I am just setting up aMember to handle membership for a local historic preservation organization. We are uploading our existing paid membership list and crediting them for this year's annual membership, which they all paid by check. We have set a specific expiration date (let's say December 31, 2007). We will send out emails encouraging members to renew for 2008 online. But what happens then? If they go to the website before December 31 thinking their PayPal payment is a renewal doesn't it just double pay for 2007 and still expire them on December 31? And if they go after is their login ID still good, or does it just get them to the payment screen? Somebody who already uses aMember, tell me how to schedule a manual renewal by the member that doesn't just keep buying this year's privileges.
We don't currently use PayPal, but "most" payments are processed the same. If anyone sees an error, please correct me. If an existing member pays prior to their expiration date; aMem will process their payment and extend their membership. aMem will actually create a new membership period that starts when the current one expires. Login names and user details remain the same. Your users will have no break/interuption in service/access. If the membership has already expired; aMem will still let them access their user details page where they may continue their membership. Users will not have access to any protected areas you have set up, til they pay that is. Either way, it doesn't appear you will experience any problems with what you have described.
121books is correct in my opinion. Also you can set emails to be sent a week (or whatever you choose) before expiry to remind them to renew, and another email sometime after expiry to let them know you're still friends even if they pay late .
How do you set up amember for: "If an existing member pays prior to their expiration date; aMem will process their payment and extend their membership. aMem will actually create a new membership period that starts when the current one expires. Login names and user details remain the same. Your users will have no break/interuption in service/access." because right now my configuration wont let my users to renew unless the service expires. Thanks.
It sounds like you have the product set to disallow subscriptions to the product for active users, or only allow for expired. Try turning these off or creating a new product for renewals. David
We have lot of records that were imported. Most of them never renew their membership online. Many of them renew their membership and we manually updated their record. I would like to encourage them to go online and renew. Most of them do not know their Username -- aMember created for them. Several questions: 1. How can they have access to their record and renew? Do they need to contact us directly and we tell them their username? What about password? 2. And what if one former member had old email address but no longer use it and is using another email? Do we need to change the person's email address in their record before they could have access? Reason I asked because most of the record had their password generated by aMember (they may need to click "Forgot Password"). Thank you.
Why not send all members an email? If amember generated their password, and they have changed their emails... guess you will have to verify them another way. If you still have their old passwords, you could write a script that would copy over their old passwords into the amember database, or entered as an extra field that could be used to verify them David
Well, that's another problem -- I can't pull off all expired members and encourage them to rejoin us -- because I can't tag or select who get the emails. This is something I want to see in future releases.