Managing Members

One of the greatest values CiviCRM offers is the ability to integrate an organization's administrative database with online forms in real time. No more duplicate data entry; no more convoluted efforts to synchronize multiple data sources; no more excuses to your Board of Directors and constituents—CiviCRM provides a single data repository for both administrators and online users.

While this functionality is experienced throughout the CiviCRM tool set, one of the most useful ways this is seen is in the membership management tools. In this section we will discuss the tools available to administrators as they manage members. You will learn ways you can 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 through the contact view. After finding the contact you wish to manage, click the Membership tab to view a summary of the contact's membership records.

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

From this interface the administrator 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 (real-time credit card transaction takes place). The interface for each process is very similar, with the exception of the available payment processing and recording options.

After choosing to create 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. This includes:

• Source: The system will complete details regarding the record, including the fact that 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: Calculated from the start date based on the membership type configuration settings.

The status override field is used to manually define a status for the record. As indicated by the title, it overrides the automated status calculation. You should use caution with this field as setting it will disable the automated status function for the record.

Recording Payments

The Record Membership Payment checkbox expands the membership payment and receipt block and provides you an opportunity to record payments associated with the membership record.

This also introduces 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 organization. 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: It seems obvious that if you have a certain membership category that charges no fee, there would be no financial transaction associated with the membership. But in a traditional understanding (membership=financial transaction) this scenario "breaks" the model.
• Membership renewal: If a member renews their membership, they are are essentially extending their existing membership record by another term, defined as the membership period. They are not creating a new membership, they are extending, or renewing an existing 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, and 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 that are then 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 to not only join your organization, but to maintain their membership on an ongoing basis through renewals. CiviCRM anticipates the renewal process and simplifies how that transaction takes place.

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 organization's membership is handled on an annual basis from January through December, an existing end date of December 31, 2008 would be extended to December 31, 2009. 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.
  

Compare the screenshot below with the one above. Note that the end date has been extended by one year, and there is a second contribution record listed below the membership details.

Because the renewal process is an extension of an existing membership record, CiviCRM locks certain fields related to the record, such as the join date and membership type. In addition to protecting against inadvertent data changes, it also helps to streamline the administrative process when recording renewals. If your constituent is moving from one membership type to another, you would need to create a new membership record, distinct from the existing one. In this way you develop a membership history for the member.