RECURRING contribution and auto-renew membership

Question

I am trying to setup an optional but recurring donation/contribution on a membership signup Contribution Page. Ideally, the new member will also have an option to choose frequency of payment, but we can do without.

I have tried price sets with a second membership for a "dummy" organisation for the donation bit, but it doesn't seem to give me an option for BOTH to be recurring.

I have also tried activating membership contribution and Contributions Amount on the campaign page, (without price sets) but as soon as I activate recurring contributions, I get the following error:

When I then enable separate payments from the membership tab, I get the error

You cannot enable both Recurring Contributions and Auto-renew memberships on the same online contribution page.

Has anyone got a workaround? Any help and guidance towards the right direction is much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you are on Drupal, then webform_civicrm can indeed mix and match different monies [Membership + Contribution + Event] and since recently construct a recurring series as well. There are some differences though compared to how each of these individual bits work using CiviCRM Core itself:

• you will add up all components using webform elements -> to get a Total $ amount;
• you can then present to the user (or config them yourself) - how you want these to be paid (now, monthly installments, etc)
• you end up with one payment - and since CiviCRM Core is not really expecting that this is possible, you won't see the distribution of that payment in the backend. So a $100 contribution + $50 Membership will show $150 payment both on the Contribution screen as well as on the Membership screen.