RE: Fixed date memberships

Hi Jana,

The biggest thing to think about is what you want to track/report with the memberships; that will influence some business practices that you put into place. 

Here at the PSO, we use memberships to represent donor levels.  When we began using memberships we had a rolling date; but soon we realized that donors might give at various times of the year, and the initiation date really didn’t help us much as to when to solicit.  We found that using contribution date on the gift was a much better indicator from year to year.   We also don’t use memberships to track benefits—again we rely on the contribution date.  But using the fixed membership and making sure that memberships coincide with the fiscal years, helps with determining the movement within the memberships (or NRR status).   That I think is the biggest benefit of the memberships for us. 

We don’t have any months  set for Renew, so if we are getting a gift to a future year, we will assign the membership to the future year.    One entry blip that we had was on the last day of our fiscal year.  Perhaps this was fixed since then, but I know that when we entered gifts on the last day it was putting memberships to the next year, not the current.  Apparently the end date was using the time of midnight instead of 11:59:59.  There have also been some weirdness with the begin or end date when we do a contribution import utility.  I can’t remember exactly what, but one of the dates in the memberships got messed up during the contribution import and then needed to be corrected on the back end. 

If you’d like any additional information, let me know.  Hope that helps.

T.C. Brown

Database Administrator

412.392.4834

We are starting to create memberships for our upcoming fiscal year and have decided that we would like our initiation date to be fixed.  It will be the first day of our fiscal year so all memberships will last from July to June no matter when a patron gives a qualifying contribution.  However, I'm trying to wrap my head around any unforeseen consequences this may cause.  I could see that it may encourage donors not to give end of fiscal year gifts since their membership would lapse soon after, though we could always push that membership to the new fiscal year.  I also fear that it may make renewal functionality obsolete.  Does anyone have any advice for things to keep in mind or tips and tricks when planning a membership campaign with a fixed initiation date?  I did a little searching in the documentation and in the forums but I didn't come up with much.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best,

Jana

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