Prorated Dues to Accomodate Fixed Membership Periods
Women in Insurance and Financial Services
As the preeminent professional organization for women in the financial services industry, Women in Insurance & Financial Services (WIFS) is dedicated to attracting capable women to the financial services sector, helping them develop their talents and advancing them toward their fullest potential. Customization was needed to facilitate the transition from a rolling membership period to a fixed one as well as continue to keep membership fees attractive to prospective members.
Background
WIFS made the decision to switch from a rolling membership period to a fixed one. This was broken down into phases:
- The first phase of the project was to create prorated memberships to facilitate getting all members on to the same renewal schedule without double charging for the period of time between the beginning of the year and the renewal date.
- The second phase started at the end of the year for people who renewed in November and December. To prevent the need for those members to renew twice within two months it was necessary for them to be charged for the rest of the year in addition to the next year.
- The third phase started at the beginning of the 2nd year so that new members would continue to get a prorated membership rate while renewing members would be charged the full rate no matter when they renewed.
Challenges
The biggest challenge that we faced with this project was the complicated logic determining who got what rate.
* The first phase simply involved dividing out the yearly amount defined in Civi and multiplying that by the number of months left in the membership year. Then hooks could be used to change the amount.
* The second phase became more complicated because now Civi had to determine if the person was a renewal with an end date in November or December and charge the year plus months amount instead of the basic prorated amount. Then there were problems with the renewal emails not showing the correct end dates so customization was needed to change that date.
* The third phase just involved removing the prorating customization if someone was renewing instead of coming in as a new member.
The second phase was the portion that took the most work and the most troubleshooting to ensure things were working properly and displaying for members correctly. There was also an added complication in that WIFS has both National and Chapter dues so there were numerous Price Sets that needed to be affected.
Solution
WIFS was already using civiCRM so they wanted to continue using the CRM that they were used to instead of switching to an entirely new system just for the one piece of functionality.
Functionality
Everything was built into CiviContribute and CiviMember. Some changes were also made to the templates used by CiviMail to send confirmations.
Web and Database Developers Brad Bouchard and Jason Farrell, independent CiviCRM consultant Brian Shaughnessy.
