convert contacts to CiviMember

[triplehenry]

Is there a simpler and faster way of converting all the contacts to Civimembers other than updating the contacts one at a time?  It would even be better if they become a civimember automatically when they register for an event or if they create an account on the drupal site but not sure if that is possible or not. 

Thanks,
Henry

[Donald Lobo]

Currently there is no automated way of doing so. You will need to write a custom cron script to do the needful and/or write a drupal/civicrm hook to intercept and make a member at the right time.

You can check for folks our our professional services page at http://civicrm.org/professional/

thanx

lobo

[yopyop]

Hi - I just want to say that I went through this about a week ago (add existing contacts to CiviMember). It took me a while to 'get it' - but it looks like CiviMember and CiviCRM contact entries are seperate - you can't just give records a membership like you can give them Group or a Tag. There is a separate Import and Export for CiviMember and normal CiviCRM contacts.

Here is a rough overview - I'm sure I'm not getting the details completely here, but in essence you want to export a CiviMember-set contact through the CiviMember screen, by doing a find, and then an 'export'.

Import into your spreadsheet program and study the fields in the export. You will want to replicate this format for records - as you'll see how the records are stored for CiviMember.

Export regular CiviCRM contact by normal means. You can eliminate everything but their First, Last and email address, and add columns of data from the CiviMember export to represent the membership status.

hope that helps. good luck..

[Dave Greenberg]

Or - to summarize these steps:

1. Export the all (or a subset) of your contact records. You can use "export selected fields" to only output the Internal Contact ID and Name fields.

2. Export a sample membership record from CiviMember >> Find Members

3. Add the membership type, start and end date columns to your Contact Export using Excel or other spreadsheet program.

4. Now import the memberships for your contacts from CiviMember >> Import Members, using the Internal Contact ID as the "match to contacts" field.