Follow Up with our membership

Members fall behind on their dues regularly. Rather than see this as debt collection, we can instead see it as an opportunity to get to know our members better.

Timeline:

• Automatic notices: Members begin receiving automatic notices about their membership expiring two weeks prior to their membership end date. If their membership is configured to auto-renew, their notice includes that information.

  If they do not renew their membership, they will receive a notification every two weeks for two months. Their last notice will tell them that their membership will be disabled.

  Technically, this two month period is a grace period (and their membership is marked as “grace” during this time). They are still considered “current” members and are still considered to be in good standing.

• Expired: After two months, their membership status changes to “expired.” At this point they are no longer considered to be current members. And, we may disable their hosting resources. We should regularly monitor for members who have expired and as soon as they enter this status.

  Before Disabling a membership:

  • Check the “Notes” section of the CiviCRM record. This section is a log of our interactions with the member and should include past conversations.

  • Check resource usage. It’s useful to check if their hosting resources are still using May First. If a membership has expired, they don’t respond to email, and they are no longer using our services, it’s an easy step to disable their membership (if we made a mistake, we can always re-enable it). On the other hand, if they are using our servers, now is an opportunity to send a more personal email (maybe they are ignoring form emails but will respond to a personal one?). It’s also an opportunity to research them, learn more about what they do. You may also need to find different contact information - or try reaching them via social media.

  If you are successful in reaching them, it’s an opportunity not just to tell them to pay, but to also let them know what activities we have planned and invite them to get more involved.

  If you have no luck reaching them, then you need to disable their hosting details.

• Disabled Disabling means clicking on the hosting order section of the control panel and disabling every hosting order.

  Next, in the CiviCRM database, edit their membership, choose “Status Override Permament” and change their membership status to “Disabled.”

• Coming back from Disabled: There are two ways to come back from being disabled.

  • They pay. If this happens, the system should automatically change their CiviCRM membership status to “Current” and unset the permanent override setting. And, we should get an email letting us know that we have to manually enable their hosting orders in the control panel.

  • They get in touch with us and provide a date that they will pay. If this happens, we generally re-enable their hosting orders (even if they have not yet paid) and edit their membership in CiviCRM so as not to override the status any longer (they will go back to expired). Also, be sure to add a “Note” to the CiviCRM record indicating what happened. If they don’t pay, they will remain in the expired state where we will have to disable them again.

• Cancelling A membership should be cancelled if they request to end their membership or they have been disabled for more than 3 months.

  A list of members that have been disabled for more than 3 months is available via the Memberships -> Members disabled for 3 months or longer menu item.

  To delete a membership:

  • In the control panel, delete each hosting order one by one.
  • In the control panel, search for the member name and then click the delete link next to the membership
  • In CiviCRM, edit the membership, choose to override manually permanently, and select “Cancelled”
  • In CiviCRM, check the contributions tab and the recurring payments sub-tab. If there is an active recurring contribution, cancel it.

  If you cancel a membership that has an active recurring contribution, you will get a warning that will remind you to cancel their recurring payment. We don’t want to collect monty from a member after they have cancelled!

  

Maintenance

In addition to the timeline, there is some regular maintenance that is required.

Ensuring all members have a Membership Admin relationship

Contacts assigned the “Membership Admin” relationship receive notices when it’s time for a member to pay their dues.

But, sometimes all the membership admin contacts have been deleted, or the primary email address for the only membership admin contact is bouncing.

Detecting that there is a problem

When it is time to send a membership renewal email and there is no working membership admin contact, the database alerts us at login time with the “Scheduled Job Failures” message:

You can find more information about this problem by either:

1. Click “View details and manager alerts” and then click “View Job Log”:

OR

2. Click Administer -> System Settings -> Scheduled Job and scroll to the job called “May First Send Renewal Reminders (Daily)” and click “View Job Log”

Fixing the problem

The job log provides the exact member ids that caused the problem:

You can then click Memberships -> Find Members and plug those ids into the search to find them:

Once you find the membership, there is no single answer as to what you should do. Some options are:

1. Use Alternate Email If there is a membership admin contact with a bouncing primary email that has a second email, you can edit the email address and make the alternate email address the primary one.

2. Promote or contact regular membership contact If there is a regular “Member contact” that has a working email, you can create a new “Membership Admin” relationship for that contact to promote them OR you can simply email them and ask them what to do.

3. Lookup on the web You can look for a web site address for the given membership and see if they have a published “info@” email address that can be used. Than create a new contact (first name: Admin, last name: Contact) with this email and create both a Membership Admin relationship and a Membership relationship.

4. Ask us You can ask other workers if they are familiar with this member or have contact with them.

5. Check control panel If the member uses May First for their email, you can look up their hosting order in the control panel and see if there are any active email addresses that can be used.

6. Uncheck bounce checkbox If the contact’s email address is bouncing and you think it was a temporary problem, you can edit the email address and uncheck the bounce check mark so we will try to deliver to the email account again.

Once you have fixed the problem, there is nothing left to do. The next day, the schedule job will run again and this time it will find a contact to email and the job should complete successfully.