CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're trying to move to CiviCRM, and I see there are the typical member types, like General, Student and Lifetime.

We also have Membership levels that are based on a range of amounts, which might offer some special privileges, like the following:

$25 to $49 - Student/Senior
$50 to $99 - Subscribing
$100 to $249 - Sustaining
$250 to $999 - Patron Circle
$1000 to $4999 - Silver Circle
$5000+ - Gold circle

What I would expect to happen is when one joins online or is entered manually, Civi would set that Level based on the amount recorded. And also update that level automatically based when a membership is updated.

Is that what price sets are for and how they behave? Should I be thinking the above is more suited to a "contribution", or can/should it work as a membership in the fashion mentioned above.

I have to admit it's confusing with so many ways to give, and whether it is tied to a membership or not. appreciate any advice.

Thanks,
Doug

If you need to work out of the box - couple of options that might work for you.
Assuming you want these to confer 'status' for a fixed period then you need to work with Memberships not Contributions.
You can set up the Memberships as above, explain the range of $ in the pre-text and then people have to enter the 'contribution amount' to be in the right range to get the membership they want.
Other route to try would be to just have a single membership - let people enter whatever amount the want to - and then build some Smart Groups from the 'amount donated' and call those all the various names above.
hope one of those helps, or the custom approach as per kurund

Btw, if I did build smart groups based on the dollar amounts above, could an email be triggered informing them of their new status and included benefits?

Not out of the box that I know of. We have started using Drupal Rules to do some such activities so that might be one route - otherwise you are back to some customisation in which case you may find a way to get the Memberships set up exactly as you want.