Hi everyone!
We are trying to decide whether we should set up our donor levels in Tessitura as Rolling or Fixed memberships. I am curious to hear what other organizations are doing, and what the pros/cons are for each method?
It seems that rolling memberships would make it easier to track benefits, and fixed would be easier for pulling our annual program listing (which lists everyone that contributed from August 1st through July 31st - our fiscal year).
Thank you for your help!
Hi Nicole,
We use rolling memberships. We rely heavily on membership expiration dates to know when to go back to our donors to ask them to renew for another year. If you don't work that way, (maybe you just do one or two big campaigns a year in which you ask everybody, e.g.,) you may not need that. If you have a rolling year of benefits from when the person makes the gift, I think it definitely makes sense to use rolling dates.
There's definitely some complexity. If somebody gives you $5,000 in January and then they give another $1,000 in October for a special project, do you apply the additional $1K toward their existing membership at the $5K level and assume they'll make another gift when you ask again in January? Or do you give them a new membership at the $1K level starting after their current membership expires? That type of situation comes up fairly regularly, especially among higher level donors. We have to make a lot of case-by-case decisions about how to apply gifts to memberships and which start and end dates to use. (Sometimes we choose wrong and have to go back and change things later, which is not always a straightforward process.)
You might find better solutions for pulling your program listings than memberships. If you poke around these forums a bit I think you'll see that there's more than one approach!