How to find how many members in previous years?

[Robyn]

Hi

I hope I'm not missing something really obvious..but I want to find out accurately (and not manually!) how many members we had say 3 years ago (its to do with a new voting rule the Board has implemented)

Its fine for members who have a start and a finish date but what about people who renew where the start and finish dates are well outside the target year?

I did think of using the payment of member dues as a proxy but that payment need not actually occur in the actual period either..

thanks for any suggestions

[DamonKirkpatrick]

That seems like a tough one to come up with in one report.  Have you thought about using activity search for any membership related activities during the target period?  This certainly wouldn't give you everything but I would imagine that the bulk of members would have at least one membership related activity (status change, renewal, signup, etc.) during the period in question.  I think you'd still have to do some filtering beyond that but it may give you a pretty good start. 

[CityClub]

I have a similar situation. For internal tracking purposes, we'd like to know how many members we had in a given year, quarter, month, etc. To do it as you go is okay if you, say, pull a simple list of current members on the last day of every month or something. The problem is to figure it out retroactively.

I haven't found any built in functionality to do this either. My thought was maybe to pull everyone with a start date in the time frame you're looking and then everyone with an end date in the time frame you're looking for and then remove duplicates. That would theoretically get everyone who was current in the given time frame.

It's not the best solution and it somewhat time consuming and manual, but I think it might work.

[The Doctor]

I also need this functionality. It seems like an OBVIOUS need for a member organization.

[CiviTeacher.com]

Your CiviCRM's data changes daily, perhaps hourly.   It is in a constant state of change.   Members join and renew, and sometimes have their dates manually corrected by staff.  This is a data archival/history issue greater than CiviCRM alone.   Before we make suggestions at CiviCRM, let's get some perspective.  Does our bank website allow you to search for, any particular date in the past, what your balance was on that particular date?   What about a particular HOUR on that particular date?  No, that would be a huge amount of effort.  My bank statement tells me what my balance was every Monday, though.  This is a billion dollar corporation.

So back to your website.  Do you keep a copy of your database from specific days in the past year, like the first of every month?  Probably not.   Then the report you want which is basically "on date X in the past, what did our Member Dashboard look like?" doesn't seem possible.   CiviCRM doesn't have a dial like a time machine that "turns back time" and gets you the information you want.

So what now?

GOOD NEWS.  Organization I've worked for configure the Membership Report - Summary to be sent on the first of each month to email address(es) of your choice.  Now you have a permanent record of, say, what your "membership snapshot" looks like on the first of every month.

Sending reports is now configurable as part of scheduled jobs.
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/Managing+Scheduled+Jobs