3.1 beta Contribution forms with membership--questions

[flug]

Hey all,

The 3.1 beta of civicrm is looking pretty good.

I have a couple of questions about it.

First off, our particular use case is we like to have a membership join/renewal form that also allows free-form donations to TWO separate things.

The membership rates are set and they have 3 or 4 choices.

However the extra donations are NOT set--they are simply boxes where people can fill out any amount they wish.

This has worked very well for us and I can see similar requirements being common--for instance, to join an organization and then ALSO donate to 1, 2, 3, 4 (at your option) special campaigns.  I can also see that many people might like to suggest a few levels for some or all of those special campaigns but then also leave it open for people to donate any amount they want.

So it looks to me like the 3.1 is so ALMOST doing this.

My questions:

 1. Using Price Sets on the contribution page I can, of course, set up a section for my membership levels and then others for any extra special contributions I like.

This works very well (with the one exception noted below).

But--if I set up one of the Fields in my price set to correspond to my membership levels, will it accurately update that person's membership status when they pay?


 2. I like to just leave a field where they can enter any dollar amount they want.  That is possible now with the price field if you just set the price per unit to be $1 (or 1 euro or whatever).

HOWEVER, there is a very annoying behavior if you do that, which is that the $1 is still displayed as the "price per unit".

Could we just have the option to omit the price per unit display altogether?

That would solve this particular problem and also another, that you might want to work the price into the item description somehow and not have it re-iterated automatically afterwards.


3. Another bit of wish-list: When you have a list of amounts in a price list, there should also always be the option to include "other" and in that case, the person could fill in whatever amount they like.

(I wouldn't use this personally--we just use "other" as our Standard Operating Procedure--but it is very, very common on fundraising forms both online & offline, so I am pretty sure people will use it.  I like to give suggested fundraising levels but if someone wants to give $10,000 or $60,000 or even just $13.49 for whatever reason, I figure that is their prerogative & they should have the option to give however much they want!)

Note the screen cap below from the 3.1 sandbox, where I've set up a form that is very, very close to what we would like (IF the membership levels will work correctly, and IF we could get rid of those unnecessary "1 euro" symbols.)


Again--great work with this and congratulations to everyone who has been working hard on it.  The Price Sets thing is just what these contribution pages needed.  IMHO with some very slight tweaks here this will be doing the particular thing that we are looking for--and probably what a lot of others are looking for as well.

[Yashodha Chaku]

flug :

But--if I set up one of the Fields in my price set to correspond to my membership levels, will it accurately update that person's membership status when they pay?

Price Sets are NOT supported with membership types.

Could we just have the option to omit the price per unit display altogether?

You can do that by unchecking Display Amount?, here
http://sandbox.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/price/field?action=update&reset=1&sid=4&fid=10

When you have a list of amounts in a price list, there should also always be the option to include "other" and in that case, the person could fill in whatever amount they like.

Again, you can easily get around this by unchecking the above setting for text/numeric qty and using price = 1.

HTH
-Yashodha

[flug]

flug :

But--if I set up one of the Fields in my price set to correspond to my membership levels, will it accurately update that person's membership status when they pay?

Price Sets are NOT supported with membership types.

Aha, this is getting so close to really working for us but this might be the deal killer, unless someone knows a workaround of some kind.

What I was hoping is that the regular membership section could appear as it does now and then the price set could appear in addition to that.

Could we just have the option to omit the price per unit display altogether?

You can do that by unchecking Display Amount?, here
http://sandbox.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/price/field?action=update&reset=1&sid=4&fid=10

Thanks--that's it exactly.

When you have a list of amounts in a price list, there should also always be the option to include "other" and in that case, the person could fill in whatever amount they like.

Again, you can easily get around this by unchecking the above setting for text/numeric qty and using price = 1.

This also works very well.

My only suggestion, maybe a slight change in the wording to suggest the possibility of doing this.  Even though this is only one case out of many possible, I think it is going to be a very common scenario.  Possible text:

Code: [Select]

Display amount next to each option? If no, then the amount should be in the option description
unless you're allowing users to choose their own amount.

HTH
-Yashodha

Thank you--that does help a lot!

[flug]

Aha, this is getting so close to really working for us but this might be the deal killer, unless someone knows a workaround of some kind.

What I was hoping is that the regular membership section could appear as it does now and then the price set could appear in addition to that.

If I might explain this a little more:

Our use case is a very simple one, but the current membership/contribution system won't handle it and it looks like the new one won't, either.

We were hoping to duplicate the essential functionality of our current membership/contribution page in CiviCRM, which works like this:

 1. Select membership level [ select box with 4 or 5 options, including "no membership"]
 2. Additional contribution to fund A [text entry, amount of their choosing]
 3. Additional contribution to fund B [text entry, amount of their choosing]

[Enter name address CC# etc]
[Click to complete the membership/donation]

If anyone could tell me how to get that type of thing to work under 3.0 or 3.1 I'd be eternally grateful!

The only thing I can think of right now is to do it via a Price Set, which apparently won't automatically do anything to the membership status for that person, and then have someone come back & manually update people's membership status periodically.

If you're wondering why we like this and don't want to change:
 

• It is simple and clean
• Took use 3-4 years of simplifying and experimenting to work out
• Based on actual experience, generates more contributions than either the simpler option (membership + one option only) or the more complex (membership plus several different options)
• Our members are already accustomed to this type of format (both in print & online) and I'd rather avoid confusing them.
• Our particular structure requires the two separate contribution options (what I'm calling Fund A & Fund B above) be kept separate
• Right now the only way I can figure to get membership + two separate contributions is to have them go through the whole payment process twice--and let's face it, anything that is more complicated and requires more pages, page loads, and clicks to complete, is going to be completed by fewer people.  We need to make it as easy as possible for people to donate to us.

[Donald Lobo]

You might want to consider hiring a developer and/or sponsoring the core team to add functionality that makes your use case possible. I suspect its  a 75-100 hour project

I'm just curious as to how/why the membership + 2 donations generates more contributions than membership + 1 donation. any thoughts on this?

lobo