Can I give a Strong Towns membership as a gift?

Yes! You can give a Strong Towns membership on behalf of another by emailing membership@strongtowns.org. One of our team members will be in touch with you to set it up.

We are trying to come up with a better way of doing this but at the moment there are three options:

1. I don't mind if my friend finds out I got them a membership before their birthday or holiday - if this is you, you can go to our Membership Page and input your friend's details and your payment information and they will become a member from the moment that the donation is made. This does trigger an automatic email to the email address provided which welcomes the new member and tells them that they will be receiving a series of emails explaining what membership in Strong Towns involves. To handle the volume of members we've had in recent years, we've automated this onboarding process and it's best if the new member (your friend) is able to receive those emails.
2. I really want it to be a surprise and I'll time my contribution for the day when I tell my friend I made a contribution in their name so they could become a member: If it's not too much trouble, you can submit the donation on the day that you want to 'give' the gift to your friend (tell them in a card, etc) and then they won't be getting emails from us until just the right moment. But that's not the most elegant solution.
3. I really want it to be a surprise but I want to pre-arrange it so that I'm not having to deal with this during the holidays- if this is you, it will be more challenging but we can find a way. Depending on whether or not you are willing to be a member yourself (the more, the merrier, even $1 counts as a membership contribution), your contribution would create a member profile for you and we would set up a second member profile for your friend that would go live on the day that you wanted them to know that they were now a member of Strong Towns. Our membership team would manually ensure that they were added to our member onboarding journey and they would be notified of their membership status (we count someone a member for one full year from the date of their last contribution - in this case, your friend would receive the soft credit for the donation you made on their behalf).

As you can see, we don't have an immediately straightforward way of setting up a gift membership but we are inspired by you and several others who have inquired about it this year to actually come up with a better solution going forward.