Feature Request: Integrating CiviPledge & CiviMembership

[dexter]

Hello,

we are implementing in our CiviCRM membership solution. What we have found would perfectly suit our needs, is almost implemented in CiviCRM and we believe would be a great idea is joining CiviPledge with CiviMembership.

In particular:

It would be great, if for a year membership one could "pledge" paying for the membership i.e. in monthly payments, i.e. using CiviPledge.

So the membership would be 1 year (from 1.1 to 31.12), but the member would not pay the whole year membership fee (e.g. 240 Euro) in one payment but in e.g. 12 (= 20 EUR a month) or 4 (60 EUR in a quarter year) payments.

In data level it would probably require to include PLEDGE_ID in the CIVICRM_MEMBERSHIP_PAYMENT table.
Renewing membership would mean to add a new Pledge.

What do you think about this idea?

Regards,

Dexter

[JonGold]

Hi Dexter,

There are two answers to this.
* First - for an organization I worked with that had a similar need, we simply set the membership term to 1 month.  Then, when someone signed up for a yearly payment, it was good for 12 terms.  Monthly payments were for 1 term.  However, this was for an organization that wanted automated payments, not pledges, so I'm not sure if this will completely meet your needs.  I think it could work though.

* Second - to truly do what you want would require that partial payments be extended to CiviMember.  I believe there's a plan for this (partial payments are new to Civi 4.5 and right now are only valid for events) but I haven't checked.  You may want to search wiki.civicrm.org for the Partial Payments spec.

[endres.systopia]

Hi Dexter and JonGold.

A couple of lads talked about this on the last CodeSprint two weeks ago: Luciano Spiegel [IXIAM], Carlos Capote [AI Spain], me [Björn, SYSTOPIA] and a some more.

We basically decided to go beyond pledges and partial payments, mostly because for us a membership doesn't have to be renewed - it just keeps on going until it's cancelled. And we want Civi to support us with that, including (semi-)automatically collecting the membership fees. Our approach is mostly based on connecting the membership with a recurring contributions (or even multiple ones).

I'm going to publish a blog post one of these days describing the issues we have and outlining our approach to fix it. Then, obviously, we'd be open for input and eventually try to put together a team to implement it.

Best winds
Björn

[tahirramzan]

Respected community,

I am working on the development of “Refunds and Partial Payment Module” for CiviCRM, I am requesting that please go through this forum discussion and contribute your valuable feedback:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,32411.0.html

Thanks in anticipation
Regards