pre-sales questions

Hi
I am helping a small charity set up their membership and picking the right membership plug in is crucial. I have been reading through your features list and would just like to verify a few things to make sure I have understood everything:
1. All posts in our site will be available to members and non-members and I will only want to protect certain pages and download files from non-members. This is OK in s2?
2. Will we be able to manually add new members and crucially payments? (Some members of the trust won’t renew online.)
3. Some of our members are happy to set up an ongoing subscription but most just pay for a year then we send out a reminder and they renew. Will your system support this?
4. Ideally your system would send out reminders as peoples year long membership was coming to an end but I gather it doesn’t do this? Have seen some code posted in a hack though so guess I could add this myself?
5. I see I can add custom registration fields. I assume members are able to log in after joining and update all their information including the custom fields?
6. We will not be offering free, guest or trial membership only paid (we are going to be running event espresso and membership means people will get a discount on events – which we would not want a free membership getting.) I’m not forced to offer a free membership option when people sign up am I ?
7. Will I be able to see a full membership and transaction history for each member i.e. if I have membership levels of general, teaching and student then if someone were a general member in their first year, a student in their second year and a teaching member in their third would I be able to look at this individual member and see this membership history along with the payments made for each year?

Hope that all makes sense. Thank you in advance for your help.

Hello s2.
Much of the documentation on the site is quite extensive and greatly appreciated. I would like to piggyback on question 7 from Gillian as to whether their is standard reporting and what the reports look like. If my organization has 7 different member levels, at the end of the month would a be able to see a summary of member numbers in each category? Could I compare it to the month previous and determine if my organization grew its membership? The year prior to get a year over year snapshot? Or will I need to export a csv file and use another program to analyze the data.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hello s2.
Much of the documentation on the site is quite extensive and greatly appreciated. I would like to piggyback on question 7 from Gillian as to whether their is standard reporting and what the reports look like. If my organization has 7 different member levels, at the end of the month would a be able to see a summary of member numbers in each category? Could I compare it to the month previous and determine if my organization grew its membership? The year prior to get a year over year snapshot? Or will I need to export a csv file and use another program to analyze the data.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hello Steven, yeah it’s not possible as-is with s2Member. You would have to do some kind of script of your own to be able to track this.

– Eduan

Hi
Is it possible for someone to answer my original questions? Many thanks.

Gillian

Sorry I missed your original post, Gillian.

1. All posts in our site will be available to members and non-members and I will only want to protect certain pages and download files from non-members. This is OK in s2?

Yes, you can protect just some pages and files.

2. Will we be able to manually add new members and crucially payments? (Some members of the trust won’t renew online.)

Yes, you can modify any user’s profile manually to change his role to one of the paid ones and change his EOT time as he makes new payments offline.

3. Some of our members are happy to set up an ongoing subscription but most just pay for a year then we send out a reminder and they renew. Will your system support this?

They can pay for a year, not a problem. s2Member doesn’t send reminders yet, though.

4. Ideally your system would send out reminders as peoples year long membership was coming to an end but I gather it doesn’t do this? Have seen some code posted in a hack though so guess I could add this myself?

Right, you could create a customization to achieve this. Here’s one shared some time ago: http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/setting-up-eot-notifications/

5. I see I can add custom registration fields. I assume members are able to log in after joining and update all their information including the custom fields?

That’s correct, from their profile page, unless you set the custom profile field to not show there.

6. We will not be offering free, guest or trial membership only paid (we are going to be running event espresso and membership means people will get a discount on events – which we would not want a free membership getting.) I’m not forced to offer a free membership option when people sign up am I ?

No, you can disable open registrations from here: [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Open Registration[/hilite]

7. Will I be able to see a full membership and transaction history for each member i.e. if I have membership levels of general, teaching and student then if someone were a general member in their first year, a student in their second year and a teaching member in their third would I be able to look at this individual member and see this membership history along with the payments made for each year?

No, s2Member doesn’t keep a record of this yet. You could create a payment notification to be emailed to an address for these, and then search there, though. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Notifications -› Payment Notifications -> Email[/hilite]

---

I hope that helps!