How to set up gratis memberships

[dsdart]

We have a few members that we grant free membership to.  They still need to have the same membership type as the paid ones, so I can't just set up another membership type.

I was looking at setting up membership status rule of 'gratis' with an end date of 50 years, so they don't get renewal reminder emails, but the end date on the contact page still shows the end date one year after the start date.

Is there an advantage to setting up a new status rule?  Or should we just do a status override and use 'current' as the status type and set the end date to 50 years in the future?  Or is there some better way to set this up?

I couldn't find any documentation on best practice on this subject so any advice would be appreciated.

[Eileen]

Don't you mean a membership type rather than a membership rule? e.g a membership type of 'gratis' with a lifetime period?

[dsdart]

I don't think so.

Our membership types are set based on the type of organization, ie: Non Profit 501(c)3, Non Profit Trade Organization, etc  The organizations with comp membership still need to be counted in these types, but we don't want 0 to be a valid price choice when members sign up/renew.

Should I set the minimum fee to 0 in the type, then not display that choice on the contribution page?  What is minimum fee used for anyway?

[petednz]

Min fee is pretty much what it says - means that if someone submits an online membership and the payment is below the Min then the page is not submitted.
So yes if you have a $0 fee but don't provide any buttons for that, or eg an 'Other Amount' field that is below your 'real' minimum, then you should be sweet.

But I would also tend to go down the route of having a separate membership type for this use case to avoid any bad outcomes when you start firing out Scheduled Reminders etc.
If you are happy to manually manage all of them via 'status override' then you may be okay with your approach. HTH