The emails inviting members to renew their subscriptions online are scheduled to be sent out by Warners on Monday 30th January. As usual, these invitations will be sent only to members who have elected to renew online, or who joined online and didn’t take out a Direct Debit at the time.
I’m pleased to advise that the renewal process has been simplified considerably this year. Each member will receive a bespoke link which will take them to a Web form with their name, membership number, subscription amount and membership type prefilled – note that membership number, subscription amount and membership type cannot be altered. They will need to enter their billing address, which will be carried forward to the payment screen, use a button on the form to copy billing to mailing address and finally enter the email address to which they want payment verification sent. Then they’ll click a Buy Now button take them to a secure SagePay payment page accepting Visa and Mastercard, credit, debit, Visa Electron and Maestro.
As usual, a means for each member to verify the authenticity of the mail will be provided – clearly I won’t elaborate here on what this is.
I will continue to work with Warners to develop the renewal process – we will for example look for opportunities to prefill more data where possible.
The process has been tested in a range of environments but clearly we cannot replicate the myriad web browsers and devices in use across the world, so if you have problems, please contact Warners in the first instance and they’ll do their best to help.
Alan Regan, Chairman & Membership Secretary
I have been asked by one member how he goes about changing his membership type as a change to type is not supported in the current process. This was my response:
The only way to change membership type after the renewal has been issued is by phone to Warners. The renewal email has their phone contact details. The on-line renewal process this year can’t accommodate a change followed by a resend of the invitation at a different rate. This might be possible in the future but I can’t commit to this.
A very small number of members have contacted me to say that the link in the renewal invitation “doesn’t work” or “isn’t live”. This is probably because the line containing the link slightly exceeds 80 characters, which some email clients truncate to 80 characters, either losing the remaining few or putting them on a new line. Signs of this are that the link isn’t clickable, the page isn’t pre-filled with your data, or the presence of spurious characters under the link.
We’ve reformatted the invitation for when we send out reminders in March, but unfortunately we can’t re-send individual renewal emails right now. So if you’re experience this problem now, try opening the renewal email in your browser (there is a link at the top of the email to do this) then in the browser, select the renewal link from “http://16mm” to the end of the link (it spreads onto the next line) and copy & paste it straight into your browser. If this doesn’t work, then you’ll have either to renew by phone or wait for the reminders to be sent in March.
l also could not gain access to renew my membership, phoned in the end, all sorted.