CiviCRM

Our primary database for both member communication and tracking membership dues uses the CiviCRM software and is located at: https://outreach.mayfirst.org/.

A general CiviCRM users manual is available. This page provides limited information that is highly specific to our instance.

Entities

In CiviCRM, there are several entities:

  • Contacts - Each member of May First has one contact record that represents their membership.

    If they are an individual member, it’s a Contact record of the type “Individual.” If it’s an organization, it’s a contact record of the type “Organization”. The only difference between an individual member and an organization member is that organization members get two votes.

    There are also many contact records in the database that are not members. They may be people who have registered for one of our webinars, former members, individuals related to members (see relationships below) etc.

  • Relationships - One contact record can have one or more relationships to other contact records. Each relationship can have a “type”. The two main relationship types we use are:

    • Membership Admin Contact: these contact records get the renewal reminder email and have the privilege of editing their membership record to add new resources or change who the related contacts are.

    • Membership contact: these contacts receive membership email announcements and voting tokens.

    Note: An individual membership contact can have a relationship to itself. All member contacts must have at least one Membership Admin contact so we can notify them when their membership expires.

    Another Note: Why do we have to create both a “Membership Admin Contact” and a “Membership contact” relationship? Answer: Our membership mailings only go to the “Member Contact” relationships.

    Also, because at any time we may delete the “Membership Admin Contact” relationship because they contact no longer wants to receive billing information, but we still want them associated with the memberhsip.

  • Memberships - A contact that is a member must have at least one membership listed in the Membership tab. There are only two types of memberships:

    • Annual: pay dues once a year
    • Monthly: pay dues every month. Only members paying in USD can pay monthly and they must pay via credit card or Paypal with the recurring option turned on so we don’t have to process monthly checks by hand.

  • Contributions - When a member pays their membership dues, a contribution record is automatically created in the database and their membership record end date is advanced either by one month or one year depending on their membership type.

Entities in relation to the control panel

We have two systems that track members: The CiviCRM database and the Control panel.

We link the two using the member_id in the control panel and the external_identifier in CiviCRM. If the member_id in the control panel is “1234”, the corresponding contact in CiviCRM would have an external_identifier of “member:1234”.

Who do we contact about a membership?

A contact record may have contact information associated with it (an email address, a postal address, etc).

For contacts with a membership:

  • The postal address is used to tell us the geographic distribution of our membership. But we never send anything by postal mail.

  • We only send email or SMS messages to “Member Admin Contacts” (billing reminders) or “Member Contacts” (all other membership announcements) of members. We never send email to the member contact itself (see below for an exception).

  • Individual members have a “Member Admin Contact” and “Member Contact” relationship to themselves. In this case, we do in practice send an email or SMS to the member contact, but only because of it’s relationship.

Some organizations offer a generic email like bills@myorg.org that is not associated with a name. Our practice is to create a contact with the first name “Bills” and last name “Myorg” (or something to that effect) with the given email address and make that contact a “Member Admin Contact” and “Member Contact” for the organization.

USD vs MXN members

A membership can be coded to pay in MXN or USD. MXN membership are administratively handled by Primero de Maya/Enlace Popular coop.

Note: A contact record can also be coded as MXN or USD. This should probably be removed because it’s the membershp record that counts.

Note again: A contact record can also be coded to prefer Spanish over English. This setting controls what language their communications is sent in, but has no relationship to the currency the use to pay their membership.

These documents are limited to members who pay in USD.

Renewing a membership

Automated renewals

The main way memberships are renewed is fully automated. When a member pays for the first time, the “auto renew” checkbox is checked by default and the member pays either by Credit Card (which is handled by the Stripe payment processor) or by PayPal. In either case, PayPal and Stripe will automatically charge their account when the renewal is up and notify our database which will update their membership.

When an automatic renewal is started after the due date

If a member renews after their due date and chooses to automatically renew, then they will always be late on their dues.

To address this problem we take one of two steps:

  1. If the payment is less than 15 days after the membership due date, we adjust the membership due date, extending it so it falls after the next membership renewal date.

  2. If the payment is more than 15 days after the membership date, we cancel the recurrance and notify the member. We explain that we cancelled the recurring payment because it will be late and let them know they will be reminded when they are due and ask them to start a new recurring payment when they next pay.

How to cancel a recurring contribution.

