CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi there,

After working with a few clients on CiviMember, I wanted to flag up a couple of ways you could improve the current CiviMember model.  Not that I have any funds to do anything about it at the moment but I thought it would be useful feedback none the less.

=historical lapses=

It is often useful when looking at a contact that has renewed their membership on a number of occasions to have more detail than just the start and end date of the membership.  Specifically to know if there has been any period where there membership lapsed.

At the moment you can get some idea of that if there are contributions associated with the membership, but there is still a fair amount of inference that you need to do, and of course, that is only possible if the membership has a contribution associated.

Better might be split up a single membership into membership terms.  The associated membership status would stay with the membership, but start and end dates would be moved to individual membership terms.

Or alternatively we could just add another field with denormalised data about start and end dates.  Still very useful on an individual record, but no option to say: who was a member at a specific point in time.

=duplicate memberships=

At the moment it is possible to record two memberships of the same type for a contact.  I've seen some clients do that, rather than renew.

Whilst that gives you the historical data on start and end dates that some clients want, it leads to contacts appearing as both expired and current members.

Would it be better to remove the ability to (or at least warn before people they) make new memberships rather than renewing them?

Hope that's useful at some level