I recently received a call from a donor whose name did not pull for the donor acknowledgements in our Prompter (playbill). He has periodically given in June - July every year, and should have pulled for recognition. I looked at his record, and the only reason I can think why he didn't pull is that this past year, his membership had lapsed by the time he renewed his contribution, and Tessitura didn't automatically update his membership.
I'm still a little confused why he isn't pulling for our listing, because our prompter listings are set up to pull based on contribution date, campaign, and total giving within that time frame, which should have included his gift this past July. Anyone have any ideas on a) how to make sure memberships are being automatically updated with each contribution entry and b) figuring why my donor isn't pulling for our prompter listing?
Thanks!
Update:
I've figured out why my donor wasn't pulling for the list - I had some settings messed up on my list. However, it has been an ongoing frustration to make sure memberships are being updated. Anyone have any ideas on part a) of my above question?
Hi Debbie,
We had a very long and stressful road down the membership path. The bottom line was, we simply didn't get it. Now that we've learned more about it it's working much better for us and we are finally able to rely on memberships regularly as being accurate.
I have two suggestions for you:
1) Make sure the Membership Update Utility is being run on a regular basis (as it makes sense for your business rules) and that the parameters are set to what you need them to be. Also, one of the recent Tess upgrades now allows that report to show you the changes it has made when it is run. We have the report scheduled nightly and the results email to our contribution entry folks so they can keep an eye out for unusual behaviour.
2) Make sure your contribution entry staff members have thoroughly read and clearly understand the documentation on memberships. We discovered that our staff members were entering and updating memberships completely wrong because they didn't understand what the documentation was telling them. When we all sat down and read through it together and went into our test system to try certain things the light bulbs started to click that their processes had been incorrect the whole time.
Now that those two items have been addressed here we have virtually no issues with memberships and are much happier for it!