Hello everyone,
Please help!
I've got a big problem here, as we have had memberships set up in Tessitura, but not really paid attention to its functionality, both in contributions and in campaign structure, and how this greatly affects what level Tessitura believes the constituent is in. We are finally really working with it for real, but have discovered that our past two years of records are a bit of a mess.
Basically the main issue that needs to be resolved for past years is that our Individual Giving campaign was a catch all for both contributions that go towards a membership, as well as other funds that are not membership applicable. So, of course this is a main reason why our records are way off. I have started a separate Membership campaign to resolve this going forward, and removed the Membership Group association from the regular Individual Giving campaign.
Ideally I would love to be able to delete the historical Membership fields in each Constituent record and then manually re-enter memberships with contribution values that only apply to memberships based on information in the constituents' contribution tabs, and then use the regular contribution-driven functionality going forward from here for future membership tracking.
Questions of course are: Is this possible? If not, what course of rectifying the situation do you recommend? Would a future run of the Membership Update Utility for this date range affect any repair work done?
Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Duane
Duane,
Rest assured you are not alone in your troubles. Many of us have stepped into similar situations, myself included.
That said, I don't really know how bad your situation is without looking at your data so I can only give general suggestions. Also I don't know how many records you're talking about and what kind of IT resources you have.
In general, if most of the records are wrong and there are more than a few hundred, it might be best to consider a complete wipe of the data. You can then enter current membership manually if your membership base is of a small enough size and you have the resources, or you can enter them through tx_cust_membership as a group.
In my situation the majority of our records were incorrect and we corrected most of them manually which was way more work than I thought it would have been. If I had to do it again I would have deleted them all and started from scratch.
I have to say though, it is really nice to have membership history, especially when pulling lapsed members, which we seem to do a lot of lately. So, if you do delete the memberships, I strongly recommend adding them back in as far back as you can.
As far as the membership update utility, it will update all membership within the specified date range regardless of whether they are manually created or created via contribution entry.
Best of luck.Dale
Hi Dale,
Thanks for the input here, and for the "been there, done that" reassurance that this can be resolved.
We have just over two years of membership history built, when we started using Tessitura. Pre-2008 contribution history is in constituent records, but this has not been transferred into Tess memberships.
Through List Manager I have determined that there are just under 900 accounts with membership records. Not all appear to be affected by this situation, so I could further refine this list to narrow this down. Can I wipe out the membership data just for a list of constituents, or would it be best just to clear all membership data and start from scratch? I definitely do want to re-build the records for reporting purposes.
How do you clear the membership records? Is there a procedure for this? I'm not very well versed in SQL and we have no IT department, so I'll need some guidance here. I'm thinking that manual re-entry of the memberships might be the way to go because of the various funds that should or should not be included.
The only way to delete the records as a group would be to do so with SQL in tx_cust_membership so you would need someone with some SQL expertise.
If you are going to manually adjust records anyway, I would suggest going into each account and either fixing or deleteing the incorrect membership and adding new ones where necessary. This could be time consuming but probably not difficult. Whomever is doing the work would just have to have their security adjusted to they can delete and modify records in the Memberships tab.
Dale
Dale,
Excellent, thanks again.