CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Folks,

A number of our members change their membership type from one year to the next. For example junior rugby players change to colts and colts change to seniors and they are different membership types with different payments. This leaves us with a number of individuals with more than one membership, one expired and the new one being current.  These prior year expired memberships distorted the membership information so in order to distinguish them from others I changed their status to 'cancelled'. This caused a Renewal Notice to be sent to those individuals who had two membership types, one current and one cancelled.

Is this the expected behaviour? If not how should I manage this set of circumstances?

Regards
Martin Fuggle

Martin
On the particular behaviour don't know the answer (but agree it isn't helpful). I have certainly had a few embarrasing situations where I have manual changed a bunch of records (particularly killing off "pending" applications that aren't going anywhere) only to have some embarrasing emails go out. I've come round to the practice, if I'm doing this, of turning emails off briefly (particularly if I then run the membership update cron script) - its in with the "outgoing mail settings" in Admin. The upside is that no embarrasing emails get sent - the downside is obviously that any genuine emails that need to go at the same time don't either. I can get away with this on a fairly low volume site (we have a few hundred members), but you may not be able to.

As Peter says there is now an upsell route so you can, when doing renewals at the back end at least, "renew" people to the next category (we are a sports club with age memberships like yours). This does reduce the risk of chasing "expired" memberships but there are still cases where (a)  someone has signed up online for a new membership with associated contribution so you have two records that you cannot mark as linked or (b) someone has gone from a family membership (inherited from household) to personal or visa versa. You cannot explicitly mark these as linked and exclude them from chasing and reporting.

However, you can create a diferent expired status (expired is different to cancelled, and having multiple expired statuses does not trigger emails in the same away). If you have a separate "Moved Membership" status you can exclude it from (some) reports and lists of people to chase for membership. It doesn't trigger emails in the same away (its the equivalent of moving from "grace" to "expired") and makes more sense if people can see their own records.

Hope that helps.
Ed