Introduction
In CiviPlus you can schedule a variety of emails to go to your members as the end date of their current membership approaches or passes, or indeed at any other time in your membership cycle. There is a lot of flexibility around the way that renewal reminders are set up - for example different reminders can be configured for different membership types.
Renewals ensure continuity of membership benefits, maintain historical records, and can include payment handling.
Setting up a basic renewal reminder
We’ll start with a common example: let’s configure a renewal reminder email to go to members 7 days before their membership expires.
First, navigate to Administer → Communications → Schedule Reminders → Add Reminder.
Give your reminder a short, descriptive Title and choose Membership as the entity. Select the Membership Type(s) and Auto Renew Option(s) relevant for your reminder. In general, it’s best to avoid sending reminders to members who have selected to auto-renew as no action is needed from them.
Set When to 7 days before the Membership End Date and choose whether to Repeat the reminder (enabling the Repeat checkbox reveals fields where you can specify how often the reminder should go out).
You can use the Effective Start Date to specify the earliest Membership End Dates that are included in the notifications, or Effective End Date to exclude notifications.
Next you can specify the name that the notifications will be sent by, if you don’t fill in the From Name and From Email fields then the default values for your site will be used.
You can also choose to Limit or Add Recipients e.g. to Limit To a particular group of members in your database. By default scheduled reminders will be sent to people even if they have opted out of bulk or all emails, unless you specifically exclude those people.
Now configure the Email Screen and body (HTML or Plaintext format) - you can select from the Use Template field to use an existing template, or create a new email from scratch.
Note: The My Memberships area in the Self Service Portal allows Note: You may well want your email to contain a link to your online registration form - for this renewal stage you can often use the same CiviPlus contribution page that you are using for new member sign-ups, or you can create a separate renewal form.
It is important that the link in your reminder email should contain a checksum token link to pre-fill the renewal form with any data that exists in a member’s record. The checksum token - {contact.checksum} - is placed into the link as follows, where IDNUMBER is the ID of your renewal contribution page:
http://example.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=IDNUMBER {contact.checksum}&cid={contact.contact_id}&mid={membership.id}
Finally, opt to Save your reminder as New Template if you plan to configure several similar reminders. This saves your email screen and body under Administer → Communications → Message Templates and you can reuse this message for quick editing when creating a new reminder by using the User Template dropdown on the Schedule Reminder configuration screen.
You can use the same approach to create reminders for different membership types, before and after the membership has expired.