Everyday tasks

This chapter describes some of the CiviMember tools of use to administrators. It will show how to expose membership signup/renewal pages and membership directories to your members and other website visitors.

Administering Memberships

Organization administrators will primarily work with membership records by viewing contacts. After finding the contact you wish to manage, click the Membership tab to view a summary of the contact's membership records (illustrated in the following screenshot).

 

Membership records appear in a list with active memberships (those with a current status) first and expired or cancelled memberships below.

From this interface, you can edit existing membership records, renew a membership, or create a new membership record. If you have configured an online credit card payment processor for use in CiviCRM, you will see two options for creating or renewing a membership: one for handling an offline record (no real-time transaction taking place), and one for handling an online record (using a real-time credit card transaction). The interface for each process is very similar, except that the credit card option includes payment processing and recording options .

After creating a new membership, you are taken to a form where you complete details regarding the record.

 

Many of the fields on this page will be auto-completed if left blank. Fields include:

• Source: The system will complete details regarding the record, including whether it was an offline or online transaction and who completed the record.
• Join Date: The date the record was created will be auto-filled.
• Start Date: If the membership type is a rolling membership, the current date will be auto-filled. If the membership type is a fixed period, CiviCRM will determine the appropriate start date based on the membership type configuration.
• End Date: This is automatically calculated from the start date and filled in based on the membership type configuration settings.

You can use the Status Override field to manually define a status for the record. As indicated by the title, it overrides the status automatically provided. You should use caution with this field as setting it will disable the automated status function for the record.

Recording membership payments

The Record Membership Payment checkbox expands the membership payment and receipt block and lets you record payments associated with the membership record. This feature touches an important concept central to CiviCRM's membership function: membership records in CiviCRM are independent of, but can be related to, a financial transaction. While this may seem confusing to organizations accustomed to viewing membership records as essentially a financial transaction, it offers an important and valuable distinction.

A membership record communicates the contact's relationship with the organisation. A corresponding financial transaction indicates the monetary value associated with that relationship. While related, the two are distinct. The distinction is best understood by considering two scenarios:

• Free memberships: Obviously if a certain membership category charges no fee, there will be no financial transaction associated with the membership. But in a traditional understanding (in which membership equals a financial transaction) this scenario "breaks" the model.
• Membership renewal: If a member renews her membership, she is essentially extending her existing membership record by another term, defined as the membership period. Therefore, she is not creating a new membership. By retaining a distinction between the membership record and financial transaction you can maintain a single membership record whose end date is extended, while creating multiple related financial transactions representing each renewal purchase.
  

CiviCRM respects this distinction by recording the Membership record under the Membership tab, recording the financial record under the Contributions tab, and then creating a link between the two records.

 

By clicking the Record Membership Payment checkbox and completing the transaction fields displayed, you are building these two associated records. After recording the membership, you will be able to view the membership record and see the related contribution record at the bottom.

Renewing memberships

Naturally, you expect your constituents not only to join your organization, but to maintain their membership on an ongoing basis through renewals. CiviCRM facilitates the renewal process.

Returning to the contact's membership tab, you will see the option to renew an existing membership record. The renewal process does two things:

• It extends the membership record by altering the end date to reflect a new membership period. For example, if your organisation's membership is handled on an annual basis from January through December, an existing end date of December 31, 2010 would be extended to December 31, 2011. CiviCRM calculates the end date extension based on the configuration for the specific membership type being renewed.
• If applicable, CiviCRM allows you to record a financial transaction (contribution) as part of the renewal process. As discussed earlier, this will insert a contribution record and attach it to the membership record.
  

Members' "join date" is not modified when a membership is renewed, so you always know when the contact first became a member. You cannot change a member's membership type when renewing their membership. If your constituent is moving from one membership type to another, you need to create a new membership record, distinct from the existing one. In this way you develop a membership history for the member. 

The membership dashboard

CiviCRM provides several tools to help you obtain a quick snapshot of your members and search through them based on various criteria.  From the main sidebar menu, select CiviMember to view the membership dashboard page. This page contains two blocks of information that display a summary or your members, categorised by type and date range, and a list of recent member activity.

 

All of the summary numbers are hot-linked. Simply click on one to drill down and view a list of members who have joined or renewed over the last two months or the year-to-date, or who are considered current according to the membership status definitions.

Searching for members

The Find Members page displays a series of searchable fields to help you segment and locate membership records. It is important to note that searching with this tool will display a list of membership records. So if a certain contact has multiple membership records meeting your search criteria, multiple records will be displayed for that contact. This contrasts with the advanced contact search tool, which displays one row per contact (i.e., there would be no duplicate listed, even if a contact had two membership records meeting the search criteria).

Toward the bottom half of the form are a series of date range fields. The left column indicates the From value and the right column the To value so you can narrow down searches to activities that take place between two particular dates.  If you are interested in membership records before a certain date, use only the To field.  Conversely, if you are interested in membership records after a certain date, select only the From field.

The top of the search result set includes a shaded block with tools letting you take action on all records in the result set, or on those selected using the checkboxes in the leftmost column.

 

Batch updates to members

Use this option to edit multiple records in a table grid using a pre-defined profile. If you are not familiar with how Profiles work, you will want to investigate how they are created before using this function. As you use this tool, note the following:

• You must have a Profile created before using this option. To find out more about Profiles, please read the Profiles chapter in the Configuration section of this book.
• Your selection of contacts must be of a single contact type. You cannot edit Individual and Organization type contacts simultaneously.
• You may edit only a maximum of 100 records at a time. If your search result set exceeds 100, use the record selection checkboxes to edit a single page of records at a time.
  

Deleting members

This action deletes all the selected membership records from the database. The contacts are not deleted, only their membership records. This action cannot be undone.

Exporting members

After selecting this action, you have the option of exporting a default set of primary fields or choosing which fields to export. When selecting which fields to export, you may save the mapping for future use. The data is exported in CSV format, which can be easily modified further in spreadsheet software or used for document mail merges.

Sending email to members

After searching your records, you may send an email to selected contacts and include data field tokens. Tokens are placeholders that are filled with the contact's data when the email is sent. This can save a lot of effort and possible errors, because you are able to send a bulk email to contacts while customizing it to each contact (e.g., beginning the email with a personalized salutation containing the contact's name).