Membership Renewal Notification Procedure
The target audience for this procedure is the Membership Chair and committee members. The time frame starts right after the board of directors have approved the upcoming fiscal year budget and set the annual dues amount.
This procedure does NOT cover:
- A Revised Annual Dues Amount should the dues amount change, and
- Processing a Renewal Order, which are separate procedures.
The membership renewal shall start on July 1st and proceed until noon on the Sunday after the August monthly membership meeting. At 12:01pm, the then approved late fee shall be applied to all subsequent renewals. Members with pending status should be reminded in the week before late fee is added warning of the impending increase in membership.
- When the member annual dues are set and at least by June 30th,
Prepare the upcoming fiscal year membership renewal product. Suggest cloning the current fiscal year product and then edit the clone to meeting upcoming fiscal year properties. After testing the product, make it’s Stock Status as Out of Stock to inhibit accidental use. - Edit the “renew” redirection instruction in .htaccess to point to the upcoming fiscal year product.
- Log onto cpanel.
- Access “Files”.
- Navigate to the WWW site root directory, usually, /home/hcwg/public_html/.
- Edit the .htaccess file.
- Locate the section labeled: # HCWG Webmaster Permanent redirect:
- Locate the line beginning with: Redirect permanent “/renew/” “/product/
- Append the upcoming fiscal year address value that follows /product/.
- Save.
- Test this generic hyperlink to ensure navigation is near immediate to the desired upcoming fiscal year renewal product: https://hcwg.org/renew/.
- Verify that a logged in member with Pending status is presented with the renew button prompt on the website top level homepage and on the My Account page.
- Using your own or a test WP user profile, change the mem_stat field value to Pending.
- New visit the website logged in with the test account credentials.
- Check for “Renew” button in the profile block on the homepage.
- Check for the Renew button on the My Account page.
- Repair as needed.
- Verify MS Office Mail Merge is ready.
The Membership Chair will use Microsoft Outlook and Excel to run a mail merge. An MS Word Template for renewal will merge with a Pending User list exported from WordPress to a CSV file. The file will be edited in Excel and saved as an XLSX file. This file will be used as the datasource to send out personalized emails to the Pending status members.- Open the reusable Excel Source file, PendingRenewal.xlsx. Remove all entries except for yourself and one other preview tester, such as the Webmaster or another membership committee member. Make any edits as needed for a test mail merge. Save the file.
- Access the MS Word renewal template, PendingMemberMessage.docx, and update the applicable fiscal year text. The Renew hyperlink is fixed to point to a redirected address, per above, Step 2. When the Word template document was opened, it should have prompted to open the Excel file too. Allow it. Save the edited file.
- Initiate a Mail Merge to Email process. The Source is user_email. The Subject is: HCWG Member Renewal Notice FY25-26 (or current fiscal year). The message type is HTML.
- The evening of June 30th,
Export target members.- Select the Members to Renew view: https://hcwg.org/wp-admin/users.php?layout=68635d775f98c, filters on Membership Group, Member Active and Excludes Lifetime membership. Make sure the number of rows returned matches the home screen’s Membership Count minus the lifetime members (six in 2025).
- Select to export. Change the filename from wp-users-export-2025-07-01.csv to wp-users-export-Pending-2025-07-01.csv
- Move the exported CSV file to the Renewals working directory.
- Open PendingRenewal.xlsx, preserve the formula for the years a member calculation. Clear the test entries. Import the CSV file.
- Apply the Years a Member formula to all rows.
- Filter on Paid Through Dates equal to the ending fiscal year to isolate those who recently joined or somehow paid more than one fiscal year dues amount. Delete any rows that should not be prompted to renew.
- Add in any members who were not otherwise included and who should receive a renewal email.
- Save the file.
- At 12:01AM, July 1st:
- Edit the current FY renewal product to be In Stock and in the catalog.
- Edit the online My Badge page to reflect the new fiscal year.
- Mark all WP users in the Renew list as “Pending”.
- Make the Membership Chair email account the Default account in Outlook.
- Open the PendingRenewal.xlsx file. Remove the test entries.
- Import the just exported target Pending status members.
- Open the MS Word renewal notice email template, PendingMemberMessage.docx. Allow to read the data source.
- Spot verify the range of data by clicking the icon.
- Initiate a Mail Merge to Email process. The Source is user_email. The Subject is: HCWG Member Renewal Notice FY25-26 (or current fiscal year). The message type is HTML.
- Monitor the output to ensure that the number of messages sent matches the number of rows in the PendingRenewal.xlsx data set.
- Send a report to the treasurer describing the number of renewal notices sent. Copy the President and Vice President.
- Once each evening for the first few weeks, process renewal orders.
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