Donor Renewals: Plans vs. Memberships

Plans are really nice! I like using plans for this.

I have Plan Types set up as quarters. Major Donor Q1 Renewal, Major Donor Q2 Renewal, etc.

I also have Plan Status set up Early Cultivation, Mid- Cultivation, Solicit, Steward - Pledge Received, Steward - Gift Received.

Gift officers can pull their plans based on type and status to determine who they should contact.

The trick is keeping the plans up to date. Many gift officers bounce so quickly from person to person that sometimes the updating doesn’t occur. So learning how to update the plans and focusing on the few things they need to update – less is more.

Another nice thing about plans is that before the year begins, a list of donors and contribution dates can be pulled. Donors can be identified and placed into quarters based on your team’s decision. Then those lists can be used to MASS produce the Plans so that your team can hit the ground running.

I hope that helps.

Marie

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Marie Kocher | Development Assistant

Kansas City Ballet | Todd Bolender Center for Dance & Creativity

500 W. Pershing Road, Kansas City, MO 64108

816.216.5582 (D) | 816.931.2232 x1382 (O) | 816.931.1172 (fax)

kcballet.org

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Joseph Fernicola
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 11:38 AM
To: Marie Kocher <mkocher@kcballet.org>
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Donor Renewals: Plans vs. Memberships

We have a small development team and we are looking to improve our routine major donor renewal process.  Of course every donor renews at a different time of year, so that is the real challenge here.  Currently our team uses a lot of Excel for this and we want to switch to using Tessitura more for this process.

I am curious if people recommend either plans or memberships for tracking major donor renewals .  It seems like there are pros to using each.  We want to use the method that is the easiest, most efficient, and makes the most sense for our small development team.

Ideas, thoughts, etc?

--Joe

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Hi, Joe:

I think that memberships are more designed for this process out of the box. Anyway, that’s what we use—although currently most of our memberships expire at the same time.

Several years ago, we tried out rolling memberships, and sent out monthly letters based on people set to lapse in the following month. For us, rolling memberships didn’t really make sense, but it wasn’t too hard to manage.

Lucie

Hi Joe,

We don’t all exactly use memberships for this, but Memberships would work very well here.  We do have rolling memberships.  So we could simply run a membership expiration report to determine when donors are about to expire. 

We do set up plans for every donor or prospect over $1,000 every year.  However, the development officers still have to go into each one and set a time frame for them to renew.  Although, we always have a huge push at the beginning of the season for donors to at least renew their pledge.

The great thing about Tessitura, I think there are several great ways to manage when donors renew.

Best,

Tony

Hi, Joe:

I think that memberships are more designed for this process out of the box. Anyway, that’s what we use—although currently most of our memberships expire at the same time.

Several years ago, we tried out rolling memberships, and sent out monthly letters based on people set to lapse in the following month. For us, rolling memberships didn’t really make sense, but it wasn’t too hard to manage.

Lucie

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Hi Joe,

We ask our major donors to give an increase of 10% each year, and our donor memberships are ranges ($250-$499 for example), so not only do we have rolling expirations, but also highly customized amounts. To that end we’ve found that combining Memberships AND Plans has been most effective. It was a learning curve for sure, but it allows me to handle the outgoing side of 700+ donor renewals mostly by myself.

Best,

Amy Britt

Development Associate, Annual Fund

Walker Art Center

612.375.5838