CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'll try to clarify things a bit in terms of expected functionality. 4.2 is a transition between two different mechanisms for sending renewal reminders - which I think is adding to the confusion, and the documentation is not complete and evidently has some inaccuracies.

1. Scheduled Reminders for memberships - The doc is incorrect. Reminders are triggered relative to membership type and date points (e.g. 30 days prior to end date, etc.). There is currently no support for reminders based on membership status. I do think the current feature set should cover the majority of use cases - but if you have a use case that isn't covered, we can discuss options / work-arounds.

2. Scheduled Jobs
2.1 Update Membership Statuses and Send Renewal Reminders - This job will continue to be used to keep membership statuses updated (in 4.2 and going forward). In 4.2 it ALSO can send a single membership renewal reminder for membership types that are configured with the deprecated Renewal Reminder Days field AND a Renewal Reminder template. If the membership record has a reminder_date set and that membership type has a reminder template - a reminder s/b sent on or after reminder_date.

In 4.3 this job title is changed to Update Membership Statuses and the reminder functionality is removed.

2.2 Send Scheduled Reminders - This job must be run in order to trigger sending of configured Scheduled Reminders for memberships. It does NOT look at reminder_date field in membership records, but rather checks for the Scheduled Reminder criteria. It logs reminders sent to prevent duplicate reminders, except those which aren't specifically configured in 'Repeat' criteria.

If you've set this up and run 'send_reminders' job and reminders are not being generated, I would check the apache and CiviCRM logs to see if a useful error is being reported.

NOTE: One 'tricky' thing on send_reminders is that there is a 'window' (I think 1-2 days) for matching the reminder criteria (to prevent really stale reminders from going out). Example - a reminder is scheduled for 30 days before Membership End Date. If the job is run 30 or 29 days before a member's end date, the reminder should go out. However if job is not run until 25 days prior to that membership's end date, the reminder is not triggered.

If you're finding

Hey Dave,

Guess I am still trying to grasp this totally.  Just so we are clear and please correct me when I am wrong:

1. No reminder for membership renewal is sent based on membership status, therefore it with only send a reminder based on the remaining days criteria till expiration and will never send a reminder beyond the date of expiration nor will it send one if the days remaining is less than 1 day variance of the X days to send the reminder (29 days left on a 30 day reminder it will send but will not send one if 31 days or 28 days remain)

2. The Scheduled job "Update Membership Statuses" in 4.3 and beyond is solely for the purpose of updating membership status based on completion of renewal. It therefore relies on the Scheduled Reminders for Memberships job to run post it's run else the reminder may never be sent.

Is that correct?

Thanks.

Also, I would argue that the case where you want a reminder to be sent based on status is of equal importance in that some of us send out a reminder after the expiration of a membership in addition to before expiration including those who haven't renewed in one whole membership cycle as a means to draw constituents back into the membership.  Might be worth blogging about to get a feel if others feel the same as me.  Currently, we don't use the reminder feature because of this very reason.  The Do Not Email opt-out would serve as the control mechanism to flood with reminders and even the repeat reminder could do a + days post expiration. Say hey your membership expired 30 days ago, might want to renew it so you don't lose whatever benefits you had.  Just my two cents worth.

OK now it makes sense. Thanks for clarifying things. This really helped to understand clearly what does what and based on what criteria.  I have to say I like that design as it accommodates many scenarios. Well done sir and team. As always thank you for taking the time to explain it all.

So here is something interesting, that may have been silly on my part.
I wanted to have a different renewal mail template for members who were expired vs. haven't expired yet. And the way I did that was by scheduling two different reminders, one for 2 months before expiration, the other for the day of expiration. Well, neither one has been sending out for days.

Membership reminders interfere with each other, don't they? I disabled one of the two reminders and all the renewals went out straightaway. I will have to accomplish this through smarty conditionals in my mail template, wont I?


(Also, I think it's super helpful that the process is generating an activity record to let me know that mails are sending out.)

zaal@ohava

I think the use case you have described is reasonable and what I expected was possible with these new scheduled reminders? Also, we should definitely be able to use the two tokens you have mentioned, membership type and end date - as these are available to select via insert token.

Also, could you please explain where you are able to see the activity record in order to know what emails are being sent? There does not seem to be any report available, and I cannot see any activity recorded under the Sender's activity tab either? Is this where you meant?

When I execute the Scheduled reminders sender (Daily) Job manually, it says Success (1). However it does not say how many emails have been sent or report on activity in the same way that the Membership Status Job does. I have a feeling that no emails are being sent as yet.

Many thanks if you or Yashodha Chaku can clarify.

Hi I have 4.2 installed and have a quick question.

Do cron jobs have to be set up for reminder emails to be sent?  I read the documentation and gather that cron jobs do need to be sent, but I'd appreciate clarification.  So far receipt and confirmation emails are working just fine.

If so, I'll have to ask my host to set it up.

Thanks in advance for your response.
CiviRocks!

Thanks for the confirmation and the link.  I'm going to pass it on to my host.

CiviRocks!

Yashoda,

Any tips on how to troubleshoot a smarty error in a template? It is preventing the scheduled reminder from being sent at all.

The error message being shown is not verbose and contains no clues whatsoever. I have a thread about it here if you want to take a look.

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,27036.msg115884.html

Many thanks in advance.