Club Membership Quandary

Catherine Goodwin $organization over 9 years ago

Hi all,

I am posting to a number of forums, because my quandary doesn't fit
under any of the conventional headings...

We sell annual boating club memberships in Tessitura. For the last few
years, we've built them as a perf with different price types indicating
the various levels (family, early bird, spouse, regular, etc.). We use
the Membership module to track expiration and renewal information, so
when a membership is sold in Ticket Orders, we have to add a zero value
membership record in the constituent's History tab.

The manual nature of this process is causing problems. Inevitably,
someone forgets to add the membership and so all of the membership
reporting is suspect. Eventually, I'd like our developer to create a
service interceptor that adds the membership automatically, but another
idea I've been toying with is that we could sell memberships as a
contribution in an order. This would have the advantage of adding the
membership automatically, but I am not sure if there are inherent
problems with using Contributions to sell things that are not actually
contributions. Does anyone else do anything like this? Are there
technical, procedural, fiscal or legal things I should be aware of?

I have also thought of ditching the Membership module and just tracking
expiration and renewal info using order dates. Basically, I am weighing
the relative merits of the 3 options.

Thanks in advance for any input you may have! Catherine

cgoodwin.vcf

Parents

Former Member $organization over 9 years ago

Hi Catherine,

This was something done here very briefly... I still have nightmares about it. The problems introduced by recording non-contributed income in contributions became significant. It is not impossible to run contribution reports without certain transactions (and therefore exclude the non-contributed amounts), but you effectively compromise ability of your org's staff to do very basic contribution reporting easily.

Every contribution related report run in Tessitura would need to specifically exclude the transactions, so every user needs to understand campaign-fund-designation setup of the non-contribution transactions to avoid it properly, which is unrealistic. Every list created in list manager regarding contributions needs to specifically exclude these contributions. The headers at the top of the screen which show total giving will be incorrect - non-donors will look like donors. Every T-Stats would have to be setup to specifically exclude those transactions, and the dimensions for Total Giving, Current Fiscal Year giving, etc. would be incorrect.

That said, I really love your interceptor idea!

Best regards,
Carla

Carla Moy
Development Manager, 92nd Street Y
P: 212.415.5482 | cmoy@92y.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Catherine Goodwin
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2016 11:44 PM
To: Carla Moy
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Club Membership Quandary

Hi all,

I am posting to a number of forums, because my quandary doesn't fit under any of the conventional headings...

We sell annual boating club memberships in Tessitura. For the last few years, we've built them as a perf with different price types indicating the various levels (family, early bird, spouse, regular, etc.). We use the Membership module to track expiration and renewal information, so when a membership is sold in Ticket Orders, we have to add a zero value membership record in the constituent's History tab.

The manual nature of this process is causing problems. Inevitably, someone forgets to add the membership and so all of the membership reporting is suspect. Eventually, I'd like our developer to create a service interceptor that adds the membership automatically, but another idea I've been toying with is that we could sell memberships as a contribution in an order. This would have the advantage of adding the membership automatically, but I am not sure if there are inherent problems with using Contributions to sell things that are not actually contributions. Does anyone else do anything like this? Are there technical, procedural, fiscal or legal things I should be aware of?

I have also thought of ditching the Membership module and just tracking expiration and renewal info using order dates. Basically, I am weighing the relative merits of the 3 options.

Thanks in advance for any input you may have! Catherine

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Former Member $organization over 9 years ago

Hi Catherine,

This was something done here very briefly... I still have nightmares about it. The problems introduced by recording non-contributed income in contributions became significant. It is not impossible to run contribution reports without certain transactions (and therefore exclude the non-contributed amounts), but you effectively compromise ability of your org's staff to do very basic contribution reporting easily.

Every contribution related report run in Tessitura would need to specifically exclude the transactions, so every user needs to understand campaign-fund-designation setup of the non-contribution transactions to avoid it properly, which is unrealistic. Every list created in list manager regarding contributions needs to specifically exclude these contributions. The headers at the top of the screen which show total giving will be incorrect - non-donors will look like donors. Every T-Stats would have to be setup to specifically exclude those transactions, and the dimensions for Total Giving, Current Fiscal Year giving, etc. would be incorrect.

That said, I really love your interceptor idea!

Best regards,
Carla

Carla Moy
Development Manager, 92nd Street Y
P: 212.415.5482 | cmoy@92y.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Catherine Goodwin
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2016 11:44 PM
To: Carla Moy
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Club Membership Quandary

Hi all,

I am posting to a number of forums, because my quandary doesn't fit under any of the conventional headings...

We sell annual boating club memberships in Tessitura. For the last few years, we've built them as a perf with different price types indicating the various levels (family, early bird, spouse, regular, etc.). We use the Membership module to track expiration and renewal information, so when a membership is sold in Ticket Orders, we have to add a zero value membership record in the constituent's History tab.

The manual nature of this process is causing problems. Inevitably, someone forgets to add the membership and so all of the membership reporting is suspect. Eventually, I'd like our developer to create a service interceptor that adds the membership automatically, but another idea I've been toying with is that we could sell memberships as a contribution in an order. This would have the advantage of adding the membership automatically, but I am not sure if there are inherent problems with using Contributions to sell things that are not actually contributions. Does anyone else do anything like this? Are there technical, procedural, fiscal or legal things I should be aware of?

I have also thought of ditching the Membership module and just tracking expiration and renewal info using order dates. Basically, I am weighing the relative merits of the 3 options.

Thanks in advance for any input you may have! Catherine

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums.

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