Updating member statuses maintains current records on the overall status of your members and tracks several aspects of membership, including membership renewals and expired members. If member statuses are not changed, some members might retain unwarranted access to organizational privileges.
Note: The Member status and Contact status do not affect the determination of whether a user is considered a member. Only the Customer type is used to determine whether the user is a member.
iMIS uses member status and date to track changes in a contact’s primary membership, which translate to their customer type and contact status.
The following properties in iMIS are all related to a contact’s member status:
- Member Status (Name.MEMBER_STATUS):
- Assigned based on properties in a contact’s primary membership and changed at the time of join or renewal
- Not user-definable
- Can be New, Dropped, Renewed, or Reinstated
- Contact Status (Name.STATUS):
- Is user-definable from a contact's account page (Overview or Membership tab)
- Must always be defined using a code that begins with A (Active), I (Inactive), S (Suspended), or D (Dropped)
- Defined in a general lookup table named MEMBER_STATUS (Settings > General lookup tables)
- Customer type (Name.MEMBER_TYPE):
- Contact's classification
- Can be a Member or Non-member type
Member Status
The member status (Name.MEMBER_STATUS) is a read-only field that iMIS updates when there are changes to a contact's primary membership (i.e. their Customer type/Contact status).
The Member Status indicates the current status of a contact record as it relates to the organization’s membership structure defined in their Contact status and Customer type. The Member Status will be blank if a contact record is added to the database with a Non-member customer type. Member statuses are only assigned to contacts who have had, at any time, a member customer type. Once a contact has been a member, they will always have a Member status, regardless of their current customer type.
The values that iMIS will assign to this property are one of the following based on the change made to the contact’s primary membership:
- New (N) - Assigned whenever the contact’s Customer type is changed from a non-member to a member and their current Member Status is not Dropped.
- Dropped (D) - Assigned when the following conditions are met at the time that a billing payment is posted and advances the member’s paid through date:
- A contact’s Customer type changes from member to non-member.
- A contact’s current Customer type is a member and their Contact Status changes from an Active state to one of the following:
- Suspended
- Inactive
- Marked for deletion
- Renewed (R) - Assigned when the following conditions are met at the time that a billing payment is posted and advances the member’s paid through date:
- The contact’s current Customer type is a member.
- The contact’s current Member Status is New.
- Reinstated (S) - Assigned when one of the following occurs:
- A contact’s current Member Status is Dropped and their Customer type changes from a non-member to a member, provided that their current Contact Status is in an Active state.
- A contact’s current Customer type is a member, their current Member Status is Dropped, and a billing payment is posted that advances the member’s paid-through date. In this specific case, Contact Status is cleared if it is in any state that is not an Active state.
- A contact’s current Customer type is a member and their Contact Status changes to an Active state from any of the following states:
- Suspended
- Inactive
- Marked for deletion
Note: If you post a billing payment for a contact with a Dropped member status, the Member Status is set to Reinstated and the Contact Status codes are changed from Suspended or Inactive to Active.
Whenever the Member Status changes, the date property (Name.MEMBER_STATUS_DATE) is set to the date the change occurred. This field is also read only.
Contact Status
Unlike the Member Status property, the Contact Status (Name.STATUS) property is user-definable. The Contact Status property has a direct impact on the Member Status property if the user-defined values satisfy certain system-defined rules. These rules (defined in Member Status) ensure that changes in a contact’s overall status are properly reflected by the Member Status related to their primary membership.
The values available for selection when editing the Contact Status property are defined in a general lookup table named MEMBER_STATUS (Settings > General lookup tables).
Defining Contact Status
A Contact Status is defined by a Code and Description. Code values can be any five-character alpha-numeric value. Codes that begin with one of the following four system-defined letters will have specific behavioral impacts that will, along with Customer type, impact Member Status:
- A – Contact is in an Active state.
- I – Contact is in an Inactive state.
- S – Contact is in a Suspended state.
- D – Contact is in a Deleted state.
Note: Code values that begin with any other letter are valid, but they are not considered as having any significance for specific behavioral impacts.
The description can be any alpha-numeric value up to 255 characters and should be a more meaningful value when shown to an end user (for example, I-SB = Inactive – On Sabbatical).
Note: To review the Contact Status for all contacts of your organization, see Building a list of contacts with their Contact Status.
Customer type
Customer types (Name.MEMBER_TYPE) can be member or non-member. Changes between member and non-member customer types directly impact a contact’s Member Status. For more information, review the rules defined in the Member status section of this article.
The Is a member checkbox in the customer type configuration determines if a customer type is a member or non-member customer type. For more information regarding Customer types, see Customer types.