  1. Lookup the contact record
  2. Click the Contributions tab
  3. Click the “Recurring Contributions” sub tab
  4. Click Cancel:

“Screen shot of cancel screen”

  1. Then, set the options to cancel, provide a reason and notify the user:

“Screen shot of cancel reason screen”

Manual renewals

If a member pays by check, bill.com, EFT or any other way that does not automatically credit their membership, their membership should be renewed by:

  • If they pay by check, ensure you have a digital image of the check (when checks are sent to our virtual post office, you can use the scanned version of the check)
  • In the database, click Memberships -> Manually Renew Memberships
  • In the “Choose the membership to renew” field, start entering the first few letters of the members name and then select the member.
  • Enter the proper Date received and Payment Method (use EFT for bill.com)
  • If you selected “Check” be sure to enter the check number.
  • The Status should be completed.
  • If they are paying for more than one term, adjust the Number of terms to advance membership field.
  • Enter the total amount and the New Expiration Date will be automatically set - so, be sure to check it to make sure it looks correct.
  • Click Save Payment
  • If payment method is check, then click the link to upload the receipt to the contribution record
    • On the contribution record edit screen, click the “Browse” button next to the Transfer Receipt label.
    • Click Save to save the check image with the contribution.

Note: If the amount they are paying is exactly the amount that they owe, then their membership will be advanced exactly one period. If it’s slightly more or less, then it will be pro-rated by advanced their expiration date less or more then a full term.

One off credit card renewals

Sometimes a member wants to make a membership contribution via credit card, but they can’t use the normal process because:

  • They have a recurring contribution already established (to prevent over payments our regular system will stop you from making a membership payment if you have a recurring payment that is active).

  • A member wants to pay a different amount. Our normal system does not give you the option to choose the amount to pay. You will always pay the amount of one term of membership. Sometimes a member might have extra money and want to pay ahead.

To accomodate these situations, we have a special one time membership contribution page. When a donation is made, the members@mayfirst.org email address will be Bcc’ed on the thank you email, alerting us to the contribution.

When this happens, we need to take the following steps:

  1. Find the contribution in the database. You should be able to use the information in the email notice to locate it.
  2. Click the “view” link next to the donation. There should be a value in the “Note” field that indicates which membership it should be applied to. If there is not sufficient information, then we need to follow up with the donor to find out how to apply it.
  3. In list view (when you see all contributions as a list), click the “…” menu and choose “Move Contribution”. Move the contribution to the membership it should be applied to.
  4. Manually adjust the membership end date to reflect the new payment.

Donations

All credit card or Pay Pal donations should be made via the special donation contribution page, not via a membership payment. When using the donation page, the “Financial type” is automatically set to “Donation” instead of “Membership Dues,”, which ensures it is entered properly into our accounting system.

If a member makes a donation by check or EFT:

  1. Lookup the contact in our database (or enter the contact if they are not already in our database)
  2. Click the “Contributions” tab
  3. Click “Record Contribution (Check, Cash, EFT…)
  4. For Financial Type, select “Donation”
  5. Enter the Total Amount
  6. In Contribution source - leave blank unless there is something special to say about why they made the contribution
  7. Leave campaign blank (unless we are intentionally tracking a fundraising campaign)
  8. For contribution date, enter the date we received it (via Virtual Post Mail)
  9. Receipt: If we have an email address in the contact record, there will be an option to “Send a receipt” and you should check it. If there is no email address in the contact record, and they request a donation receipt, then create a receipt manually outside of CiviCRM and send it to them.
  10. Set Payment Method to Check
  11. Leave transaction ID blank
  12. Enter the check number

Note: If the person may be from the US and the amount is more than one hundred dollars, send a separate, personally written thank you letter that can serve as a receipt for deducting the amount from their income taxes.

See the Nextcloud “mayfirst-admin/donations” folder for sample letters.

Sending email

We sending email to our members using the CiviMail feature of our database.

We typically send to two groups (with each group sub-divided into English and Spanish speakers):

  • COM: Members - this group comprises all contacts that are related to members. We use this group infrequently to notify members about news or events that are only of interest to members. Since we use this list to inform members about the membership meeting, voting etc. we do not want members to unsubscribe so we send to it sparingly.
  • COM: World - this group includes everyone in the database with an email address. We send all other announcements to this group.

Every message has an english version (sent to the english sub-group) and a spanish version (sent to the spanish sub-group).