CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a suggestion for a possible improvement to the CiviMember renewal behavior, but I'm curious if other users' membership programs would have the same issues.

Currently, if someone renews their membership to my organization online, but selects a different membership rate (say they were a student before but now get the recent grad rate), CiviMember creates a whole new membership record, instead of updating the existing student level membership record.  While I didn't think this would matter much at first, I'm realizing it will make it more difficult to track membership history.  If someone was a member since 1999, but they switch membership levels, the record with the 1999 join date lapses and it looks like they haven't been a member very long.  Now, I can still look people up individually to see their history, but it would be much more difficult for us to print member join dates on the membership cards and renewal notices if that information is on a different membership record than the current membership. 

Maybe this has already been addressed since 1.9, but my suggestion would be that just like CiviMember updates the expiration date when someone renews, it would also update the membership type/level instead of creating a new record, IF the membership is for the same organization.  Are there cases where other groups use multiple memberships for the same organization?

You might want to add this feature to the CiviMember Phase 2 page. The last comment is on similar lines to your comment

We will probably work on phase 2 in a future 2.x release. If important to you, you might want to consider contributing code / resource towards phase 2

as a work around (ugly and hackish), You could potentially also do a custom search to get the join date of a member.

lobo

Dave,
peterd's issue might be related to that issue you and I worked through where the renewal function didn't grab the membership record id for the membership selected when creating the renewal, but seemed to randomly choose one the older records and renew them. This only happened when renewing an expired membership record as I recall. Here was the original post discussion: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2318.0.html

That was fixed and I ported it back into my installation at the time. Do you know offhand if the fix made it into 2.0.3? If so, that may fix the issue.

On the original post in this thread --
I agree that the join date field doesn't quite work in the current structure -- though it can have some value. It might be useful to know when someone "joined" a certain membership type, especially if they switched from one to the other. The start date generally is equivalent to the join date for rolling memberships, but for static periods, the start date is adjusted to fit the defined period start date. Which is just to say that the join date is a useful field in its current structure. But doesn't provide that "universal" join date value.

I've overcome this by creating a custom field for the individual with their join date. It's disconnected from the membership records so it's not dependent on changes or lapses with membership. Problem is that it must be managed manually, which can create problems.