Making auto-renew membership the default

Taking the admin burden off your operations? Check. Well, a one feature I’ve been implementing recently making sure the auto-renew checkbox is checked by default for membership pages.

Yes, you could send reminders via Administer > Communications > Scheduled Reminders to prompt people to renew. But why not remove that altogether and go for simplicity?

Note: You should still notify members/donors that they will have a donation automatically applied ahead of time; it’s definitely the best practice.

So how do you do it?

Since Form Builder isn’t yet ready to accept contributions –that is estimated to be near the end of 2025, this applies to sites using the tried and true profile forms. You can opt to use Joinery’s Profile Conditionals extension and adapt the conditions to which you want this behavior to occur.

I put the following code in it’s own profcond.settings.php. file in case you make a syntax error and want to quickly deactivate the conditionals to prevent it from breaking CiviCRM. Add include __DIR__ . ‘/profcond.settings.php‘; to civicrm.settings.php file for this setup.

This applies to all contribution pages that use a certain price field in a price set called “Yearly Membership”.

<?php
        
$civicrm_setting['com.joineryhq.profcond']['com.joineryhq.profcond']['contribution']['all'] = array(
          '01_auto_renew_is_checked' => array(
            'conditions' => array(
              'all_of' => array(
                array(
                  'selector' => 'input[name="price_7"]',
                    'op' => 'is_checked',
                    ),
                  ),
                ),
                'states' => array (
                  'pass' => array (
                    'selectors'  => array(
                      'input#auto_renew[type="checkbox"]' => array (
                        'properties' => array('checked' => TRUE),
                      ),
                    ),
                  ),
                  'fail' => array (
                    'selectors'  => array(
                      'input#auto_renew[type="checkbox"]' => array (
                        'properties' => array('checked' => FALSE),
                      ),
                    ),
                  ),
                ),
              ),
            );

Change out the price field (price_7) with yours. There are countless ways to change the conditions based on your use case. You can find more info on what’s possible here.

An alternative and more extreme measure is to force auto-renew, which is what one of my clients uses to good effect for all of it’s membership types. They raise over $100K/year and are the highest ranked fundraising organization within it’s group of state chapters, so I’m not going to argue with that.

To give donors confidence they will be able to control their subscription, they also use the Word Replacements feature so the language is changed from “Membership will renew automatically.” to “Membership will renew automatically. You can cancel at anytime.” And with Civi, a link in the email receipt allows you to cancel it as well.

There is also an alternative of using this https://github.com/adixon/ca.civicrm.contributionrecur extension that provides some utilities around recurrings, notably a “Default the “recurring payment” checkbox to checked” option master setting or per contribution page.

Here’s the deal:

Making it easy for donors to support you is win. Decreasing any friction helps with that. Losing donations because they forgot to get back to the email reminder is a reality of life. Spending time chasing them down costs you time, which costs you money.

So go ahead and make it easier for your donors to help you from the get-go.