Author Topic: Understanding Membership Types (Read 1911 times)

organicathlete · December 01, 2007, 08:12:13 pm

Hi,
From the documentation (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Membership+Types):

Quote

Every membership type requires an associated Organization contact
Create an Organizational Contact for each membership "organization" you want to offer membership in. This could include chapters (California Chapter, Western Division), subject groups (Eagles group, Bears group) or other labels you wish to use to differentiate memberships.

I was wondering what the functional signifcance of this was. Is there a relationship created between the contact and that organization?

-Bradley

Denver Dave · December 01, 2007, 09:32:29 pm

Hi organicathlete

Thank you for your question. I have on my list to start looking into the membership module. Be sure to post what you find out.

Perhaps you would be interested in the CiviCRM study group?
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1490.0.html

chrism · December 02, 2007, 02:15:36 am

A membership has to be a membership *to* a specific organization. In the simplest case, in which you are a single organization that has individual members, you would create one organization contact for your home organization and then grant memberships to individual contacts.

The CiviCRM schema is designed to be very flexible though, so you can expand the use of organizations in a few ways:
a) create multiple organizations that other contacts can be members of (e.g. many chapter organizations)
b) enter organization contacts without memberships just to track other kinds of relationships and interaction history (e.g. funding agencies)
c) allow organizations to be members of other organizations (e.g. business memberships)

The part that I first puzzled about was the step of needing to create an organization contact for "yourself", and that this entry then exists without any special status except membership relationships.

lcdweb · December 03, 2007, 06:24:54 am

chrism's outline is excellent.

The confusing part, as was stated, is that the organization contact type holds BOTH the "special" organization(s) which holds membership (whatever association, etc. you are representing), AND all organizations (e.g. companies) that are members or contacts of that special organization.

So first create an organization record for your organization, e.g. ABC Association. When you create a membership type, you then associate that membership type with ABC Association. When an individual/organization/household becomes a member using that membership type, they are joining that "special" organization -- ABC Association.

You can have multiple special organizations, as was indicated, for a parent organization and then daughter chapters, for instance. And you create membership types specific to each "special" organization.

When you apply a membership to a contact, it does NOT create a relationship to the special organization. It creates a membership to the special organization. Relationships are defined separately, and can control both hierarchal and peer relationships between contact types.

-Brian

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Author Topic: Understanding Membership Types (Read 1911 times)

organicathlete

Understanding Membership Types

Denver Dave

Re: Understanding Membership Types

chrism

Re: Understanding Membership Types

lcdweb

Re: Understanding Membership Types