Enable a PA to manage membership on behalf of their manager(s)

Question

I want to enable the Personal Assistant of an Individual Member (or multiple Members, but not all employees of the same organisation) to be able to set up membership (and pay renewals) on their behalf (without signing in, in their name). I think this might be achieved using permissioned Relationships and the extension "Relationship Permissions as ACL", but I'm surprised I can't find evidence of this requirement amongst other users. How might this work?

Answer 1

I've implemented a variation on this a couple of times, and found that requirements are wildly different from organization to organization. Combined with the fact that most CiviCRM orgs are not using CiviMember, that's why there's no general implementation.

There's two parts to this: Initial signup, and sending renewal notifications to the PA.

Initial signup

With Drupal and Webform-CiviCRM

Webform-CiviCRM makes it easy to set up a membership for one contact while registering as another.

FormBuilder

FormBuilder isn't there yet. It can almost handle this situation for free memberships (a 3-line patch adds membersip support) but it's still a ways from handling payments.

For one of my WordPress clients, we handle renewals this way. I created a two-page form - the first is FormBuilder, then we use the post-submit URL to redirect a user to the payment page. However, their renewals are all with logged-in users. It's currently unclear if doing this while not logged in is possible.

Caldera Forms/Ninja Forms

If you're on WordPress, you can also explore the community fork of Caldera Forms, or Ninja Forms, both of which are likely to support your scenario (though collecting payment requires a paid plugin with Ninja Forms).

Form Processor

If you're on Joomla, or these other scenarios are unworkable - there's a final answer, but it's much more work to set up. Create a form in the tool of your choice (e.g. FormStack, SurveyMonkey) and on submission, fire a webhook to an endpoint created with the Form Processor extension. My WP client using FormBuilder for renewals uses WPForms + Form Processor for the initial signup.

Renewal notifications/payment

For handling notifications to the PA, I recommend using CiviRules and Email API to create a rule with the action "send an email to a related contact" when the membership is almost up. If you use invoicing, my altinvoice extension will allow sending invoices to additional contacts based on a relationship setting.