Our organization has been a bit spotty when it comes to updating memberships and tracking them in Tessitura. I'm still new to Tessitura but I think that using memberships will help us with pulling playbill lists and during renewals. Can someone help me out with how you used Memberships??
1. Did you establish the rules for the memberships (i.e. certain campaigns/designations, etc) ? If so, how do tell Tessitura these membership rules?
2. After you've established the membership rules, how do you reto-actively go back and adjust memberships for gifts in the past campaign year?
3. How do you use the membership reports in Tessitura?
THANK YOU!
We went ahead with memberships late last year in test and rolled it out a few months ago. The idea is to save our Dev team hours in pulling lists of donor levels. We are still going tweaking it at present and will do a full review after we recover from our Gala event.
For us memberships are pretty vanilla based on 7 donor levels over 12 months with 1 mnth renewal and 6-12 months lapse date (depending on giving level). Pledges were the curly thing to think about for me and depend on whether you have monthly pledges etc. It's all handled by the Campaigns/Membership table. They trigger from our Individual Giving Campaign automatically but I did add in some relevant Elevated Events by editing T_CAMPAIGN which works fine.
I run the Membership Update report weekly (Sunday night) which is emailed to the Dev department. I've also scheduled a Membership Detail report to email to the Dev department at the beginning of the month that lists the memberships expiring in the next 30 days.
Re retro-actively updating historical records - I asked the tessitura team who ran a utility in test. We reviewed the rules till the looked right and then got the records run in live.
I hope this is what you are after. Let me know if you need me to send screenies of our levels or unpack the logic a bit more.