Memberships without contributions

We established a new membership organization of “complimentary” (or in your case, honorary) memberships to track major donors who get certain member benefits without actually being members.  Since it is a separate organization, a patron can have this type of membership in addition to the regular one.  We don’t send renewals for it, but it’s easy to pull reports and of course it expires at whatever time we choose.  They are set up manually.

How do you handle benefits that correspond the membership system, but aren't based on a contribution to a membership campaign?

  We have set up "honorary" and "by virtue of" memberships , but we're wondering if there may be a better way.

An example that has us considering alternative methods is this:  when there is a contribution, the native functionality makes it easy to allocate membership benefits, but when there is no contribution, AND there is an existing active membership, we have to wait until the existing membership expires to create a new membership, and not forget to set a tickler, and follow up promptly, and record or recall the details, etc.  
 
We have tried manipulating expiration dates to arbitrarily expire active memberships so we could create the new one, and then get IT to repair the arbitrated expiration date on the backend, but this is kludgy and time-consuming, and we would like to be rid of it, but setting a tickler and following up promptly and recalling the details, well, that's not very elegant, either.   
 
Another thought we've had is to demand a token contribuion, but this has not proved as easy as it sounds to implement.  It has not been our policy to demand a token contribution, and I beg your indulgence to suggest other alternatives ahead of that one or submit success stories to overcome resistance to it.

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We established a new membership organization of “complimentary” (or in your case, honorary) memberships to track major donors who get certain member benefits without actually being members.  Since it is a separate organization, a patron can have this type of membership in addition to the regular one.  We don’t send renewals for it, but it’s easy to pull reports and of course it expires at whatever time we choose.  They are set up manually.

How do you handle benefits that correspond the membership system, but aren't based on a contribution to a membership campaign?

  We have set up "honorary" and "by virtue of" memberships , but we're wondering if there may be a better way.

An example that has us considering alternative methods is this:  when there is a contribution, the native functionality makes it easy to allocate membership benefits, but when there is no contribution, AND there is an existing active membership, we have to wait until the existing membership expires to create a new membership, and not forget to set a tickler, and follow up promptly, and record or recall the details, etc.  
 
We have tried manipulating expiration dates to arbitrarily expire active memberships so we could create the new one, and then get IT to repair the arbitrated expiration date on the backend, but this is kludgy and time-consuming, and we would like to be rid of it, but setting a tickler and following up promptly and recalling the details, well, that's not very elegant, either.   
 
Another thought we've had is to demand a token contribuion, but this has not proved as easy as it sounds to implement.  It has not been our policy to demand a token contribution, and I beg your indulgence to suggest other alternatives ahead of that one or submit success stories to overcome resistance to it.

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. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!