Chapter 9. Growing Your Membership and Interacting with Members

If you are a member-based organization—whether a professional or trade association, a society, or a charitable not-for-profit organization using membership structures to encourage recurring support—your members are your lifeblood. They are most likely your primary constituents, and much of your organizational identity and vision revolves around serving their needs. Having an integrated system to solicit, retain, and manage your members is essential to your organization's success. As such, you will want to take advantage of CiviCRM's membership management tools.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Reviewing the initial setup and configuration of membership structures in CiviCRM

• Understanding how the daily management tools work

• Soliciting new members and retaining existing members with online forms

• Searching and building reports to track members

• Putting membership in context and reviewing other tools that will prove...

Setting things up

As with the other areas of CiviCRM, you will begin by configuring several system options related to membership. It is important to take some time to think through the mechanics of how your organization works in order to ensure that the system is configured properly.

There are several membership tools that should be reviewed and configured through the interface, which you can access through Administer | CiviMember. In addition, several scheduled jobs have an impact on your membership workflows and should be reviewed, configured, and enabled. These scheduled jobs will be covered in the relevant sections.

Component settings

Before digging into the nuts and bolts of configuring membership types and statuses, let's briefly touch on the membership-related component settings, which you can find at Administer | CiviMember | CiviMember Component Settings.

Currently, there is only one configuration setting to review and set: the Default online membership renewal page. One of the things...

Working with memberships and daily management tools

As you work with membership records, you will likely want to easily access a snapshot of how your members are trending, search for members by specific type, status, or other criteria, and work with individual contacts and their membership details. CiviCRM provides a host of tools to do these things.

From the main navigation bar, let's do a quick review of the Membership menu:

• Dashboard: This option provides a summary of current members by type and date range.

• New Membership: This option lets you create a new membership record quickly.

• Find Members: This option provides tools for searching through the member records.

• Membership Reports: This option lists all existing membership report instances created in the system.

• Batch Data Entry: This option provides tools to enter membership records and their contribution records in bulk. This set of features is detailed in the Accounting batches section in Chapter 8, Fundraising for Your Mission. The only...

Forms to solicit new members and retain the existing ones

Having great administrative tools is wonderful, but we also want to be able to expose the membership signup and renewal pages on our website in order to solicit new members and retain existing members. In CiviCRM, we do this through a contribution page.

Contribution pages are used to solicit funds from site visitors. This may be for general donations, sponsorships, pledges, campaigns, or in our case, memberships. Begin by visiting Contributions | New Contribution.

We will not review all of the options available in the contribution page configuration, as that has been covered in depth in the previous chapter. We will focus on the key elements pertinent to membership signup pages.

In the Title tab, you will see a Financial Type field. Its use, for our purposes, can be a bit misleading. As you recall, when we defined membership types we assigned a financial type to each. When processing memberships through a contribution page, whatever...

Searching and reporting

We mentioned earlier the Find Members tool on the Membership menu, but let's take a few moments to explore the options available and review membership reports:

Most of the search options here are self-explanatory—you may search by a contact name or e-mail, membership types, and membership status. For these types and statuses, selecting multiple options is inclusive: the result will yield records matching any of the selections.

Below the membership status field is a set of important options, if you are making use of membership inheritance via relationships. Recall that you can configure a membership type to extend the membership to other contacts based on the selected relationship(s). If ACME Corp. is a member and the employer/employee relationship is selected for their membership type, all employees of the business will receive a membership record as well.

While this functionality is useful, it may be confusing to understand how you calculate members. If ACME has three...

The big picture and other tools

Membership management rarely occurs in a vacuum. It's most likely that your members will also be your authenticated (logged-in) website users, a primary target for event registrations, and recipients of most of your communication via snail mail, e-mail, or other means.

Let's consider some ways your membership may impact other areas of CiviCRM and review some third-party extensions that may be used with your site and members.

Common functions in CiviCRM

It's not uncommon for member-based organizations to have a "members-only" section in their website. This secure access area will require a Joomla!, Drupal, or WordPress user login account. If you have created a contribution page for membership sign-up, you can include a profile that has the user account creation option enabled. As contacts complete the membership application form, they will be able to create their user account to access the site.

As you work with your members, it's likely that you are primarily...

Summary

In this chapter, we've seen how CiviCRM provides robust membership management and reporting tools for administrators and the ability to expose member sign-up and renewal forms to your website. Specifically, we walked through the essential configuration steps required to get up and running with membership management in CiviCRM, taking time to understand the core concepts with how CiviCRM deals with membership records. We reviewed the tools available for monitoring and tracking your membership records, and saw how individual membership records are handled within the contact record. We also set up a website form to allow contacts to join or renew their membership, while discussing the broader options available for contribution campaigns, and understood how the membership search tool can be used to find subsets of members, in particular with regard to the various date fields. We stepped through the creation of membership reports from one of the three membership report templates. We took...