CiviPlus supports a wide variety of membership joining processes including those that require members to apply via an application process to join the organisation. Often the first step in the joining process is for a prospective member to complete an online form that allows them to provide the information you want to collect, for example:

The comprehensive form builder in CiviPlus can be used to create a range of tailored form types that are fully integrated with the back-end CRM database and allow for flexible membership signup processes. These are called Webforms, and In this article we explain how to create one that will be used as part of a membership application review/approval process which is covered in the article here.

There is a separate section on Webforms in the Knowledge Base here - this article focuses on those areas that are particularly important from the perspective of a Membership application form.

The example Membership Webform in this article allows a user to create a new Membership Application for an organisation, which will kick-off an approval workflow. This means that the application form needs to collect the information needed to undertake a review. This information may include details about the different contacts relevant to the application and details about the application itself, which are typically held as a set of custom fields. This means that, depending on how the application form is configured, a certain amount needs to be set up before you start to create the form. In our example the following needs to exist in CiviPlus first:

CiviPlus Webforms are created and maintained within the Self-Service Portal part of the solution, so navigate to the Content -> Add Content -> Webform menu item from the Portal as shown below:

Complete the "Create Webform" page and click Save button to create the new Webform. In the example below we have just given it a Title and left all the other options as default values. Save this page to start configuring the Webform.

Next we will move to the CiviCRM tab of the Webform configuration and select the Enable CiviCRM Processing option. This will allow data from CiviPlus to be made available in the Webform, and allow data entered into the Webform to be saved back to CiviPlus.

Once the CiviCRM Processing option is enabled, we can start to populate the Webform with fields from CiviPlus. To start with we are going to add three contact fields:

By changing the Number of Contacts field to 3 you will see that two extra Contact placeholders are added to the left hand pane. We will now configure each one to match the contacts listed above.

We configure the Organisation contact on the Webform first, as this allows us to add relationships for the individual contacts in the next steps.

Firstly, set the Contact Type to Organisation, and give it a Label to make it clear what type of contact data it holds. Next, decide what Contact Fields you want to appear on the form - in this example we will only be asking for an Organisation Name, but your can tick other field names if you want other information to be collected during the initial application.

Next, we say how many sets of the standard CiviPlus Address Fields, Phone Fields, Email Fields and Website Fields we want to appear on the Webform for this Organisation Contact. In this instance we are only asking for 1 of each, but you could ask for more if you wanted. There are options for how you want to configure each set of fields.

Having set up the Organisation Contact, we will configure the fields that we want to capture for the individual completing this Membership application form on behalf of this organisation.

We leave the Contact Type field as Individual, but provide a Label so that we can clearly see which of the contacts we are referring to - "My Details" meaning the person making the application. Next we decide which of the standard CiviPlus Contact fields we want to collect on the Webform - in this case we are only collecting a few. We are also using this opportunity to set the Current Employer for the person completing the form to the Organisation Details that we entered earlier.

Now we decide what other information we want to collect about the person filling in the webform. In this example we are only going to ask for a single Email Address, which is the minimum we need. However, select the Enable Relationship Fields option so that we can identify the person filling in the webform as the "Main Contact" for the organisation in the Relationship Type field and set it to Active. When the form is submitted this relationship between the individual and the organisation will be recorded in CiviPlus.

The 3rd contact is going to be the person who will handle payment for the membership if/when it is approved. This is pretty much exactly the same as configuring the person completing the form, with the following exceptions (see below):

As mentioned earlier, when this Membership Application Webform is submitted an approval workflow will be kicked off in CiviPlus. We need specify which type of workflow ("Case") should be started, and some other details. We do this in the Case section of the CiviCRM tab.

By changing the Number of Cases option from "0" to "1" we get the opportunity to configure the Case that will be initiated when the Webform is submitted. Choose the correct Case Type for this Membership Application - as stated earlier this should have already been created in CiviPlus and in our example it is called "Organisation Membership".

Leave the Case Status field as Automatic - this means it will default to whatever the initial status for the Case is. The Medium field allows you to say how this application has come in - in our example it is via an "On Line" form, but other options might be via phone or post. Since we are going to automatically assign a Case Subject to this application we select this option so that the field is available on the Webform.

In the Case Roles section we can specify which contacts should be assigned to specific roles within the workflow. The most important role is Case Client - this is the name of the primary contact associated with the workflow, so we enter the "Organisation Details" contact. However, we want the Case Creator to be an individual rather than an organisation so we select the "Your Details" contact.

Lastly we come on to the the set of fields that we want to collect and review as part of the Membership application. For this we use a Custom Field Set called "Organisation Membership" which has already been created in CiviPlus and associated with the "Organisation Membership" case type. It is because of this association that the custom Field Set is available in the Cases section. We select all of the fields so that they will appear on the Webform:

Having completed all of the sections in the CiviCRM tabyou can click Save and move on to the next part of the Webform configuration.

The sections above cover how to configure the CiviPlus elements of the Webform which are specifically relevant to a Membership Application use case. Once this has been done you can continue to setup the rest of the Webform using the tabs on the configuration page. There are lots options to control the presentation, format and handling of the form before it is submitted, including:

Details on how to use these features can be found in the Knowledge Base article here.

Because of the way in which we configured the CIVICRM tab the following actions will take place when this webform is submitted:

The creation and management of the Membership Application case is covered in the article here.

Here is a screenshot of the WEBFORM tab of the application form after configuring the CIVICRM tab and making a few minor additions/changes.

And this is what the application webform could look like when completed by a user:

Finally, this is an example of page shown to the user after submission.