CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've created and have begun using some membership types for organizations. Now I'd like to enable "on behalf of" for a couple of those types, so that I can let individuals who work with those organizations be recognized as employees. However, when I open up an existing membership type to edit it, I don't have a dropdown list for "relationship type." I can see where it should be, but there's just the question mark that brings up the tool tip. How can I enable "relationship type" for an exsting membership type?

Wish I had set it up before using the membership type, but now I'm stuck where I am. Is there a fairly clean way to create a new membershp type, then transfer the existing memberships from the old type to the new type?

I'm willing to manipulate the database. What do I need to do? Is there a way to retroactively active "on behalf of" by tinkering around in the MySQL file?

Now that I look at this, I think I've overestimated my willingness to try solving my problem by manipulating the MySQL file directly. My common sense has caught up with my love of tinkering, and has reminded me that trying to bypass the program has seldom led me anywhere good. It's not just adding a new relationship to the membership type that's the problem -- it's that it would probably turn out that there are a dozen other obscure places I would need to make the change. So, now that I've talked myself out of that potential nightmare, I'm looking for a cleaner solution to my problem. Anybody care to weigh in on the easiest way to transfer my current membership information to a brand new membershp type that includes the "on behalf of" option?

I did the export and import as suggested, and it went just fine. A few glitches that we'll have to sort out manually, but it did the job. Thanks!

Here's what I did:

1. Created a new membership type with a different name and activated the "on behalf of" information. (Everything else was the same.) For instance, one of my old membership types was "Publication member," and the new type I created was called "Publication."

2. Exported the memberships I wanted to change. To do this, I chose "Find members" from the "Memberships" menu, checked the boxes for the membership types I wanted, and clicked search. When the results popped up, I made sure the "all XXX records" button was selected, then chose "Export" from the drop-down menu. I chose to export "Primary fields," and saved the resulting CSV file.

3. I opened the CSV file with Excel. In the "Membership type" column I replaced the old membership name with the new one. I also looked at the columns containing dates, noted for format, highlighted the columns, and applied the matching date format. Not sure if this helped, but I've had trouble with date formats before, and this seemes to make a difference.

4. I went back to CiviCRM and chose "Import members" from the drop-down menu under "Memberships." I chose the right options, including contact type (mine were organizational), "insert new membership" (since I was creating a new membership, not updating an old one), and date format (matching the format noted in the previous step).

5. For the field mapping, I only picked the fields I needed. I use an "external identifier" number with my records, and that's what I used to match. I also matched membership type, member start date, member since, member expiration date, and source. I didn't match "Membership ID" because I thought that would duplicate existing memberships. And I skipped 'Member status," figuring CiviCRM could calculate that based on my membership rules. Also, I saved this field mapping, since I would need it to deal with import errors.

6. Most of the records imported fine. There were some import errors, and I downloaded the error file. The error file is great, because it contains only the records that had problems, plus the reason for the problem. You can just fix the problem and import the error file again, repeating the process as needed until you have no problems. In my case I found that I had a few records that had not been assigned "External identifier" numbers, and therfore couldn't be matched. I just entered those memberships by hand.

That's about it.