CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

This is my first post and I am a new user of CiviCRM. I would like to send out an email to several folks who tried to join our organization, however their membership is stalled at "Pending."

Within my email I would like to include the date that they tried to join and assume I can use a token for this, "Our records indicate you applied for membership on {token}..."

I do not see any token options within the native set with Civi, however I did find a thread requesting help with a similar issue (https://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,21013.msg88225.html#msg88225) and this JIRA ticket (https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5746)

Both seem out of date.

Any advice?

Thanks.

Andrew,

Thanks for the reply. Yes, thank you I see that I can add the tokens {membership.end_date}, {membership.join_date} and {membership.start_date} in a Scheduled Reminder email.

As I mentioned I am new so I may not fully understand your recommendations. I hope you can tolerate my inexperience...

Scheduled Reminders would give you the right tokens, but there's no way to filter by membership status directly.  You could, however, create a smart group of contacts where the membership status is "pending", then create a scheduled reminder for a week or two after the join date and limit the recipients to members of the smart group.  That would then get you what you need, and you'd have the bonus of it automatically sending to folks.

Per your reply, I  searched for all those listed as members with a "Pending" status and created a group (actually two groups)

1. "Search" -> "Advanced Search" -> "Memberships" -> select "Individual" and "Pending" -> "Search"
1a. "Select All Records" -> "actions" -> "New Smart Group" -> "Go"
1b. Named and saved Smart Group
1c. "Done"

2. "Search" -> "Advanced Search" -> "Memberships" -> select "Individual" and "Pending" -> "Search"
2a. "Select All Records" -> "actions" -> "Add contacts to group" -> "Go"
2c. "Create new group" -> named/described group -> checked "Mailing List" -> "Add to Group"

I then went to "Administer" -> "Communications" -> "Scheduled Reminders." And see, as I do not have any reminders, I can "Add one."

However at this point I do not know what to do. After playing around a bit it looks like I can create a new automated message to be sent based on some activity, event, trigger. However, it looks like I can only schedule these to be sent out after the "Member Join Date" of "Member End Date." But now I am not sure if I can/should use the "Member Join Date?" Looking at my pending members records, I see a "Received Date" on the "Contributions" and "View Contribution" pages; A  "Start Date" and "End Date" under "View Membership" but nothing listed as the "join date." I ask, because if the "Member Join Date" is predicated with an actual membership going through, then will this date exist as the memberships are still pending? For example both the "Start Date" and "End Date" fields are empty/blank in the "View Membership".

The only date that is included in the record of a Pending member is on the "Contributions" tab, listed under "Received."


Also, you suggest, "limit the recipients to members of the smart group." In the "Schedule Reminders" screen I do not see (understand) how to limit the emails to just my smart group. I have selected "Entity" -> "Membership" -> "Individual" (leaving "auto renew options" blank. I selected "14" "days" "after "Membership Join Date". I also selected "Additional Recipients" = my new group of pending members. Does this mean that, by default, anyone who has a pending membership after 14 days will get this email, AND, all of the folks in my "Pending Members" group will get this?

Sorry if I am unclear - still learning, and thank you again for your help,
Patrick

Andrew,

Hey thanks anyway, I appreciate your time and effort. I do note that the "received" date is still included in the user record (see attachment) and suspect if I can find that in the db I can insert it into the rmail. Hmm, brand new to Civi and already have a project!?!?!?!

Thanks again,
Patrick

Although there is no membership join date for the people you want to email, they will have a membership signup activity.  The date of that activity isn't exposed for scheduled emails in 4.4.5 but will be in 4.5 and a simple tweak to the code should expose it in 4.4.5.  See http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,30793.msg132312.html#msg132312. 

If you have a test site and want to experiment with this, change line 78 in CRM/Core/BAO/ActionSchedule.php from this:

    $activityType = CRM_Core_PseudoConstant::activityType(FALSE) + CRM_Core_PseudoConstant::activityType(FALSE, TRUE);

to this:

    $activityType = CRM_Core_PseudoConstant::activityType(FALSE) + CRM_Core_PseudoConstant::activityType(TRUE, TRUE);