Smart Membership Validation: Your Shield Against Fraud

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Introduction

Welcome to the world of smart membership management! At Join It, we understand the value of trusting your membership data and keeping your member experience seamless. In this post, we'll dive into the common types of membership fraud and how our Digital Membership Cards offer innovative solutions to keep your organization safe.

Common Types of Membership Fraud

Before you can prevent fraud, you have to understand fraud and the forms that it commonly takes when it comes to memberships. In our experience across 1,800 organizations and $75,000,000 in membership sales - we've found there are are two common types of attempted fraud in memberships: Forgery Fraud and Duplication Fraud.

Forgery Fraud

Imagine a member showing up with a membership that doesn't exist or is no longer active. This is forgery fraud, and it's more common than you'd think.

Duplication Fraud

Then there's duplication fraud, where someone uses a valid membership, but guess what? It's not theirs!

Spectrum of Fraud Risk

Every organization faces a dilemma: how much should you invest in preventing membership fraud? While it's a balancing act between costs and member experience, consider these questions:

• What's the cost or impact of a fraudulent membership?
• How likely is it for someone to attempt fraud?

Membership Validation Tools

In this digital age, the right tools can make all the difference. Advanced technology not only streamlines the validation process but also adds layers of security to safeguard your organization.

3 Strategies for Membership Validation

Next, we'll outline the 3 different strategies that you can implement to validate your memberships and prevent fraud. In summary, these strategies are: 

1. Basic Validation: Use Digital Membership Cards to display membership and do a visual check (doesn't entirely eliminate forgery or duplication fraud)
2. Advanced Validation: Use Digital Membership Cards to display memberships and scan QR code to check against hosted member database (prevents forgery fraud)
3. Complete Validation: Use Digital Membership Cards to display memberships and scan QR code to check against hosted database and very against a required profile photo that had previously been uploaded (prevents forgery and duplication fraud)

Now that we've defined the 3 different strategies for Membership Validation, let's dive deeper into how I would implement each of these if I were a customer using Join It.

1. Basic Membership Validation

Let's dive into the first strategy: Basic Membership Validation. This approach has a lot of benefits - it's the easiest to implement, it's the smoothest in terms of customer experience, and for the most part - it prevents fraud because it would require a reasonable amount of effort for this process to be defrauded.

However, the down side is that you are still vulnerable to forgery and duplication fraud. So if you're in a high risk category, like nightlife, or there's a high marginal cost to delivering your membership benefits - then you should consider one of the stricter enforcement strategies.

If I were to implement Basic Membership Validation, then I would distribute Digital Membership Cards to each of my members and have them display the cards upon arrival at the venue or event. It's that simple!

2. Advanced Membership Validation

The next strategy is: Advanced Membership Validation. This approach requires a bit more implementation in terms of your operations, but it also protects against forgery fraud by validating each membership against your hosted members database.

If I were to implement Advanced Membership Validation, then I would activate the QR codes on the Digital Membership Cards. Then upon arrival to the venue or event, I would have staff scan these to check against your hosted members' database, nipping forgery fraud in the bud.

Of course, the downside is that you're still vulnerable to duplication fraud - for example, someone could use another member's valid Digital Membership Card.

3. Complete Membership Validation

The final strategy is: Complete Membership Validation. This approach requires more preparation from the member, and one more additional step from your staff upon check in - but it protects against forgery fraud and duplication fraud.

If I were to implement Complete Membership Validation, then I would follow the same steps as before - distribute the virtual membership cards, activate the QR code feature, ann the scan the card upon arrive. But I would also require that the members upload a profile photo during their membership purchase or renewal. This way, I can confirm that the membership belongs to the member that's using the card. Therefore, eliminate the risk of duplication fraud.

Another variation on this strategy is that you could check the member's ID card to confirm that their name matches the valid membership that's being presented.

While this is the most secure form of validation and it prevents both forgery and duplication fraud - it's the most 'expensive' both is costs to implement and a 'tax' on the membership experience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you might be surprised to learn that our most common recommendation is that our organizations use Basic Membership Validation. For most cases, this increases the difficulty of fraud by enough that it deters folks from attempting to commit fraud.

Of course, there are cases where you might want to consider the more secure approaches - such as: 

• Industry: If you're in an industry that experiences high rates of fraud (e.g. night life)
• High marginal cost of benefits: If it costs a lot to deliver the benfits to your members, and a fraudulent participant could throw off your budget
• Governance or Record Keeping: If members are participating in an election of a Board of Directors or Annual General Meeting

In the end, these are the tools that you have to prevent fraud - and the different strategies that you can use to fight fraud on a level that fits your specific needs. It's about protecting your community and enhancing the member experience.

Of course, we'd love to answer any additional questions that you might have or offer advice that address your concerns. So don't hesitate to reach out to us! 

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