CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This is an interesting idea --
I don't think there's an obvious way to accomplish this within the existing structure. What would be cool is if the flexibility found within the CiviEvent price set tool was replicated for CiviMember. Right now you choose your membership option from a single list -- radio buttons, so you can't choose more than one option. But it would be cool if you could setup multiple sets of membership options.

Here are some thoughts on a workaround --

If the cost to join each division is the same across the board, then you could do something like this:

In the membership options, have four options:
1) Standard membership
2) Standard + 1 division
3) Standard + 2 divisions
4) Standard + 3 divisions

Then create custom fields/profile to capture the specific divisions the user wants to join. You can use smart groups to get a list of your division memberships.

The biggest downside of this structure is that you're going to split your "standard membership" category into four categories. If you want to capture how many current members are in your standard membership, you would have to grab all four categories. This also will be problematic for ongoing renewals. If someone shifts from +3 divisions to +2, they will not actually renew their membership, but will join under a different category. Not a huge deal, but you lose some of the data continuity.

As a slight alternative, CiviCRM has the flexibility to have multiple membership-holding organizations. So you could create create membership options for your parent organization, and then create membership types for each of your divisions. While you can put multiple membership type options on a single contribution form, you still are stuck with the inability to actually select multiple options. So you'd need to direct your members to go through the form multiple times, once for the parent org membership, and then for whatever divisions they're also joining.


This brings up a good point --
I suspect a lot of organizations have membership structures where the user may select multiple options. Rather than having the membership option list as radio buttons, it would be great if it was checkboxes (or if in the contrib config you had a choice one way or the other). The code would need to be altered to accommodate multiple member record inserts.

This is an issue that I've struggled with too. The multiple options route is fine until you have many different membership levels and several uplifts. Means that you end up having a huge number of options.

Awhile back I detailed some CiviContribute / CiviMember membership renewal payment process requirements here http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviContribute+++CiviMember+membership+renewal+payment+process+requirements. This also discussed in this thread http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,932.msg3891.html#msg3891.

I understand that CiviMember is scheduled to be worked on in a later release. Would be good to get this addresed!