This is the seventh video of 9 in the Tendenci Memberships Module Training series to teach Tendenci site admins how to use the memberships module features. This video shows you how to create and customize member notices for renewals and autoresponders.
How to create and customize member notices for renewals and autoresponders
One of the important features that we've built into your Tendenci membership module for your website are our notifications to your members.
To get to the administration page for your notices, you would come to your memberships tab and click on notices. This will take you to the admin backend for your membership notices and this site has six notices already and your site will come with these standard six, out of the box that we've created for you that you can then go in and customize.
The purpose of these notices is so that when your members join or when their renewals are coming up, you don't have to worry about remembering to send each of them an email or notification. Our system will do it for you and you can customize that.
The standard six talk about renewal reminders after expiration. There's a renewal auto-responder that goes out before their membership has expired. Then there's a membership auto-responder for welcoming the new member who has just joined.
These notices will go out to each individual member at the right time for them. So if you have members who are joining throughout the month, throughout the year at different times, they will all receive their notices based on the dates when they joined or when their membership is about to expire individually. It will save you and your site administrator a lot of time having to keep up your communication with your members.
You can also add new notices and that's over here on the right hand side, to add a notice. I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like. You can name it anything you'd like. So let's say we're going to call this, one week after joining, and this is more a name for you to know about because we'll have a subject line later so when to send, we're going to send it seven days after the join date. Then you select the membership type that will receive this notice and in this case we'll have it go 9to the professional members.
So then we have the email fields and this is what's going to actually go to the member in an email notification so the subject is. We'll just say "welcome to the organization, how has your first week been?" You can customize it, that will be the email subject line. Then you can select if you like it to be HTML or plain text.
If you select HTML then you're able to use the WYSIWYG editor to add images, graphics, hyperlinks and it will be able to create a rich newsletter type feel. You can also select the default plain text, for people if you have a lot of members, for example, who don't have smart phones and are looking at their email from Blackberry or if you just want to send a simple greeting, not have it be too fancy.
The sender is going to be the email address of where you want those replies to go to. So for example, I'm sending it out from my email address and then your member will see it and reply to it. The sender display is going to be the name you want it to say, it can be an email address as well, and it will allow you to personalize it. So you can enter anything you like there.
If you want to add media, you simply upload it through the WYSIWYG. We'll just insert an image here and you can customize it just like we've been doing with other content in the site. Then if you look down here, we have added what we call tokens that allow you to personalize your message to your members. For example this says for a first name field you would use this right here inside the email which means up here you would go, dear first name. And then when your member receives this email, instead of it saying "first underscore name" it will insert their member name based on the individuals profile.
You can click here and view a full list of the different available tokens. That way you can kind of customize it for each member the way they would like to receive it. Then status is right here and you click save. So now there's a one week after joining and you can see it goes to professional members and it's active.
So that's how you go ahead and add one of these auto-renewal notices and you can have as many as you would like. There are a couple of things take note of inside of membership notices and one of those is that under membership type here you see that the standard ones say none compared to the one week after joining is professional members. So only professional members will receive this one week after joining notice, whereas these others that say none will actually go to all membership types not just one specific type so the none can be a little bit unclear.
The second thing is that these view logs, you can click on a notice log here, and there won't be anything here because it's a new site however, once you've started to send notices out, you will see each of those notifications as a log here so you'll be able to view which notices went out and who it went to and can keep track of whether or not those notices are going out to people.