CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I haven't been using the relationship features of CiviCRM, but would like to start. I've created a couple of organizational membership types with "is employer of" as a relationship type, and I've created  membership category called "Staff" for individuals who are employees of member companies.

I'd like to create a way for individuals to sign up as staffers and indicate that they are employed by a member company. I created a contribution page called "Staff sign-up" that signs folks up as members of the "Staff" membership category. It includes the field "Organization name," but when a user fills out that form it's just a blank -- there's no drop-down box from which they can pick the organization name. That means that if they're employed by "The Times," but that company is in our records as "Times, The" it won't match.

I tried creating a profile called "Staff sign-up" with the field "employed by," but that doesn't really help either.

Any thoughts on a way to let individual users sign themselves up as staff in a way that connects them with the right employer record and creates "staff" memberships for them? I suppose if nothing else we could just gather the information through a profile update form, then set up the relationship manually, but it would be nice to automate this.

A couple of thoughts on this...

1. If your MEMBERSHIP model is that Organizations are Members, and you want employees of organizations to "inherit" a membership (as long as they are employed).... then you really only need one membership type. The 'Relationship Type' field for that membership type should specify 'Employer of'. This will result in a membership being automatically granted to any Individual contact who has an employee-employer relationship with a member organization.

2. If the assumption in #1 is correct, then the front-end signups would work like this:
- if the person is not yet in your DB, but the organization is already a member, then you want to direct them to a profile which includes Current Employer field (as Peter D noted). They shouldn't be signing up for a membership because their employer is already a member. You could potentially expose a searchable directory of existing member orgs so people can check up front.

-  if the org is not yet a member, then your Membership Signup form should include the 'On Behalf of an Organization' section (checkbox in 'Title and Settings' config form). This signup will result in the organization getting the membership AND the person doing the signup being added with a 'permissioned' employee relationship and the inherited membership.

Eileen McNaughton recently posted a detailed recipe for doing this kind of lookup in a Profile here:
http://civicrm.org/node/685

if you are interested in seeing this in core / supported, consider sponsoring a developer to work on cleaning it up and creating a drupal module for it. i suspect its a 10-20 hour project and eileen might be interested in doing it :0

lobo