Introduction
Your organisation might have specific policies or procedures that take effect when a membership reaches its renewal stage, for example:
Junior or student memberships can only be held for a certain number of years.
A lower cost membership becomes available if person is unemployed.
A initial discounted introductory offer comes to an end
Of course you could always change the membership types manually, but if the numbers are large this can become difficult and time consuming to manage. And although you could configure a self-service form to show the correct membership type at renewal, if some of your members are using direct debit processes the memberships will renew automatically on the same membership types, which may not be correct.
So, to simplify the renewal process CiviPlus allows you to set up rules for automatically upgrading memberships when a membership has a payment plan which is set to auto renew and the offline payment processor is being used.
Note: This automatic upgrade feature is only relevant for memberships that “autorenew”. Where a member is not auto-renewing they will typically be be sent a renewal reminder with a link to a webform. You could "force" a member to change to a specific membership type on renewal by configuring the webform so that the membership type is specified by conditions.
Setting up an Automated Upgrade Rule
Navigate to Administer -> CiviMembership - > Membership Automated Upgrade Rules.
You will will now be able to add a rule to automatically upgrade from one membership type to another, as shown below:
Firstly, enter a name for this automated membership upgrade rule in the Label field (in this case "Upgrade from Student to Member").
Now select the From Membership and To Membership types from the drop down lists that are shown for each so that the current membership held by a member will be transitioned to a new membership automatically by the rule.
Use the Period to have held "from membership" for field to specify the threshold that will trigger the upgrade rule for a particular member. You can specify a certain number of Years, Months or Days from either:
The date that the member first held this current membership, or
The date that this current membership started
If you want to restrict who the rule applies to you can select one group from the Filter Group dropdown list, and only members are in that group will have the auto-upgrade rule applied.
Note: Currently the Filter Group options only works with standard groups or smart groups created by search kit.
Finally, check the Enabled field so that the rule will be run.
Note: Since it is possible that more than one rule would apply to a "From membership" type, the order of the rules will determine which one will be applied with the rule which has the highest "order" selected and rules with a lower order discarded. You can change the order of the rules by using the up/down arrows on the page that lists the upgrade rules.
When do the automated upgrade rules run?
Renewals run on the number of days prior to the end date of the membership as configured in the payment plans settings. The “Renew offline auto-renewal memberships” scheduled job needs to be enabled in order to kick off the renewal process - if you do not have access to the Administer -> System Settings -> Scheduled Jobs page then contact Compuco who will be able to set the frequency and enable the job on your behalf.