Membership type and Membrship dues

[sewen]

Hi,

My issue refers to CiviMember.  We are a Chamber and have imported our members (busineeses) as organizations Contacts so that we can list their emplyees as individuals Contacts.  Now we want to set up membership dues.  Since Membership type has to be tied to an (1) organization, we set up another organization as the Chamber.  How do you generalize the membership type to all our members??  Do we set up a relationship between the member organization and the parent organization, i.e. "organization parent" and "organization sibling (or child)"?? Then can we have all or members use that membership type.

Am I making this more complex then necessary??  I just want to allow our member businesses/organizations to pay dues online.

Thanks.

[Dave Greenberg]

If I understand your requirements, you've done the right thing by setting up "the Chamber" as an organization and creating a Membership type where the "Membership Organization" is "the Chamber".  Let's say you called this "Chamber Business Membership"...

You've said the the members are businesses (which you've imported as organization contacts) - so you "just" need to assign this membership type to each of these contacts - you don't need to make an additional "relationship".

However, IF you want the Individual employees to be "covered" by the business membership - then you would also set a "Relationship Type" in your Membership Type setup ("Employee of"). Then, employees of the business members would also be "granted" a membership automatically.

HOWEVER, paying dues online is a bit dicey for "organization members" - because:
- The most reliable way to 'match' members to contacts when they're using an online signup/renewal form is if they are logged in as a CMS (Drupal/Joomla) user. However, users are generally Individuals.
- For non-authenticated signups, CiviMember needs a way to "match" memberships to contacts - and for organizations we currently ONLY do this based on Organization Name - which is not too accurate/reliable.

We expect to be doing some work in the coming months to make things a bit more flexible in this regard - but for now you might consider a slightly different setup where you have a person who is the "responsible party" for each business membership. With this approach, you could setup the Membership Type so that the relationship extends from the responsible party (individual) - who is the direct member - to the business they represent via a new Relationship Type which you create.

[sewen]

Hi David,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Early on when I import businesses as Organization Contacts I have typically been sneaking the owners name in the organizations Nickname field.  Lately, I have been importing the businesses as Organization Contacts and the owners name as a relationship of Company Employee.  It makes sense that I create a new set of relationships called "Company Owner" and "Company owned by" , and do the initial import with that relationship.  Then import additional employees with the normal "employer", "employee" relationship.

Then I could setup the owner as the membership payee?

Thanks.

[Dave Greenberg]

Yes - i think that approach will work nicely. You would then assign your 'Company Owner' <-> 'Company Owned By' relationship type as the "Relationship Type" which extends your Membership Type.

You should play with this manually w/ a few records to make sure you have the directionality set correctly. The expected behavior is that if you sign up a Company Owner (individual contact) as a Member - when you view the associated "Company" contact record - the Membership tab should show a read-only membership that has been automatically assigned. If it's not working as expected, try switching the direction of the Relationship Type you've assigned for the Membership Type (I think you'll have to delete and create a new Membership Type - which is why I'm encouraging you to make sure it's working as you want prior to doing much data entry/import.)

[sewen]

Hi David,

Again thanks for the quick reply.

One more question on this line of thought.  Our Members are grouped by categories, i.e. accommodations, restaurant, family dining, entertainment, etc.  and are displayed on the web site by category (at least one  way).  Some members want to be listed under several (as many categories as they can) categories, i.e. accommodation, bed&breakfast. 

I was going to again use a field we wouldn't normally use in the member's/contact's record, i.e. Sic or nickname to hold this information, but I found out Sic was too short, and I was going to use Nickname for something else.  It looks like a custom field is the best, or should I use Groups or Tags. 

We have about 140 categories that need to be assigned, 1- to let say 5 per member (we have 500 members).

Thanks.

[Dave Greenberg]

Tags are probably the most straightforward way to categorize contacts - especially since (it sounds like) you don't need a hierarchy of categories. 140 tags might be a bit clunky in the interface for assigning them - each tag will be a checkbox on the View / Edit tags tab for a given contact. But otherwise it should work nicely.

