Author Topic: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership (Read 853 times)

mdlueck · October 03, 2010, 01:22:50 pm

Our organization is converting to using CiviCRM currently, and specifically we are thinking to use Membership Status Rules to replace the existing system which sends out specific emails to members on specific days of their membership.

For example, there is a set email that should be sent out when they become members, another email on the 5th day of their membership, another on the 14th, and so on...

Since people may join any time of day, is it going to be reliable to set the "day 5 rule" to be "start date +4 through start date +5"?

Or does that leave the possibility that people would get duplicate emails?

Or should we define the rule with the same "start date +4" for the beginning and ending, and will Civi assume any of the 24Hrs of that day?

Dave Greenberg · October 03, 2010, 02:38:16 pm

Have you considered adapting the current membership renewal reminder functionality for this (rather than triggering status changes)? The same script which keeps membership statuses updated also triggers sending an email $n days prior to membership expiration. It uses civicrm_membership.reminder_date to know when to send the email - and clears that date once the email is sent. I'm thinking you could potentially embed your rules about sending the various emails and that script and increment (rather than clearing) the reminder date value as each is sent. Might be a big hole in this idea but ....

mdlueck · October 04, 2010, 05:26:13 am

I see problem(s) with connecting the emails to the renewal reminder functionality... Some emails are sent beyond 30 days, also there are some "please consider coming back" notes scheduled to be sent N days after a membership ends.

So will the Membership Status Rules just not do what we are trying to, or...

Thank you!

Dave Greenberg · October 04, 2010, 09:39:25 am

Status rules might work - but hard to really say w/o seeing more detailed outline of how you plan on using them. There's no built-in code to trigger emails based on status rule changes, and no built-in place to record that a given mail in your "schedule" has already been sent (you could add one or more custom membership field for that).

mdlueck · October 06, 2010, 10:27:34 am

Testing status rules, Civi seems to handle correctly when the date range for a particular Smart Group is the same beginning / ending: aka "day 5 rule" being "start date +4 through start date +4"

(sssiiigggghhhhh.....)

Seems the people working on the "application side" as opposed to me on the "infrastructure side" were trying to get Civi to do something that Civi is not capable of doing at this point. I apologize for the confusion.

I think the program is called FollowUpExpert, and basically the vision has been to replace FollowUpExpert with CiviMail.

(Link to FollowUpExpert website: http://www.xtreeme.com/followupxpert/ )

What we would need is cron scheduled emails to be sent out to Smart Groups, only if said Smart Group actually has members currently.

Example: Someone joins the org, on day 5 of their membership, they are suppose to receive the day 5 email. So configure a smart group to select out all of the day 5 members, and if > 0 is found, then send the canned email to said recipients.

I guess for now, someone can by hand do the click, click, click method to send out emails. Or stick with FollowUpExpert a little longer and figure out how to sync CiviMember with FollowUpExpert.

Where should I file a Req for new feature of "scheduled mailings"?

Dave Greenberg · October 06, 2010, 02:36:13 pm

If you're planning on either contributing code or sponsorship from your client to make "scheduled mailing" happen - then you can start with a blog post or spec on a wiki page.

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Author Topic: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership (Read 853 times)

mdlueck

Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership

Dave Greenberg

Re: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership

mdlueck

Re: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership

Dave Greenberg

Re: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership

mdlueck

Re: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership

Dave Greenberg

Re: Needing to send emails to members on certain days of their membership