Do not send scheduled reminder if at least 1 membership is active

Question

we recently encountered an issue after migrating to CiviCRM.

In the original system, membership renewals were considered discrete, separate memberships rather than a contiguous one.

When we imported the membership history from the original CRM to CiviCRM, the membership history imported fine, and the old memberships were marked as "Expired". However, due to a scheduled reminder rule ("Send membership renewal notice 7 days after expiry"), we're finding that people who have already renewed a membership and have an active one will still get a reminder notice because one of their expired memberships meets that criteria.

Does anyone have a code snippet to adjust the schedule reminder for memberships to only send a reminder if there are zero ACTIVE memberships on record?

Answer 1

yes this can be problematic. You may also find that having other 'expired' memberships will trip you up when doing other searches etc. Therefore in a similar situation we have opted to find all the historic expired memberships and set them to a new Membership Status of 'previous expired'. that helped reduce confusion and would resolve your Scheduled Reminder issue to.

Answer 2

I have a client who deals with a related situation. In their case, we use SQL to update membership statuses.

In their situation, they have people who create new memberships that supersede an old membership - but they still get membership reminders on the old membership. This SQL runs hourly on a cron job and sets the old memberships to "expired" with the "status override" flag set:

mysql <dbname> -e "UPDATE civicrm_membership cm2  SET status_id=35, is_override=1  WHERE cm2.status_id = 34 AND  cm2.contact_id IN  (SELECT contact_id FROM (SELECT contact_id, status_id FROM civicrm_membership) cm JOIN civicrm_membership_status cms ON status_id = cms.id WHERE cms.is_current_member = 1 GROUP BY contact_id HAVING count(contact_id) > 1)"

Owing to different membership status configuration, this won't work as-is for you, but should give you the right idea! They're in a slightly different situation in that they have "grace" membership statuses that are still active