How to set up membership levels

[webmaster@cumbriapast.com]

At present the Society has a membership year that runs from July to June each year, members can pay for 1 to 5 years at a time and we have 28 classes of membership to cover all categories. New members joining after 1st April also get free membership up to 30th June and thier membership runs from 1st July that year.
Whilst I think I can see a way of doing this it involves and enormous amount of entries which will have to be changed on the 1st April every year.
It seems I have to have 28 x 5 membership levels each with the appropriate expiry date of 1 to 5 years and 140 subscribe buttons. But I am not sure how renewals will work with this.
Or am I missing something and is there an eaiser way of achieving this.
Thanks
John

[admin]

Hi John, You can do this with far fewer membership levels than you are expecting. A few points about how eMember works will help explain the approach:

1. A membership level controls content access and the membership duration. The price is set on the payment button, not on the level. If your 28 membership classes all get access to the same content and differ only in price, they don’t need to be separate membership levels. You only need one level per duration, so 5 levels in total (1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years and 5 years). You can then create a payment button for each class and duration combination, pointing to the matching level. If you need to record which class a member belongs to, you can store it in a custom field.

2. We recommend using duration-based expiry (for example “1 Year”) rather than a fixed expiry date. A fixed expiry date applies to every member on that level, so it would need to be changed every year, and changing it would extend everyone on that level, including members who haven’t renewed.

3. With duration-based levels, the expiry is calculated from the member’s “Subscription Starts” date. When an active member renews, the new period is added from the end of their current expiry date rather than from the payment date. So once a member’s start date is lined up with 1st July, it stays lined up every time they renew on time.

4. For new members, the start date is set to the date they paid. To line them up with your membership year, edit the member’s profile in the admin area and change the “Subscription Starts” date to the 1st July that started the current membership year. For members joining after 1st April, set it to the upcoming 1st July instead, which gives them the free period up to 30th June automatically. You would do the same for a lapsed member who renews after their membership has expired.

This way nothing needs to be changed on 1st April each year. The only manual step is adjusting the start date for new members and late renewals.

You can find more details in the eMember documentation:

Documentation

Thank you.

[webmaster@cumbriapast.com]

Thanks for the quick response which helps a lot.
Whilst we only have 4 different price bands we do need the 28 classes to cover access to various parts of the site and mail lists.
I am trying to cut down on the effort needed by the membership secretary. Would it be possible for example for me to run a CRON just after midnight each day and look for any new payments and set the subscription_starts column value to YYYY-06-30
where YYYY is the previous year up to 31 March otherwise current year for active accounts. I can look for accounts by looking for a subscription_starts date of yesterday.

I am assuming the subscription_starts date is the day the pay even when it is an existing subscriber paying late.

This could give a false expiry date for a few hours in the persons account details but I can explain that in the welcome message.

I am assuming that if they renew early their renewal day stays the same and I do not have to do anything.

Thanks
John

[Author]

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