New in 4.3: limit inherited memberships

CiviCRM has the ability to automatically grant memberships to related contacts. So, for example, when a company purchases a membership, employees of this company can be automatically extended the same membership. In the user interface, these memberships are then flagged as ‘by relationship’.

But up to today this was an all-or-nothing proposition: all employees of the company where automatically granted a membership, with no ability to neither limit the number of related memberships, nor choose which of the employees would get these.

In the upcoming CiviCRM release 4.3, you now have these additional features:

• During definition of membership types, you can eventually choose to limit the number of inherited memberships.
• When a membership of this given type is created, related memberships are automatically granted up to the specified limit.
• For each membership of this given type, you can reassign the related memberships as needed.
• For each membership of this given type, you can override the default limit and therefore grant more or less related memberships as needed.
• Membership types and memberships list screens (such as the ‘Membership’ tab for a contact) have been extended with an additional column showing the status of related memberships.

Here are a few screen grabs showing the user interface for these additional features:

• In the membership type definition screen:

• In the membership tab of the contact screen:

• In the membership view screen (shows how to reassign related memberships):

These additional features have been repeatedly asked for in the forums, they should be of great value to membership-based organizations and help increase CiviCRM's presence in this segment.