Auto-Renewal Functionality Question

Hello everyone,

We are investigating instituting auto-renewals for our membership program at the Science Museum of Minnesota.  In reading through the documentation of this process, my colleague Jenny and I have hit the wall.  As far as we can tell, the only way that the functionality can identify someone as wanting to auto-renew is if their previous membership was set up as a pledge with the appropriate billing type.

The problem is, how do you let people opt in or out of an auto-renewal program if everything is based on the previous gift's setup?  Per the Tessitura documentation, contributions should be processed as gifts if they are being paid immediately; thus all our membership payments are set up as gifts, not as pledges.  According to what we have found, the functionality would require that the pre-existing membership had been sold as a pledge, in order for that customer to pull in to the auto-renewal utility. That would prevent anyone who wants auto-renewal from signing up online or via our frontline staff (75% of our gifts), as the ticketing module cannot take pledges.  In addition, we need to allow people to opt in during the course of their existing membership, which we can't do if everything is based on the gift that's already been processed. I also cannot figure out how someone would be able to opt OUT of auto-renewing; if their previous membership was purchased via a pledge, which is how the auto-renew utilities work, we can't go back later and change that billing type, so there would be no way to prevent them from being pulled into the auto-ren utility for the next year once they told us they wanted to opt out.

Are we just missing something here?  Has anyone found workarounds for these issues?  Or would we have to do custom work to allow for smooth opt-in and opt-out functionality?

Thanks,

Beth (and Jenny)