Find Membership query

Question

I created 2 smart groups for mailings. One to pull all "current" members, one to pull all lapsed members.

In my lapsed group I set membership status = expired or cancelled, and current membership = no. However, I am getting current/active members showing up in my lapsed group and I don't understand what I did wrong?

Any insight is appreciated!

Answer 1

My guess is that current member = no is finding contacts with a non-current membership (but who might also have a current membership as well), rather than contacts who don't have a current membership at all. Can you verify if that's the case? Do these contacts have two memberships, one expired and one current? We could add a help text to Current member in Advanced Search indicating this is what's actually happening in the background or even look at improving this. I have found that current member gives unexpected results in the past as well.

If you use SearchKit instead, searching for:

• Contacts
• with (required) a Contact Membership with status one of expired or cancelled
• without a Contact Membership with status one of new, pending, current (or using whichever statuses are appropriate)

you should get the results you're looking for.

Answer 2

Finding Members who have a Current Membership and do not also have an Expired Membership, or vice versa, can be done using SearchKit by using a Without' join. (was mentioned here https://chat.civicrm.org/civicrm/pl/hnbkc3f8u7r69q1u1zbf6caozr)