Memberium & LearnDash: Why Do I Need Both of Them?

Memberium and LearnDash work well together.  With LearnDash's recent release to 3.0 and now 3.1, it's even better for managing the learning process.  I do want to make it really clear that Memberium and LearnDash are two distinct platforms.  They each provide their own set of features that together make for a solid platform for building online learning courses and coaching programs.

An interesting request I’ve gotten in the last couple of months is people asking for Memberium / LearnDash sites.  They’re not asking me for a LearnDash project. They’re not asking for a Memberium project.  They’re asking me for a Memberium LearnDash site and it’s interesting.  It's almost like those two products are fused together in people’s minds even though they’re very distinct things.  They are very different.

First of all, Memberium is a plugin.  It adds function to Wordpress.  It's main role is to connect Wordpress and the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system you are using.  We primarily serve Infusionsoft CRM users, but Memberium provide support for ActiveCampaign as well.

Wordpress already has well built login system.  Memberium works along with the WordPress login to enhance what it can do by connecting it up to Infusionsoft.  If Infusionsoft checks it's list of contacts and see that the person logging in is either a paying member or someone who has opted in to receive content they've been offered, it  allows them in as part of the Wordpress login process.

That's not all it does.

• It keeps your content from getting into the hands of people who haven't purchased it from you.
• It provides you with as set of short codes for displaying content in Infusinsoft on the site.
• It allows you to build login boxes, purchase items using Infusionsoft's e-commerce and many others.

LearnDash is very different.  It’s a Learning Management System (LMS).  My team and I have been building membership sites for a very long time. We were building learning systems before LearnDash was available.  That meant we had to hand build course structures to partition content into courses, lessons and topics.  It was doable, but it took a lot of work.  It was also something most people wouldn't want to take on if they weren't really knowledgeable using Wordpress.

With LearnDash, the course structure is just natural. They have the concept of a course that’s made up of lessons that are then made up of topics.  You can connect them all up using a drag and drop interface that's easy to use.  Once configured, LearnDash takes care of the creating menus, navigation bars and formats the content nicely.

Another thing that LearnDash does well is it allows you to get people to either:

• pass a quiz,
• answer some questions or
• press a button in order to get to the next section.

You can have five lessons course that made up of one cohesive unit of content.  Then you follow that with a quiz.  You can configure the lesson to only allow them to take the next lesson if they pass the quiz.  It provides some really nice features in this area.

So remember, Memberium is about protection. It connects WordPress with Infusionsoft.  It makes it possible for both Infusionsoft and Wordpress to connect.  LearnDash is for building courses.