Hi everyone,
I need some membership advice. We have a typical annual membership structure: people donate a specific amount and they get benefits and are recognized at that level. The memberships expire after a year unless they're renewed. It's standard.
The fundraising team wants to raise money for a new initiative that will last about two years. Their plan is to create a membership around this initiative separate from our regular membership. This new membership would have it's own set of benefits and people would be recognized separately from their annual gifts.
The first idea was to create a new membership organization. I hesitate to do this. I've had two competing membership organizations before. The members were not mutually exclusive (they wouldn't be in the new initiative either) so some people had two active memberships. Reports, custom features, and output set elements all broke because of this. Not to mention, I created an entirely new membership organization for what turned out to be 7 donors.
Another idea was to incorporate this new initiative into the existing membership structure. Gifts to this fund would upgrade an existing membership. The downside of this idea is that we can't track the non-deductible amount in Tessitura and someone wouldn't be able to decline benefits for the new initiative while keeping their benefits from the annual membership.
How do other organizations handle situations like this? I can see the pros and cons of creating a new membership organization, but also the pros and cons of incorporating it into the existing membership structure. Does anyone have any other ideas?
Allison
Why are you considering the membership organization? In other words, what do membership records on customer accounts get you?
For example, do you plan to use entitlements, renew these folks, need non-deductible components, need staggered expiration dates, need to offer benefits on your web site, and your web site already is keyed into memberships? If any of those things are true, and I could imagine that having the membership records would be helpful or necessary for other reasons as well. Then, of course, do the memberships and get good at pulling the lists you need.
However, if none of those things are true, have you considered a constituency code on a set of funds for each of the levels? The funds could share the same GL coding. You just use the different funds to reflect your levels. These funds would be associated with a specific campaign that only gets funds for that program.
just a quick $0.02
Changing your current membership organization to support this shortish term initiative, may cause you problems when you are ready to shut down this initiative in two years. I'd recomend if you are going to us the current membership program that is working for you. That you carefully consider your exit strategy
To be clear, I don't want the membership organization. Someone suggested it without knowing the consequences and it caught on with others. There are specific program benefits that have non-deductible amounts associated and that's the only reason a membership organization would be helpful. I would much rather have funds/designations and a constituency with a start and end date. I just want to know what other organizations do in this situation so I can prove that a second membership organization is not the way to go.
You might be able to use Premiums to deal with the Non-Deductible Amounts? However, now things are getting more complicated. You probably don't want to simulate a second membership program.
Best way to figure this out is to try to set what you are thinking about in Test and see what happens. Then you know and can show folks exactly what is going to happen in your system.
Ok, that's my $0.04.
I'll look into premiums for non-deductible amounts. I definitely don't want a second membership program when a lot of our donor pool would overlap. I made that mistake years ago and I learned my lesson. Thanks for your $0.04!