Forms to solicit new members and retain the existing ones

Having great administrative tools is wonderful, but we also want to be able to expose membership signup and renewal pages on our website in order to solicit new members and retain existing members. In CiviCRM, we do this through a contribution page.

Contribution pages are used to solicit funds from site visitors. This may be for general donations, sponsorships, pledges, campaigns, or in our case, memberships. Begin by visiting the Contributions | New Contribution page.

CiviCRM will walk you through a nine-step wizard to configure your page. We will not review all of the options available, but focus on the key elements pertinent to membership signup pages.

In the first step of the wizard, you will see a Contribution Type field. Its use, for our purposes, can be a bit misleading. As you recall, when we defined membership types, we assigned a contribution type to each. When processing memberships through a contribution page, whatever contribution...