Membership Management

Membership Types

Your membership types are defined under the fees tool in the Membership Management control panel.

The type of an individual member can be set/changed in their profile. You can set the membership type to member/TYPE if that member maintains their own membership, or to secondary if they inherit their membership privileges from a primary member who takes care of that for them. Secondary members must also set the primary member that they are related to. Only the primary member will receive notifications about expiry and renewal of memberships.

User Types

Most members are also users, meaning they can log in to private areas of your website. In addition to member and secondary users (described above), your website may also allow guest users (sometimes called registered guests). These users can also access private areas, but otherwise they do not have any benefits of membership. You can still find them in your Membership control panel.

Additionally, there is a staff user type, which is intended for office staff, interns, and other officials who should be able to access member-only areas of your website, but otherwise do not maintain an official membership. Setting someone to staff only grants access to member-only areas of the website. It does not grant any administrator or back-end privileges.

To grant website administrator privileges to a user, you must do 2 things:

1. increase their access level to 2 or 3
2. issue them some keys to the website sections they are permitted to manage (keys are issued using the Security Manager tool)

To disable login access, set the user's access level to 0. To disable administrator access, but continue allowing member/guest/staff access, set the user's access level to 1.

Membership Status Definitions

• Active* - a member that is in good standing (paid in full).  This member can login to the members-only area and shows up in the Member Directory.
• Comp* - life members (comp fees, no expiry). This member can login to the members-only area and shows up in the Member Directory.
• Pending* - a member in good standing (waiting for cheque).
• Expired - a member that has expired. This member can login, but can only access the member renewal form. This member will not appear in the Member Directory.
• Archived - a member that is not in good standing and will not be contacted for any purpose (eg., deceased, changed industry, etc.) This member can login, but can only access the member renewal form.

*Active, Pending and Comp members will automatically show up in the Member Directory unless the member has select "hidden" from the visibility drop down.

For a quick view of the status of each of your member, click on the Membership icon on the webtop. In the Membership screen you will find a Status Filter where you can filter the members based on their Status.

New Member Signup Process

To add a new member, you should always go through the public sign-up process.

If you have the person's credit card, you can enter it using this registration form. The new member will automatically receive an email confirmation with her login/password (Confirmation emails only get sent after the person has paid).

If you've already processed the payment, complete the first screen only. This will automatically send the new member her login/password. However, you must then go to the admin area and click on the Membership module. Find the new member and update her status to "Active".

Automated Renewal Email Process

Emails go out on the second day of every month at 6am Pacific.  They go out as follows:

• 1 month less a day before their membership expires
• The day after their membership expired
• A month and a day after their membership expired

Emails do not go to people who have renewed their membership.   They do not go to people who have a status of "comp", only "active" or expired".

Early Renewal

• This feature allows members to renew their membership prior to the member expiry date.
• Permits you to send an email a month or two early to encourage members to renew their membership early
• They must currently be active
• Members can renew early for the next period only (ie: you can't renew for two years, etc). Once the member has renewed early, the Renew Now button disappears until the following year.

Payments

Invoice Status Definitions:

• Active - Only active invoices affect the account balance.  These are real invoices, and the invoice total is/was owed by the account holder.  All other invoices are not valid from an accounting perspective.
• Inactive - Inactive invoices are still in the process of being drawn up.  All invoices are inactive when first created, and are then activated when the purchase is confirmed.  For example, in an online shopping system, the invoice is inactive while the user is shopping, but gets activated when the user checks out and tries to pay.  If a user abandons their shopping cart without ever going to pay, they will leave an inactive invoice behind in the system. Also, if the credit card is rejected by Moneris, the invoice will show as Inactive.
• Processing - Processing invoices have gone to payment (Moneris), but we have not yet heard back.  For new invoices, they probably really are in processing, and should not be altered.  For old invoices, one of two things has probably happened:

1. they went to pay, but could not complete payment, and the purchase was abandoned
2. they paid, but the receipting process was interrupted (eg. by the user closing the browser before coming back to the your site)

• These invoices should be reconciled with the payment gateway records, and then marked as either "active" if payment was received or "canceled" if not.  (If marking the invoice as active, it is also a good idea to log the payment as well.  Otherwise, the invoice will show up as an outstanding receivable.)

• Canceled - Canceled invoices were fully or partially processed at one point, but then were canceled later.  In an e-commerce setting, you will use this to cancel invoices that were left in a processing state, but which reconciliation shows were never paid.

Payments

For the above Invoices, you need to apply payments. E-commerce payments will automatically be updated, unless the user cancels the receipt callback. (You can also use this to manage off-line payments, eg. payments by cheque.  But I don't think that is important for you, so I won't go over it here.)

Here are the status definitions:

• For good payments, the status should be "paid"
• To cancel/undo a previous payment, set its status to "canceled"
• To mark an offline payment as tentatively received (eg. a cheque that has not been cleared), use "received".  These payments will be presumed good and included on account statements and balances, but should be updated to "paid" or "canceled" as part of final reconciliation.
• The status of "suspicious" is used to flag automatic e-commerce payments that could not be validated through the gateway. These should be checked manually, and then updated to "paid" or "canceled".

Pending

When members pay their dues using cheques, their membership status is automatically marked as Pending. To record an offline payment, please login to your Payment module at: http://domainname.com/cgi/ctrl-panel.cgi/Pay

Note: remember to check off the "Perform payment post-processing" checkbox to have the system automatically update a member's status.

At the end of each week, the website administrator will receive an automated email listing the members that are still pending.

Emailing Members

The Email Module tool allows you to broadcast e-mail messages to all members of your website. Here are the merge codes that you have the option of using:

For recipient groups you have:

[[EMAIL]] - recipient's email address
[[FIRST_NAME]]
[[LAST_NAME]]
[[NAME]] - first and last name combined
[[LOGIN]]
[[PASSWORD]]
[[MEMBERSHIP_DATE]] - date of their last membership status change
[[TYPE]] – type of membership
[[EXPIRY]]

For mailing lists you have:

[[EMAIL]]
[[FIRST_NAME]]
[[LAST_NAME]]
[[NAME]]
[[ORGANIZATION]]
[[HONORIFIC]]