Setting Up Memberships That Pay Off-Site

[cjminott]

I Posted this to "Using CiviMember" but I realized maybe I should have posted here, so cross-posting.

Hey there, Wondering if I could get some feedback on how I'm setting up our memberships.  We're new to CiviCRM and I want to make sure I set it up correctly, and this forum has been a great help for us so far.

Long story short, we have a monthly donation program where people donate on a monthly or annual basis that we've been running through our existing payment processor.  We've added the levels as a Price Set, and connected to our Payment Processor so new members are already signing up through CiviCRM.

My worry is how to add in the existing members who's credit cards are run through the payment processor, outside of CiviCRM.  Here is our plan:

• Add Memberships through "Add Membership" button within each Contact, so that they auto-renew.
• Manually import each contribution they've made in the past (i.e. 12 separate donations for a monthly member)
• As credit cards expire, remove members from the external payment processor and run their new card through CiviCRM

Am I missing anything?  Or would this work like I think it would?  I think it takes care of tracking all of the current members, as well as giving them credit for their previous contributions.

[JonGold]

I'd be interested in hearing others' experiences on this!  When I've set up CiviMember with monthly payments in the past, I enabled the "auto-renew" checkbox and made each membership term 1 month.  I think that's the only reasonable way to do it, though as I said, I'm curious how others handle monthly payments on what management thinks of as an "annual" membership.

For the purposes of this question, the important part of this appeoach is, "each term is one month, auto-renewing, each payment that comes in extends the membership by one month."

The question about how to handle folks who are in a legacy payment processor can be tricky though, and I'm not sure the approach below will work easily.  Reason being, (last I checked at least) there's no good way to associate an imported contribution with a membership, so there's no way to extend the membership by entering the payments.  So I think in your situation, you'll end up manually adjusting the end dates when you set up the memberships.  Which you could do when you create the member record, or when you do the import.  Probably both, if you're only entering a year of payments at a time, since some cards will expire more than a year from now.

Agreed that once you run their card through Civi, life will get much easier.

[cjminott]

Hey JonGold,

Yeah we're going through auto renew, and when I just did the "Add Membership" it actually added the contribution for me.  What I don't know is what it will do next month, haha.  If it continues to auto-add the contributions, our plan is to let it, and give the donor credit.  IF they decline or expire in the existing processor, we'll just delete the associate contribution that didn't actually happen, and move them over to CiviCRM.  (Only talking about 100 people so a manual-ish process is doable).

[JonGold]

I'm pretty sure what happens next month depends on the payment processor - I've spent more time than I like working with that code!  When you set up an auto-recurring payment processor, the processor sends a message (called "Instant Payment Notification", or IPN) to CiviCRM when a recurring payment's been processed.

My recollection is that CiviCRM will NOT create a new contribution if it receives no IPN at all.  However, I believe some processors will create a "Pending" contribution?  I'm sorry that I don't recall better, hopefully someone else can chime in!  I'm pretty embarrassed, given that I've written code to change exactly this behavior.  On the other hand, there's probably a million forum posts dealing with that part of this equation.

[joanne]

We don't actually encourage cross-posting.  Community members tend to read across several boards rather than stick to just one.   I have deleted the other post since this was the first one that was answered.