Membership Parameters

I think you might be mixing a few things up.    Campaigns typically have dates that correspond with the fiscal year.  Now there are sorts of flavor campaigns and dates so for this questions let’s just stay with the assumption that your membership campaign reflects the date of your fiscal year.  

The dates of a membership are not set up by campaign but instead in the membership setup  Campaign/Memberships.  There you establish how long a membership is – typically 12 months.    So any gift posted within 12 months will be added to a single membership regardless of which fiscal year/campaign.   When looking at the contribution in the Membership history record you will see all campaigns that contributed.

When you set up your membership rules you can state that number of months before the expiration date that you would want the membership to renew.  I would suspect that if you did not want the new membership to renew until the expiration month you would set this item to 0.

All this is to say the Campaign dates and  the membership date are not same dates  -- both are set up separately.

We are wondering about modifying membership dates.

The way that we like to look at memberships for our constituents may be a bit odd, but we like memberships to be based on the last 12 months of donations. As it is, Tess connects memberships to campaigns, and therefore the fiscal year. Is there a way to modify our setup so that all donations in the last 12 months count towards a membership or does it have to be based on the campaign dates? Or have I got my understanding of the system wrong?

Thanks in advance.

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Yes – the membership the gift is attributed to is done at time of data entry.  Any gift given within the 12 months can be allocated to a particular membership.  If you have an additional gift during the 12 month membership will be attributed to the current membership if that is what your Membership rules state. 

In reading your email though it almost sounds like you are counting a gift twice  both 12 months forward and 12 months back.

Say a membership set up today in FY13  with $1000 with expiration date of 5/14 --- all gifts posted membership campaigns will be attributed to this membership.  A gift of $500 given in September which for us would now be FY14 would be part of this 12 month membership (there would be 2 membership campaigns attributed to this membership)  Depending upon start/end levels membership levels may change but it will be the same 12 month membership.

If in April 2014 we were to get a gift of say $50  and we do not have a new $1000 renewal – we can post the $50 as part of the 5/14 membership by using allocated funds during data entry.   We have to do this because our rules say renew the person 3 months starting 3 months before exp date.

The additional gift can only be part of one membership. 

Sorry, I realize looking back that I was not explaining quite what I meant to. I am actually concerned more with additional gifts when there is an existing membership.

If someone gives a gift during the renewal period we have set up it goes toward a new membership for the following year - as you would expect - what we are wondering is if there is a way for that additional gift to be counted cumulatively toward a membership that would expire 12 months from the date of the additional gift but would include, as far as recognizing the membership level, all of the gifts that had been given in the previous 12 months as well. Is this too much of a continual update to memberships when Tess tends to look at it cyclically? Or have I muddled my understanding again?

Apologies for the vague explanation earlier. I hope I've got it right this time.