Middle of Month Membership Renewal Reminder Letters

Membership renewal Letters should be sent as close to the 15’th of the month as possible (to properly interleave with emailed reminders)..

Ideally, prior to generating a list of recipients, any recent donations should be processed (and memberships renewed where appropriate), and the database should be checked for duplicate records (which can occur if someone donates using a new address, email or name variant).

Setting up the query (requires admin privileges)

The query setup code finds members who membership is about to lapse or has lapsed and not been renewed, then saves the expiration date in a searchable custom field (see description on the CiviCRM Stats page).

• In the WordPress dashboard sidebar, in the ‘OVEC’ sub-menu click on ‘CiviCRM Stats’
• Under ‘Update custom fields for renewal reminders’ click the ‘Printed reminders’ link (be sure to click the ‘Printed reminders’ link and not the ‘Email reminders’ link as the setup code pays attention to different ‘privacy’ options)

Running the query

We want to send printed reminders to people whose membership will lapse within the next month, as well as to constituents whose memberships have lapsed recently (but not been renewed) for an additional month (a total of two printed reminders, during which time they might receive as many as four email reminders).

• In the CiviCRM dashboard hover on the ‘Search’ menu and click on ‘Advanced Search’
• Expand the ‘Custom Fields’ accordion, then expand the ‘Custom query fields’ sub-accordion
• Click the ‘Custom query date’ drop down menu and select ‘Choose Date Range’
• Enter a date range from the 15th of the previous month through the 15th of the next month. For example, if sending email near the middle of August, the appropriate date range would be July 15 through September 15 of the current year

Generating a PDF of renewal reminder letters

• In the header line of the search results, click on ‘Zip’ (this should sort the results by zip code, making it easier to spot case where both a husband and wife are included in the results)
• Select all records using the checkbox in the header row of the results, not the dot option above the results.  Then uncheck any records you may not want to include
• In the ‘Action’ drop down, click on ‘Print/Merge Document’
• After the Print/Merge Document page loads, click in the ‘Use Template’ field and select the appropriate printed reminder template- currently ‘zz-Membership renewal Covi19 – print’. This should populate the ‘Document Body’ field. Use the inner scrollbar to scroll down and verify you’ve selected the correct template
• The ‘Activity Subject’ field may be left blank or set to something like ‘August renewal letter’
• If necessary, use the outer scrollbar, scroll to the top or bottom of the page. The document type should already be set to pdf.  Click the Download Document’ button. You should receive a pdf download, which you can either save to print later (be sure to pay attention to where you save it and what you name it), though it’s a good idea to at least open the pdf at this to be sure it looks okay).
• Click in the ‘Use Template’ field and change the template to the appropriate membership renewal envelope – currently ‘zzz- #10 Membership renewal envelope’
• Click the Download Document’ button. You should receive a pdf download appropriate for printing envelopes, where the envelopes are in the same order as the letters.  You can either save the pdf to print later (be sure to pay attention to where you save it and what you name it), though it’s a good idea to at least open the pdf at this to be sure it looks okay).
• After both letter and envelope pdfs have been downloaded, clicking the ‘Cancel’ button will take you back to the search results, or you just close the Print/Merge page (or click onto some other page for another task)
• Print the letters pdf on 8.5 x 11 paper (with suitable print settings to print both sides), and the envelope pdf on #10 envelopes