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Teddy

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Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 07, 2008, 06:17:08 pm
I'm being told by my developer that we can't implement online membership renewal for members whose membership was created offline (either via manual entry in the backend or via data import). So, anyone who did not sign-up online cannot renew online.

Is this really valid?

Donald Lobo

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 07, 2008, 07:23:36 pm

you need to trust your developer a bit more :)

Yes, a lot of civicrm has been designed and implemented assuming online signups for things like events/contributions/memberships. Over the past few releases we've been enhancing the offline versions of those components and making them more powerful and close to the online signups.

We need to unify the two a bit more and allow things like the below

You can help by getting your developer to either figure out what needs to be done and do it, or sponsoring some work by the core team to get this done for 2.1

lobo
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Teddy

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 07, 2008, 07:35:53 pm
Donald,

Thanks for replying.

So far, the developer has been great, but I never trust one opinion solely. If I did, I might be left with a dysfunctional solution.

Client has existing members, and entering them all in manually to create the appearance of an "online" sign-up in order to allow online renewal seems counter-intuitive at best. I guess I don't get the logic of how the system can identify an offline sign-up vs. an online signup and why that affects renewals.

I'd love to sponsor new development for the new version, except I need it *now* for the current version (trusty developer already indicated that upgrading will be impossible because of all the modifications). I'm more than happy to sponsor new development to get this to work on the version we're using  :)

Teddy

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 07, 2008, 08:34:56 pm
Quote from: Donald Lobo on March 07, 2008, 07:23:36 pm

You can help by getting your developer to either figure out what needs to be done and do it, or sponsoring some work by the core team to get this done for 2.1


BTW, what is involved in 'sponsoring' for new development? Sorry if this is an oft asked/answered question...

Donald Lobo

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 07, 2008, 11:04:31 pm

1. good software practice discourages us from doing any development on a released version :) Sorry, all our work is always done on trunk and for the next release

2. here are some things we follow regarding work done by core team:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Consulting+Services+Agreement
http://civicrm.org/node/115

For issues like the below which are good to have in core, the large number of hours requirement is waived :)

lobo
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Donald Lobo

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 07, 2008, 11:56:55 pm
Quote from: Teddy on March 07, 2008, 07:35:53 pm
Client has existing members, and entering them all in manually to create the appearance of an "online" sign-up in order to allow online renewal seems counter-intuitive at best. I guess I don't get the logic of how the system can identify an offline sign-up vs. an online signup and why that affects renewals.

An online signup has *lots* more information than an offline signup. An online signup is associated with a contribition which is associated with a contribution page, which is the frontend form we use

An offline signup did not have any of that for 1.9, and the option to create a contribution was introduced in 2.0. The main missing piece here now is the contribution page id (which is needed to display a renew link)

So overall, we are getting closer to offline and online being one and the same. there are a few holes we need to fill in a future 2.x release. Again all this needs to be optional, since different orgs have different needs / criteria etc

lobo
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Teddy

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 08, 2008, 03:57:33 am
Quote from: Donald Lobo on March 07, 2008, 11:56:55 pm
So overall, we are getting closer to offline and online being one and the same. there are a few holes we need to fill in a future 2.x release. Again all this needs to be optional, since different orgs have different needs / criteria etc

Ha! They should all have the same needs my client does! :)

Teddy

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 08, 2008, 03:58:49 am
Quote from: Donald Lobo on March 07, 2008, 11:04:31 pm

1. good software practice discourages us from doing any development on a released version :) Sorry, all our work is always done on trunk and for the next release

2. here are some things we follow regarding work done by core team:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Consulting+Services+Agreement
http://civicrm.org/node/115

For issues like the below which are good to have in core, the large number of hours requirement is waived :)

lobo

Thanks - I'll check those documents out this weekend.

petednz

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 08, 2008, 07:37:26 pm
Pete from NZ here. If I read this right, then I have just learnt that the 4,000 or so existing members we have recently imported will not be able to use the function of online 'renewing'. If that is so then I am slight gobsmacked  (oh i see there is a smiley for this :o ) that we hadn't picked this up before, eg from documentation about 'importing' members (never noticed it and can't see it on a quick search).
And there I was just about to push Chris in to implementing the online join/renew pages so that the manual renewing of existing members task could be lifted off the office team.
I hope I am just missing a piece of the puzzle in terms of understanding this, rather than finding out that a piece of the puzzle isn't there. If the latter, then yes, we'll need to (help) find a solution.
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Donald Lobo

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 08, 2008, 08:31:43 pm

An online membership has 3 additional records:

a. a contribution record
b. a membership_payment record which links the contribution and membership
c. a contribution page record which links a contributon to the page which collected that contribution (and which renew will also use)

We use these 3 records to figure out if we can or cannot display a renew link.

Membership import does not create any of the above record. Offline membership in 2.0 can potentially create a contribution and membership_payment record

For your 4000 or so existing members, i would figure out what contribution page to send them to for renewal and create one or more of that (which gives u record c above)

You can then manually create 4000 records for a and b above. For accounting sake you might want to keep all the contribution amounts as 0 (unless u have transaction info u can add), but this will introduce 4000 additional contributions to the system (or more if you are going to go back a few years)

so overall the situation is not as bad as it seems :)

lobo


lobo
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petednz

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 08, 2008, 09:12:34 pm
cheers lobo - and I am sure Chris will understand that "manually creating 4000 records for a and b above" will not mean any person actually has to do anything 4000 times  ;)
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Dave Greenberg

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 10, 2008, 07:14:06 pm
This thread was bugging me so I did some testing and discovered that there is NO PROBLEM with using an Online Membership Signup and Renewal page to renew  memberships created "offline" (either via import OR via admin data entry).

The only "hitch" is that the "Contact Dashboard" does not offer a "Renew" link for these memberships. This is because we don't (yet) have any way to figure out which online contribution page to refer them to when there is no contribution page associated with their original membership signup.

However, organizations can certainly provide (offline) members with a link to an existing online membership signup/renewal form via email, posting on website etc. (It can be part of the message template used by the UpdateMembership script when it notifies members that it's time to renew.) These members will see there existing membership info displayed on the form - the same as "online created members".
Update
I added an offline membership for Jane Volunteer on the Drupal demo.

If you login to the demo (http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org) using "her"  user login...
User = volunteer
PW = volunteer

... and then navigate to the membership signup and renewal page at:
http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=2

... you'll see that the renewal case is handled properly.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2008, 10:02:58 am by Dave Greenberg »
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petednz

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 10, 2008, 07:18:24 pm
Your a hero Dave - will put the handbrake on chris till we have tested and verified. cheers
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Teddy

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 10, 2008, 07:35:32 pm
Thanks for the input everyone.

tonyg

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Re: Online renewal (though account was created 'offline')
March 21, 2008, 12:16:53 pm
Hi Dave. I think I'm confused but based on your post and example, it sounds like for someone to renew "online" from a "offline" membership entry, they must be logged in?

I researched this a bit and on the issue tracker, i found this http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-1027 In the second paragraph in parentheses, it seems like this is unclear.  Could you clarify this for me?


Thanks!
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