CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

(1) One of the features we like about CiviMember is its ability to send membership renewal reminders.  However, unlike the End Date, the Reminder Date is not set automatically after import.  It can't be imported as there is no field mapping defined.  That said, if I retrieve a membership record (after import) for edit and save it without making any changes, the Reminder Date is then set. 
QUESTION: How can I set the reminder date in batch (a bit tedious if I have to manually edit the record one by one)?

This seems like a "missing feature" in import memberships. :-(  A few possible "solutions":
- if you have PHP programming resources, might not be too hard to add the call to set the reminder date to the import code and contribute this as a patch
- you could write a .sql script to update the db directly - although not sure how hard it would be to get MySQL to calculate correct reminder date for each record based on it's end date (obviously if all end dates in your import set are the same - this is easy). The column in the DB is civicrm_membership.reminder_date. If you create such a script - please post it back here so others can potentially make use of it.

Going forward (2.2+), I think we can add support for the Reminder Date field in Membership Profiles so it can be updated via "Batch Update Memberships"

(2) Can someone please explain to me the logic of the membership update script (the one run as cron job) with regard to reminder sending?  It seems that the script simply checks if the Reminder Date is blank, if it is not and if the date is on or before the system date then a reminder will be sent and the field blanked.  Is that correct?

Pretty much - the script first calls a function which checks that there is a valid email address for the contact, not ON HOLD and the DO NOT EMAIL flag isn't set. I think current rev also checks that contact isn't Deceased.

(3) Membership history: CiviMember does not keep track of each renewal, is that true?  How can we track renewal history?

Renewals are tracked via creation of a record in civicrm_membership_log - which is intended to provide an ongoing history of the membership. This data is not currently exposed in the UI - but a cool community contribution would be to create a simple listing page for this linked to the View Membership screen :-)

(2) Just one more question: for the reminder date check, the script sees if the date is ON OR BEFORE the system date, correct.  That means, if I were to write a batch update after importing the membership record, I can't just blindly set the reminder date base on the end date for otherwise CiviCRM will send a reminder to those whose membership has long expired.

True statement. You'll want to filter your update with an appropriate range for civicrm_membership.end_date

(4) NEW QUESTION: are there mail merge tokens for membership data?  It would be nice if the reminder can contact member specific information, such as End Date.  I understand that we can say in the body of the reminder that his/her membership will expire in {period} base on the rule we set up but it will make more of an impression if the exact expiry date are shown.

Currently, tokens are NOT available for membership properties. In 2.2, we are adding a "token hook" mechanism that will allow folks to add tokens. We'll probably deliver a sample implementation specifically for membership properties with the release. :-)

I have fixed the membership import routines to include Reminder Date in the field mappings.  This is a simple fix and there is no processing logic other than the basic format checks as provided by CiviCRM.

I hope someone will find this useful.

The attached PDF is actually a zip file.  Please rename it to CRM.zip after download.