Overview
For many membership signup workflows you can create a public form where members can sign-up online, pay by Credit Card or Direct Debit and have their membership start immediately.
However, there are a couple of membership workflows where this simple approach may not meet your required process, in which case you can use the SSP to allow members to switch to Direct Debit:
Workflow 1: The prospective membership has to be approved before payment is made, but want to offer the option for new members to “switch” to direct debit rather than paying by credit card.
NB: An alternative (and sometimes simpler) approach exists for signup after an application process using webforms. In this approach you would have the admin send a link to a membership signup form for the member to fill in once they have been approved. This maybe all you need, but has the downside that:
the administrator cannot set the start date of the membership for direct debit signups - it would be the date they fill in the form.
the administrator cannot easily set the membership type and any other options on the form - although there may be ways around that with custom fields and conditions however. The member would come to the form like any other signup.
the form would need some access permissions setup to stop users from stumbling upon it and getting memberships they shouldn’t.
if offering a fixed membership, we cannot offer instalments for current features/limitations of webforms).
if the client wants all members (including those paying by credit card) to “autorenew” - i.e. for a new invoice to be created for them at the end of the year, then the above webform does not currently support that.
Workflow 2: All members, including those paying by credit card, should “autorenew”: i.e. a new invoice is automatically created for them at the end of the year.
To handle both of these workflow scenarios the CiviPlus GoCardless integration provides functionality that allows SSP users with a membership which is attached to a recurring contribution to switch to GoCardless Direct Debit.
Example Use case
The main use case for this functionality is when you have a membership applications process, but want to offer the option for new members to “switch” to direct debit rather than paying by credit card once their membership is approved.
Once the application is approved, the membership manager sets the membership manually in the CiviCRM backend (Membership > Add membership) with a payment plan, but sets the Payment Method to Accounts Receivable (i.e. we don’t know the payment method yet)
The new Member can login to the SSP to view their membership, and use the Switch to Direct Debit option that has been configured in the portal.
Note: If you want members who are currently paying by “credit card” without autorenew to switch to Direct Debit with autorenew you simply need to offer the option to pay by GoCardless Direct Debit on your renewal form.
How to set it up
These are the steps you need to follow so that the Switch to GoCardless is available to members:
Once the new membership has been approved the Membership administrator should firstly add a new membership with a payment plan, but select manual recurring payment processor. This neans that the membership is autorenewing, but there is no link to GoCardless. The invoices will appear in the SSP and the member can either pay by BACS or Stripe/credit card if contribution page for this is setup.
On the SSP screen, when a user logs in, if they have a membership, which is paid by a recurring contribution, and the “switch to direct debit” functionality is enabled in SSP settings they will see the following block on their My Membership page:
Clicking on “Switch to Direct Debit“ will navigate the user to the screen below. Select any one payment scheme from the schemes listed and proceed by clicking on “Next” button
Clicking on the Next button will navigate the user to the next screen which has two options:
Pay now for outstanding invoice (the most recent invoice) - This will take user to do one off payment and setting up up Direct Debit.
Skip and setup Direct Debit without pay now - This will ignore the one off payment for the outstanding invoice and redirect the user to the direct debit setup screen
3. Click on “Setup this Direct Debit“ button and complete the setup. Upon successful setup, user is navigated back to the SSP → My Memberships with success message
5. Thats it! The user has setup their GoCardless Direct Debit and future instalments will be taken by Direct Debit.
User will receive an email from GoCardless stating the confirmation of Direct Debit setup as shown in below example
When the charge date is approaching, user will be notified again by GoCardless as shown in an example below