CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Is there a way to send out member renewal reminders automatically?  Or do I need to sort on the expiring group periodically and send out a message manually?

Is it possible to change renewal reminders for an existing Membership Type?  When I edit a Membership Type, the renewal reminder fields (template, days in advance) are not enabled.

I'm running CiviCRM 2.03.

Thanks,
Alex.

Excuse me if this sounds rude, but you've got to be kidding.  In my case, I set values for Renewal Reminder Message and Renewal Reminder Day, and now the client wants to send them earlier, so I need to change them.  I have a couple hundred members, so what you're saying is that in order to do a simple thing like change the reminder time period I have to create a new membership type and then change the type for all the members that have that type?  That is some poor design.  What dates are set in stone?  What can't you simply go through and look at end dates in the update script, and if the difference between now (i.e. when the script is being run by cron) and the end date matches the defined interval, send the email and do the updating of the record?

Can I at least change the value for civicrm.membership_type.renewal_reminder_day directly in the database?  Or are there other fields that would also need to be changed?

Duly noted.  My apologies.  I guess it's just that I've done my own share of developing, and one thing I always try to do is make sure configurations are flexible enough that changes like this can be handled easily, whether it's a one field form or a much larger module.

Thanks.

I am looking into the same issue, and it is now April 2010 so I'm hoping some progress has been made since the last post. Does anyone know if it's possible to edit the renewal reminder message or renewal reminder day for a membership type once it hast been set? Thanks!

As of May 2010, you can change the reminder message, or select from several templates that you create.

Changing the reminder days, if your script MembershipUpdate.php script is currently running, will cause your reminders to get out of sync for a period of time, and certain members will not get an automated email, or some may be duplicate emails, depending on if you increase or decrease the number of days.

If you are just starting your configuration, and you have not sent out any membership reminders that are automated, and not yet setup your cron to run the script, changing the number of reminder days by doing a direct query on the DB should essentially have no effect, IMHO.  

Do others agree?

I don't actually need to do this, but shouldn't it be fairly simple to write a php script that finds all membership records of a certain type, and then resets the reminder date based on the membership end date and the new reminder days setting? It's a hack, but it would work.

I think the poster back in 2008 had a point - this seems like a very strange design to me. It's not like subtracting x number of days off a date is a expensive operation, why cache the values?

Since my client had a need to remind members more than once that their memberships were expiring / had expired, and since I messed up slightly during my data import of an existing membership database by inserting an empty reminder_date field, I did write a reminder_date update query which appears to have worked in conjunction with running UpdateMembershipRecord.php .

E.g. for certain types of members whose accounts end on sept 30th, 

Update 'drupal'.'civicrm_membership' set reminder date = '2010-08-30' where membership_type_id IN (1,2,3) and end_date = '2010-09-30'

Then run your .../sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/UpdateMembershipRecord.php?name=.......

It would be nice if there was simply an UpdateMembershipRecord.php url option that forced the reminder email out, even if there was no reminder_date, for grace and/or expired users.