Upcoming renewals lists the memberships due to expire in a period you choose. From there you can remind payers and members by email or SMS, run your renewal Worker Bees for the memberships you select, or set up a Worker Bee that runs automatically for every renewal.

Before you start

  • You need memberships:read:memberships to see the page.
  • Sending reminders also needs relationships:write:contacts, because the messages go to contacts.
  • Fire worker bees needs memberships:write:memberships.
  • Setting up an automation needs access to Worker Bees.

See the permission catalogue.

See what’s due

  1. Open Memberships → Upcoming renewals.
  2. Under Renewals due, choose This week, In the next X days, This month or This quarter. For In the next X days, enter a number of Days from 1 to 365.
  3. Check the dates shown beside the filter (“Renewing between … and …”).

Every period starts today. Weeks run Monday to Sunday, and quarters are calendar quarters. Only Active and Lapsing memberships are listed; Pending, Expired and Cancelled ones are not.

Each row shows the Number, Payer, Type, Members, Status, Renewal date and how soon it’s Due (Today or “In 12 days”). Select a row to open the membership. The page remembers your period in its web address, so you can bookmark or share a view.

Send a renewal reminder

  1. Tick the memberships you want to remind, or tick the box in the heading to select them all.
  2. Choose Send renewal reminder.
  3. Under Send to, choose Payers, or Payers and members.
  4. Under Channels, choose Email, SMS or both.
  5. Choose a Consent purpose. Only purposes that cover every channel you chose are listed. Transactional (no consent needed) skips the consent check.
  6. Edit the Email subject and Email message, or the SMS message. An SMS can be up to 900 characters. You can personalise the text with {firstName}, {lastName}, {membershipType}, {membershipNumber} and {expiryDate}.
  7. Choose Send to (the button shows how many contacts will be messaged).

Check the channels, purpose and text carefully before you send. Messages go as soon as you confirm, and there’s no way to recall them.

Each contact gets one message per channel, even if they appear on several of the renewals you selected; the message is about their earliest renewal.

Who doesn’t get a reminder

Every contact is checked before anything is sent. When sending finishes, you’ll see how many were sent and why the rest weren’t:

Reason Meaning
without consent They haven’t consented to the chosen purpose on that channel
without an address No email address is recorded, or for SMS, no phone number in international format (such as +447700900123)
child or deceased Never messaged, even with Transactional (no consent needed)
unavailable The contact doesn’t exist or you can’t see their record
failed Sending failed for that contact

If sending stops partway, the message tells you how many had already been sent. Check before sending again, so nobody gets the reminder twice.

Run Worker Bees for selected renewals

Fire worker bees announces the memberships you’ve ticked as due for renewal, so every active Worker Bee triggered by Membership renewal due for the period you’re viewing runs for each of them.

  1. Tick the memberships, then choose Fire worker bees.
  2. Read the summary and choose Fire for (the button shows the number of memberships).

You’ll see how many memberships were sent to Worker Bees and how many were skipped. A membership is skipped if, for example, it’s no longer due in that period or is no longer Active or Lapsing.

Automate renewals with a Worker Bee

Every day, ThirdSectorBee announces memberships due for renewal to Worker Bees:

  • on Mondays, for this week
  • on the first day of each month, for this month
  • on the first day of each quarter, for this quarter
  • every day, for memberships exactly 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days from their renewal date.

To set one up, choose the period on Upcoming renewals, then choose Automate with a worker bee. The Worker Bee wizard opens with the Membership renewal due trigger chosen and a Due within condition for that period already added, so the bee runs once per renewal rather than once for every period. If you’re viewing In the next X days with a number other than 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90, the condition isn’t added; pick one of those periods in the wizard.

The trigger also lets you check Raised by (scheduled or manual, meaning Fire worker bees), Membership type, Status, Membership number, Expiry date and Days until renewal. Actions that work on a contact are sent to the membership’s payer. See Create a Worker Bee and Trigger types and actions.