CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi, I've seen some older posts about the constraints around changing renewal reminder settings - I get it.  But I wondered, is there maybe now a way at least to disable reminders for a particular membership type, or even to suppress all reminders? Can this be fiddled in the SQL perhaps? My client hasn't yet decided whether or not to use the reminders, and asked for them off in the meantime, though they were on to start with (sigh).  

Hey there,

Wanted to add some suggested steps for disabling renewal reminders for members.

The reason this isn't as simple as just removing the renewal date reminder in civicrm_membership_type or civicrm/admin/member/membershipType?reset=1 (i.e. the reason that box is disabled once set) is that each individual civicrm_membership record has its renewal date calculated when the membership is created based civicrm_membership_type.

The script that sends renewal reminders (which is the same one that updates membership statuses (civicrm/bin/UpdateMembershipRecord.php)) looks in civicrm_membership to work out if a membership renewal reminder should be sent (it doesn't care what is set in civicrm_membership_type.

Also related to this, there is (currently) no function to change the reminder date that when you update the membership type.  And there are probably also lots of extra subtleties that need to be considered (update for records, just future ones, etc. see here for more http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,7345.msg32247.html) but that isn't the point of this post ...

What if you just want to stop renewal reminders for a certain membership type?  That should be possible.

You'll need to 1) stop the renewal reminder date getting set...

Background: In CRM_Member_BAO_MembershipType at ~line 420 there is an if statement to check if renewal_reminder_day is set in the membership type.  if it is this feeds a suitable reminder date to the membership.  Why do you care? Because if that is set to NULL, then reminder dates won't be set for new memberships of this type.

UPDATE civicrm_membership_type SET renewal_reminder_day = NULL WHERE id = [insert membership id here]

And 2) null the reminder date for any memberships of this type that are already set.

UPDATE civicrm_membership SET reminder_date = NULL WHERE membership_type_id = [insert membership id here]

PS. the results of these statements are not verified - use at ur own risk and / or confirm that they look good / work for you.

Michael