CiviCRM & Drupal for Membership Management

The CiviCRM module for Drupal is a highly configurable, nearly out-of-the-box solution for deployment of a membership registration process. For a member-management system with only new registrations (no existing data to import), we set up custom data profiles to build the forms and contribution pages to handle membership registration.

Member information was to provided by the members themselves, so a very user-friendly process was needed. Members had to be authenticated users, so Drupal accounts were set up first. Members were emailed their login and a link, which directed them to the member registration form. The form is actually a CiviCRM contribution page - a great feature for online campaigns or pledge drives which can have online payments turned on or off. In this case, online payments were not required.

Custom profiles support multiple types of custom fields. We added all required membership fields to our custom profile, and assigned the profile to our contribution pages.

Membership types also can be customized. We created the required types (specifying dues, duration, renewals) and assigned them to our contribution pages.

The result is a user-friendly, customized online registration process that not long ago we would have built from scratch. Of course, the real benefit is the CiviCRM features that make it a robust membership system: custom fields, activities management, CiviMail, online payments, and solid data management and reporting.