Again - try it out a bit first, and focus on operations you want to take relative to the categories (searching in the built-in search interfaces, using a profile for public searchable directory, registration/signup form(s), etc.).

[sewen]

Hi David,

Unfortunately, I did forget that some of the categories do cascade (heiracrchy), i.e. accommodations, hotels, motels, camp sites, etc.  I'll have to find out how important this is.

Thanks.

[ds505]

The ability to link memberships and contributions to Organizations through the Online Contribution pages would be great. It looks like someone recently filed an issue here: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2226

[lcdweb]

Just wanted to add my comments on this thread --
From my perspective, the best way to address this issue would be to have the ability to select a "primary contact" within the organization's record. It could be simply a drop down populated from whatever employer/employee relationships currently exist. That designated primary contact would then have the ability to process membership transactions on behalf of the organization.

I think it's important that such designation be controlled from the organization, not the individual. Should the individual move to a new company, you don't want that designation to necessarily follow them. And you would want to know that the organization needs a new primary contact identified.

In my case, the workarounds in this thread don't work because all individuals receive membership status by virtue of their employee relationship to the company. The membership record must be created in the organization so that the relationship field replicates the membership down to the individuals. Fortunately, we're pretty new to online payments so it's not a big issue at this point.

-Brian

[Laryn]

...but for now you might consider a slightly different setup where you have a person who is the "responsible party" for each business membership. With this approach, you could setup the Membership Type so that the relationship extends from the responsible party (individual) - who is the direct member - to the business they represent via a new Relationship Type which you create.

Would this type of set-up allow other individuals to be sub-members of the organization? It sounds like we'd have an organizational 'admin' ("the responsible party") who could manage the subscription, and then other individuals could be regular users that are covered by the organizations membership fee?

[Dave Greenberg]

You can't "automatically" extend a membership from an individual to an organization and then to other individuals related to that organization. So you'd have to set this up with some manual processing (or custom coding)...

One approach might be:

• An individual signs up / pays for membership for their organization using a regular Online Contribution page which includes a profile with custom contribution fields for selecting a membership type and filling in organization information. The profile also adds them to "Pending Approval" group.
• A staff person in your organization reviews the submitted contribution - and assuming things are ok adds the Organization and Membership for the Organization in the back-end.
• Other individuals who are "employees of" the member organization could potentially signup via a separate Profile form which includes the "Current Employer" field (and creates the Employee/Employer relationship for them).

[ClayWhipkey]

• Other individuals who are "employees of" the member organization could potentially signup via a separate Profile form which includes the "Current Employer" field (and creates the Employee/Employer relationship for them).

Dave, That is exactly what I want to do.  I'm not finding an obvious way to present this in an individual profile signup form.  We want to allow individual users to signup on the site and select an existing member organization to be related to, and also possibly select the relationship type (employee, volunteer, lead representative, etc.).  Is there a way to do that on the profile form?

[Laryn]

We've decided to just create sub-accounts off of an individual (the main contact from that organization). One question I just thought of...what happens if a sub-account member (who is getting their membership via the main contact) tries to renew? Does it update the main contact's membership?

[Dave Greenberg]

I'm not sure how this will behave :-( - but my guess is that it will create a new separate membership for that person. You'll need to run some tests with your data...

[Dave Greenberg]

Dave, That is exactly what I want to do.  I'm not finding an obvious way to present this in an individual profile signup form.  We want to allow individual users to signup on the site and select an existing member organization to be related to, and also possibly select the relationship type (employee, volunteer, lead representative, etc.).  Is there a way to do that on the profile form?

The closest to the above that you can get with existing functionality is to add "Current Employer" as a profile field. The individual will need to type in the organization name (no "select" is available) - and CiviCRM will attempt to find a matching Organization contact record (exact name match). If found, it will create the employee-employer relationship with the existing organization. Otherwise, it creates a new organization contact record.

You can see an example here:
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/profile/edit?gid=1&reset=1

(if you're logged in, it will pull data for the demo user)

Otherwise - you'll need to build this as a separate module using the APIs or talk to us about contributing an enhancement to profiles that would allow something like you've described.