Approving new members

When approval is in play

If your organization requires approval on public join, anyone who signs up from your public page (or your embedded join form) is created with the status Pending instead of Active. They're told on the join page that an administrator will review the membership. Nothing else about them is different — the record, the custom fields, and any payment are all captured — they just aren't on your active roster yet.

Finding who's waiting

Filter the Members list by the Pending status to see everyone awaiting review. If you've turned on New member alerts under Settings → Notifications, owners and admins also get an email the moment someone applies — and a push notification on any device where you've enabled it.

Approving

Open the member's record. A banner at the top of a pending member's page offers Approve. One click and:

1. Their status changes from Pending to Active.
2. The action is written to your Audit log, attributed to you.
3. Your welcome email is sent — if the Member welcome email toggle is on in Settings → Notifications. This is the moment the welcome fires for approval-required orgs, not at sign-up.
4. A member.updated webhook and integration event fire, so anything you've connected downstream learns about the new member.

Approving is deliberately the only path that completes the join flow properly. Editing the status field by hand will make someone Active but skip the welcome email and the audit entry, so use the Approve button.

If you don't want to approve someone

There's no "reject" button — leave them Pending, or archive the record to take it off your working list while keeping the history. If they paid, refund the payment separately; changing a member's status never moves money on its own.

Don't want to review sign-ups at all? Turn approval off on the Website page and joins become Active immediately, with the welcome email sent at sign-up.