Looking for membership strategy

I've been stuck with my project for a while and not sure where to go from here. First of all, I'm not very good at figuring out the tech side of things and I don't really enjoy it, but I need to do the best I can because I need this website to pull people together from all over.

My website is about genealogy. I have about 70 members and for quite some time, I've been holding back from new registrations because the workload of managing the project is getting to be more than I can handle. I need to engage people to help and work with me more than just join the website. I know if I opened this up publicly, I'd have 200 or more members within a few weeks. What I need to do is to set up different levels of membership where people can see up front that they can choose how they want to be involved. If they want more out of it, they need to put more into it. I imagine having different registration tracks where low-interest people have a simpler registration process, but minimal processing and work on my part. People who have stronger interest in helping and participating can be directed to more opportunities that may also be more demanding. Is there a way of setting up multi-level membership without it being too difficult for my brain to manage?

What are you meaning by memberships? You're wanting to charge them a subscription for additional features? or do you mean you want different profile types? By put more into it do you mean in general access to more features on your site or just a more complex profile?

Each of the member profiles I have connected to one of many family trees. I ask for enough information to find and label their connection. Then, when people look at the member list, they can immediately see who is in their family tree, who is related and who is not. Many of the people are minimally interested. That is understandable and acceptable as a basic member. Others are active researchers whom I want to enlist and guide toward work and collaboration. For example, "Registered Member" for the general, "Genealogist" or "Researcher" or "Colleague", something like that, for others. Among those, there may be a different scope of interest. For example, some may only be interested in part of their family tree... others in their whole family tree, others in collections of related family trees and (hopefully) some interested in project-wide roles. I'd like to set up role definitions (scope of interest) that people could self-identify. I would ask them to provide more detailed indication of their interests that is not available to the public, but people could easily see the ones who have common interests... that people could even recruit others with common interests within the Project.

I would like to set it up so that when people register, the first choice is "which type of membership do you want". I'd also like to ask the current members to go through some sort of profile update once the new system is in place. And, I'd like for people to be able to change and update their own roles as their interests change.

I've looked at Profile Pro, but so far don't really understand that and question if I really need that. I've looked at GroupJive as a possible solution, but I don't want free-for-all group formation. I want the groups to reflect the actual state of the research.

There is no subscription or payment component. I will be asking for general donations, but not connected to membership.

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Ok, sounds like you just need CB Conditional then. You'd have a select field where they can select their profile type then you'd condition tabs/fields based off the value of that select field. See the below videos to get started, but keep in mind a tab or field can only be conditioned once as the conditions will conflict with one another.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp0puRITgC7PxD6MvmDwNNIi2HNcYxs7u

This will allow you to have the different profile types and be able to have simple registrations up to complex based off the type selected.

Thanks. I've always been a little intimidated by the "Conditional fields" process, but maybe it's time to study up. It will be worthwhile if it leads me in the right direction.