Automating membership renewals

Overview

In Wild Apricot you can automate the membership renewal process (renewal workflow) with timed reminders and actions for each membership level. These settings can be accessed under the 'Renewal Policy' tab of the membership level that you would like to setup. You can access a list of all your membership levels from Member > Levels .

Membership Renewal Period

The renewal of your members will be calculated based on the following two properties of your membership renewal settings:

• Renewal Period - the interval of the membership (Never, Monthly, Quarterly, Twice a year, Every 1, 2, or 3 years, etc.)
• Join Date - can be set to either the date the member joins (rolling date), or a specific date (e.g. 1st or 15th of the month)

If your membership currently has a rolling renewal date, then select Join Date. If you would like everyone to renew on the same day regardless of when they joined, select specific date. Here's an illustration:

In this example both Bob and Mary have signed up for membership on the 13th of May. Bob has signed up for Gold Membership while Mary picked Silver Membership. Both of these membership levels have a monthly renewal period, however the Gold Membership renews from the Join Date whereas the Silver Membership renews from a specific date (e.g. every 15th of a month).

In this case, Bob will will have an entire month before his next renewal due date and payment are due, but Mary will only have 2 days until her first renewal because her membership renews on the 15th of every month irrespective of the date she joined. Note: this can be tweaked further using prorating settings.

See: Renewal date calculation for more details on renewal date calculation

Renewal Policy Settings for Membership Levels

Select/create the membership level you would like to edit (Members -> Levels) and go to the Renewal policy tab:

Automating Renewal Reminders and Actions

Let's say we wanted to send 2 reminders to our Members who have an approaching renewal date with the following criteria:

Reminders

• Send the first reminder 14 days before their renewal date
• Send the second reminder 7 days before their renewal date
  • Also send a notification to the administrator so he can follow up with this member if needed

Actions

• If our member doesn't renew after 14 days send them a grace period notice
• If our member still hasn't renewed after 30 days, then we'll set them to lapsed and archive their record

Bundle Administrators Notifications vs. Individual Notifications

As illustrated below, bundle levels also have the option to notify bundle members as well as bundle administrators. And both individual and bundle membership levels include the option to notify administrators when members are notified - however the administrator doesn't have to be your site administrator or even a contact in your contact list (e.g, a custom e-mail recipient) see Routing of system e-mails for more details.

Examples of Renewal actions

As you can see, this is only one of our many options, and we could also have done the following:

• Change Member status to Lapsed, inform them about it but do not do anything else. Lapsed members do not have access to Members-only private website section, see Access control by member status
• Downgrade this record from a "Regular membership" level to a free level like "Other contacts" - this way the member can continue to receive emails and can upgrade again if they want to. In this case you must setup your member-only pages and other online benefits to be available only to "Regular Members" but not to "Other contacts"

Customizing renewal emails

You can customize the emails that are sent out to members and administrators during the various steps in the renewal process.

When you create a membership level, emails are taken from Default membership emails automatically, but you can also customize these e-mails individually.

See also

• Recurring payments
• Default membership emails
• Member - renew or change level
• Prorating membership dues for new applications
• Renewal date calculation
• Organization Timezone