonged to the same chapter or section before the merge, check for a duplicate entry afterward and remove the extra one by hand if you find it. A chapter left on the member’s current chapter list after a merge can also make that member appear in the chapter’s active-member queries, even when the chapter should really only be part of their history. Removing the chapter from the member’s current list, as described below, resolves that.
Add or Correct a Past Chapter or Section
- On the History tab, click Add Chapter or Add Section to record a new entry, or click the pencil icon on an existing entry to correct it.
- Choose the chapter or section.
- Fill in Join Date, Start Date (History), and End Date (History) as needed.
- Click Save Changes.
Result
The entry is added to the member’s chapter or section history. If you edited an existing entry, your changes replace that entry, and the History tab switches to that list.
Warning
A few details in this dialog are easy to miss:
- The title always reads "Add Historical Chapter" or "Add Historical Section," even when you are correcting an existing entry.
- Rhythm does not compare End Date (History) with Start Date (History), so double-check the dates before you save.
- Saving a history entry saves the member’s whole membership record, so the same rules apply as they do for a normal correction. If the membership fails an unrelated rule, such as an active membership that somehow has a termination date, you cannot save the history change until that issue is fixed.
- The chapter or section dropdown only shows chapters and sections that are currently active. If you correct an entry that points to a chapter or section that has since been made inactive, the dialog keeps the saved value even though it no longer appears in the list.
- For some organization memberships, this save fails unless the membership record has a contact populated. If saving a chapter change fails on an organization’s membership, add a contact to that field first, then try again.
Tip
If a membership is missing an expected chapter after a join or rejoin and you cannot tell why, you can add the chapter here as an interim fix while the cause is investigated.
If chapter values were cleared from many memberships by mistake, there is no automatic way to add them all back at once. Each one must be re-entered by hand, either here or through a bulk update as described below. For a larger set of affected memberships, gather the affected members with their membership and chapter information into a spreadsheet, then apply it through Mass Update instead of fixing each record individually here.
Remove a Past Chapter or Section
Click the trash icon on the entry you want to remove, then confirm: "You are deleting this historical chapter. This operation cannot be undone." The message refers to a section instead when you remove a section.
Warning
Adding, correcting, or removing a past chapter or section entry does not leave its own record of the change. Unlike the membership’s automatic history, nothing records who corrected a past holding or when. If you are trying to explain how a chapter association disappeared, do not expect the audit log to show it. A removed chapter or section leaves no audit trail, so you may need to fix the record directly instead of tracing what happened to it.
Memberships imported with a chapter already assigned can behave differently when the member is later dropped or terminated. The chapter can move out of the current membership information and into chapter history. A membership whose activity was created inside Rhythm may keep its current chapter information through that same kind of drop.
Change Chapters, Sections, or Primary Chapter for Many Members at Once
You can change chapter, section, or primary chapter values on many membership records at once with Mass Update, instead of opening each membership individually.
- Build a query of the membership records you want to change, or prepare a spreadsheet with the membership’s own identifier and the values to apply.
- Go to Mass Update for Membership Application > Memberships and choose the field you want to change: Chapters, Sections, or Primary Chapter.
- Map each column to the correct field, review the update’s preview, and run it.
Warning
A few field-mapping mistakes are easy to make with this process:
- Map the row identifier to the membership’s own ID, not to a chapter or section ID. Mapping an uploaded "Chapter ID" column to ID can look fine in the preview, but Rhythm will not find the right membership record to update.
- The bulk-update fields for these relationships are chapter_ids, section_ids, chapters, and sections. Prefer the ID-based fields, chapter_ids and section_ids, over the name-based ones because chapter and section reference fields expect the related record’s actual ID, not its display name.
- The chapter name you see on a membership is a display and reporting field. It is not writable through mass update, so changing it does not change the member’s chapter. Use Chapters, or the dedicated Primary Chapter field below, instead. A mass update that only touches that display field can complete without error and still leave the membership’s actual chapter unchanged.
- Chapters is an array field, so array-style values and expressions apply to it. Primary Chapter holds a single value, not an array, so array-expression syntax does not work there.
- To clear every chapter from a membership, set Chapters to an empty array expression,
[]. To clear a membership’s primary chapter instead, leave the chapter ID column blank in a Primary Chapter update rather than trying to blank out a name. - To add a new section to members who already have sections, without replacing what they already have, use the mass update option that adds a selection rather than the one that replaces the field outright. A plain mass update on Sections can overwrite a member’s existing sections instead of adding to them.
Primary Chapter can be bulk-updated using the dedicated Primary Chapter option under Mass Updates for Membership Application > Memberships Service. Use that field when your goal is specifically to change the primary chapter. Updating Chapters changes chapter membership but does not mark any chapter as primary.
Tip
If a bulk update does not clear or change a chapter value the way you expect, there may not be a workaround yet besides making the change by hand on the affected records.
Expected Result
The member’s primary chapter reflects your latest choice, and their recorded history of past chapters and sections matches what actually happened, including anything from before you started using Rhythm.