Configuring Membership

CiviCRM provides a suite of tools that allows you to track and manage membership records and to view a snapshot of who your current members are at any point in time. You can manage your memberships more easily by allowing individuals and organizations to become members or renew an existing membership online.

Both Joomla! and Drupal have extensions available to control access to website resources and allow user registration based on membership status. Visit the CiviCRM website for more details.

Before you begin using CiviCRM's membership tools with your contacts you will need to configure several elements and give some thought on how your records will be organized and used.

Configuring Membership Types

The first step toward implementing CiviMember is to configure the membership types and status rules. These are handled in: Administer CiviCRM » CiviMember » Membership Types ( Drupal: http://siteurl/civicrm/admin/member/membershipType?reset=1 ).

Membership types are the various membership categories that your organization offers. You can configure an unlimited number of membership types and set various options for each of them. Options include how they are used, the membership term period, and the dues amount. The below image displays the various options.

Begin by defining the name of the membership type and a brief description. The name will be used throughout the system so be sure to choose it carefully. CiviCRM requires the membership type be associated with an organization record.

Having each membership type is connected with an organization gives CiviCRM the flexibility to handle multiple membership types with multiple organizations (or sub-organizations) within a single interface. For example, if your national organization consists of 6 regional chapters, each of which maintains membership records separate from the national membership, you can create membership types for each chapter membership and associate it directly with the chapter organization.

Continue through the membership type configuration by entering the minimum membership fee (zero if the membership is free), and select the contribution type. When a user or administrator logs a membership record in which a fee is recorded, CiviCRM will log a corresponding contribution record and assign the selected contribution type. In most cases you will select "Membership Fee" from the dropdown. You can create and modify Contribution types through the Administer CiviCRM tools.

Each membership type must have a duration value and period type selected. The duration value is the length of time for which the membership is valid (e.g. an annual membership has a duration of 1 year). The period type determines when that duration is measured from. A rolling membership is measured from the date it is entered in the system, whereas a fixed membership begins on a defined date. For fixed period memberships you must also identify the rollover date the point after which new memberships are entered as belonging to the next dues period.

Membership can be inherited from one contact to another which is useful in situations like professional trade organisations where the organisation is the member, but employees of the organisation receive the benefits of membership. Use the relationships dropdown to specify which related records should receive membership through the parent record.

You can restrict certain membership types (e.g. honorary, lifetime) so they can only be accessed by administrators and are not available to membership signup or renewal pages on your website, but are only to be managed by administrators. Use the visibility option to control who is able to access the membership type.

At the bottom of the membership types page you will find a block of information for managing renewal reminders. CiviCRM can be configured to send out a reminder email to members as the expiration date for their membership nears. This is particularly helpful for rolling membership types where contacts may join at any time during the year. To configure the renewal reminder you must first have setup a renewal email template through Administer CiviCRM » Message Templates.

The Atlantis State Public Transit Association (ASPTA) is useful as a case study for thinking about how to apply memberships.

The Atlantis State Public Transit Association (ASPTA) has four membership categories it must configure in CiviCRM:

• Regular Members: Public transit systems. There are three tiered dues levels within this category, based on the size of the system. Membership is organization-based, and all employees receive access to member benefits, such as discounted rates at Association events.
  
• Affiliate Members: Businesses providing goods and services to the transit industry, such as bus and rail car manufacturers, engineers and consultants, parts and component manufacturers, etc. Membership dues are a flat rate for all Affiliate Members. Membership is organization-based, and all employees receive access to member benefits, such as discounted rates at Association events.
  
• Associate Members: Students, government representatives, public interest groups, research institutions, and other interested parties. Membership dues are a flat rate for all Associate Members. Membership is individual-based.
  
• Honorary Members: Retired transit system executives and others who have made a notable contribution to the industry and Association. No membership dues; lifetime period. Membership is individual-based.
  

As the ASPTA CiviCRM administrator configures the membership types, she creates three separate types for the Regular Member category to account for the three dues levels. The duration is one year, beginning on January 1, with a rollover date of October 1. In this way she accounts for new members who join very late in the year and are not able to fully benefit from their membership—the membership extends through December 31 the following year.

In the relationship type dropdown she selects "employer of." All employees of regular member organizations are allowed to attend the annual conferences and training programs at the member rate, and receive mailings from the Association through their inherited membership. The Affiliate Member category is configured in a similar way.

Associate Members are people, not organizations, so the configuration is similar with the exception that no option is chosen for the relationship type dropdown.

Note that CiviCRM does not have the ability to connect a membership type to a specific contact type (individual, organization, or household). While we have structured the membership types according to the ASPTA category definitions, it will be important to train staff to enter records with the appropriate contact record (Regular and Affiliate with the organization; Associate and Honorary with the individual).

The last membership category is a little different than the previous. It is awarded to those who have retired from the industry and are recognized for their contributions to the organization. Membership is defined as rolling (beginning on the date of retirement), lasting for 1 lifetime (no expiration date), and it is not available to public access pages (only administrators can assign the membership to an individual).

Configuring Membership Status Rules

Having completed the configuration of the organization's membership types, you must now define the membership status rules. These are handled in: Administer CiviCRM » CiviMember » Membership Status Rules ( Drupal: http://siteurl/civicrm/admin/member/membershipStatus?reset=1 ).

At any point in time, your members will have a status identified for each membership record. The status provides information about the record, for example if it is current, new, expired, or in a grace period. Generally those status types are measured from the start or end date of the membership record.

CiviCRM will check the status rules for a membership record and update it accordingly when you create or edit the record. In order to take full advantage of the membership status rules, and to automatically send membership renewal emails you must configure your server to regularly update the status of your members.  This is done using CRON.  For more details, visit the online documentation: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Membership+Types.

Membership rules are very powerful but can be involved to set up.   At its most basic, membership rules are based on a start time and an end time.  The start event indicates when the rule begins and the adjustment allows you to offset the start date. The end date works the same way, though it is not required.

The current membership checkbox is an important way to determine whether a certain status is considered "current" when viewing the CiviMember summary statistics for memberships. In most cases, the New, Current, and Grace status types are considered current.

When configuring the membership status rules, be sure to take note of the order in which they are listed. CiviCRM will process the rules beginning with the first and assign a status as soon as one matches.

ASPTA is most interested in identifying new, current, grace, and expired members. The status rules defined by default when installing CiviCRM will largely meet their needs, with a few modifications.

• New: The Association generally only sees a handful of new members each year. Consequently, effort is made to reach out to new members in a purposeful way and ensure they are quickly integrated into the organization. The organizations would like to define new members as those who have joined within the previous 10 months. The status rule was changed so that the end event adjustment was 10 months from the join date.
• Current: The default status rule fits their needs—current members are those that fall within the start date and end date of their membership period.
• Grace: Because so many of the organization's members are government entities (public transit systems) that traditionally have slower, bureaucratic systems when processing payments, ASPTA will extend the grace period to 4 months after the expiration date. Note, however, that the status rules are universal to all membership types.
  
• Expired: The start event adjustment is altered to 4 months in order to coordinate with the grace period. Members who have not paid their dues will be considered current through the end of April, after which time they will be changed to the expired status and no longer benefit from membership discounts and mailings.
  

Once you have completed the membership configuration, you can use CiviCRM to track your membership records.