CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

(I split this from the original topic because the potential solutions are a bit different...)

Our organization is made up of local chapters and then has a umbrella state organization above them that they all belong to. In fact part of their local dues goes to pay for there state dues. Can memberships be setup in such a manner that if I join one organization that I am automatically a member of a second organization?

CiviMember doesn't currently support this type of hierarchical membership. There has been some decent discussions and spec development toward "Multi-Organization Support" - which is quite related (link below) - but ideas are still on the drawing board.

That said, depending on how "automated" you need this to be, and how large the "sets" of local chapters and states are... you could potentially handle this with custom fields "Used for" membership - combined with the Smart Group functionality.

You could create a membership type for each local chapter, and use a State/Province type custom field to "mark" the state umbrella it belongs to. You could actually derive that from the address of the Chapter Organization that "owns" each membership - but I think if you want to do a search / have smart groups which contain members of each "umbrella state" - it will be easier to use a custom field.

Alternatively you could create a membership type for each State organization, and then use custom fields to assign the chapters. There could be a lot of setup here - but the advantage of this approach is that each state's membership type can have it's own option list for the "Local Chapter" custom field (since you can say that a given custom field is used for a specific membership type).

Allocating a portion of local dues to the state organization would need to be a manual accounting function. You can assign different "Contribution Types" with corresponding accounting codes to each membership type - so this may help w/ the accounting.

Discuss / requirements for multi-org support are here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Multi-Organization+Support+in+CiviCRM