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.
A separate membership organization doesn't seem like it would resolve our issue of giving a complimentary membership to a patron who already has an active (complimentary) membership. I mean it seems like it might fix a few where the existing active membership is in a non-complimentary membership org, but many if not most of ours are ongoing complimentary memberships. Are you able to overcome this obstacle with zeroed-out definitions for active, pending, lapsed, etc.
I think I am missing something here. What triggers the need for a "new" ongoing complimentary membership? A separate membership Group (not sure if this is what everyone means when they say "organization" above) would handle this - that allows you to have as many active memberships as you would need, regardless of if there is money attached to the membership. It's separate rules, status, etc. But that perhaps doesn't address your need to handle benefits?
Your question made me think of expanding the expiration date of the existing membership beyond the predetermined period of a year to two- or three-year long honorary memberships. I will have to think through the ramifications for reporting and listbuilding, but that might actually work for these few extraordinary cases. Thanks!
I was wondering if anyone had had any success with this?We issue complimentary memberships which are valid for a year. As we were in the first year of our membership program, we've not had to think about this until recently, now that those complimentary memberships are expiring.We will be 'renewing' some of these memberships and were thinking that perhaps we could just extend the expiration of those memberships but then would we have to manually change the status to renewed? And would this flag the membership as having been renewed and requiring a new acknowledgement (aka membership card)?Thanks,AdrianaCRM Marketing SpecialistSydney Opera House