How do these two membership styles work?

With Anniversary Memberships, everyone's membership begins on the same day as everyone else's each year and ends on the same day as everyone else's does. For instance, your organization might have its membership year begin on September 1st each year and end on August 31st of the following year. If a person buys a membership on, say, October 15th, their membership will still end on August 31st of the following year.

With Rolling Memberships, when you buy, say, a 1-year membership, you get the full year, no matter when you buy it. If you buy the membership on June 5th, it will expire on June 5th of the following year. If you buy a 3-year membership on January 11th, 2016, it will expire on January 11th, 2019.

The Magnet Platform supports both approaches but is set up by default with Rolling Style memberships.

If you would prefer to have Anniversary Memberships, just let us know via Support Tracker. In this case, we need the following two pieces of information:

1. the "Anniversary" date. This is the date on which the membership year begins.

2. the "Cutoff" date. This is the date after which a person buying membership will get the rest of this current membership year plus all of the following membership year. For example, if your Anniversary Date is January 1st, you might set your Cutoff Date to be October 1st. That way, if someone buys a membership on, say, October 5th, they will get the last 3 months of the year plus all of the following year.

So - which one is better???

Rolling is definitely a more efficient way to optimize/maximize the profitability of membership to your organization - for an obvious reason: you are never 'giving away' months.  But more importantly, it allows you to take a friction point out of the decision making process for a potential member.

"If I wait 3 months, I can get 18 months instead of 9..." 

...this doesn't happen with Rolling membership.

Also, calendar based anniv. style has the limitation of only allowing a 1-year term. 

Bottomline - we strongly recommend you use Rolling.  Over 90% of our clients do and the ones who don't, usually convert within the first year.