Moving from monthly renewals to quarterly

Heather,

My biggest question would be how you currently run your renewal cycle. Do you only send one renewal notice to each patron?  It looks to me like that would be the case in the scenario below.  How does that compare to what you're doing now?  Fill me in on that and we can see how it plays out.

Beth
* * * * *
Experience the thrilling twists and turns of an unforgettable rafting trip down the Colorado River. Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk opens on Friday, January 9 in the Science Museum of Minnesota's Omnitheater, giving you a better understanding of the looming global water crisis and the ways in which you can help protect and conserve Earth's water resources. Visit www.smm.org/grandcanyon to learn more.

Elizabeth A Varro
Membership Manager
Science Museum of Minnesota
(651) 265-9829

----- "Heather Hoyt" <bounce-heatherhoyt8769@tessituranetwork.com> wrote:
| From: "Heather Hoyt" <bounce-heatherhoyt8769@tessituranetwork.com>
| To: bvarro@smm.org
| Sent: Friday, June 12, 2009 10:12:02 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
| Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Moving from monthly renewals to quarterly
|
|

We have decided to transition from doing monthly renewals to renewals on a quarterly basis.  I need some guidance on how our current tessitura memberships need to be modified. I'd also like to hear from any org that has gone through the change and if they encountered any issues with comparison reporting from previous seasons.

This is how we are setup currently:

Suspend 2 Months After Initiation
| Cancel 2 Months After Initiation
| Expire 12 Months After Initiation
| Renew 2 Months Before Expiration
| Lapse 2 Months After Expiration
| Reinstate 60 Months After Expiration

Initiation: Today

We would like to move to:
| 1st Quarter mailing
| July, August, September Renewals July 1 Drop date
| 2nd Quarter mailing
| October, November, December Renewals October 1 Drop date
| 3rd Quarter mailing
| January, February, March Renewals January 1 Drop date
| 4th Quarter mailing
| April, May, June Renewals April 1 Drop date

We use the Membership Renewal Notices report(I think this is canned?) for our renewals.

Please help, I need to get this all ready to go by July 1! Thanks!

 

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Makes perfect sense.

It seems to me that you just need to make sure you're clear on how the change in renewal cycle might change your responses.  Under your old system, each member would get a renewal the month before they expire, month of expy, and month after.  When you increase the range of expiration dates that fall in each reporting cycle, you introduce less regularity across your membership; people will get very different treatment depending upon their expy date.

To run the most extreme example: Mr. A expires on July 1, and Ms. B expires on Sept 30.  If I'm reading you correctly:
Mr. A will get his first renewal notice on or just after his expiration date.  His second notice, if it's necessary, will come three months after he expires. 
Ms. B will get her first renewal notice almost 3 months before she expires, and if necessary will receive her second notice roughly 1 week after she expires.

So, the question is, how well do you understand how your cycle affects renewals?  Would Mr. A have been more likely to renew before he expired?  Will a 3-month lapse before you ask him again make him less likely to renew then?  Will Ms. B even consider renewing a full 3 months before she expires, or will that be a wasted effort?  Would she have responded better to a notice a month before her expiration?

Those are the questions I would wrestle with.  It may just mean that you track your responses very carefully under the new system, and evaluate how it's working for you so you can change it if necessary. 

The only thing I would think about in the membership org setup is the lapse time.  We don't use that here at the Science Museum, so I've never given much thought to it; but it seems worth giving some consideration to how having that grace period might factor in with the change in when you remind them of their expiration date.

Beth

* * * * *
Experience the thrilling twists and turns of an unforgettable rafting trip down the Colorado River. Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk opens on Friday, January 9 in the Science Museum of Minnesota's Omnitheater, giving you a better understanding of the looming global water crisis and the ways in which you can help protect and conserve Earth's water resources. Visit www.smm.org/grandcanyon to learn more.

Elizabeth A Varro
Membership Manager
Science Museum of Minnesota
(651) 265-9829

----- "Heather Hoyt" <bounce-heatherhoyt8769@tessituranetwork.com> wrote:
| From: "Heather Hoyt" <bounce-heatherhoyt8769@tessituranetwork.com>
| To: bvarro@smm.org
| Sent: Friday, June 12, 2009 12:52:12 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
| Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Moving from monthly renewals to quarterly
|
|

We currently are using the month out, month of, month after letter system, which asks each patron up to three times for a renewal, we will cut that to of and after. So basically each Quarter will consist of two groups of people, people renewing for their anniversary date, and people from the previous quarter that did not renew. That make sense?  This is strictly for our annual fund campaign, we do other campaigns throughout the season like Year End and Fiscal Year End etc... We have kept our membership category structure very streamlined. Only Individual and Corporate, this way all of our individuals only have one active membership at a time. 

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