Hi everyone,
I need some membership advice. We have a typical annual membership structure: people donate a specific amount and they get benefits and are recognized at that level. The memberships expire after a year unless they're renewed. It's standard.
The fundraising team wants to raise money for a new initiative that will last about two years. Their plan is to create a membership around this initiative separate from our regular membership. This new membership would have it's own set of benefits and people would be recognized separately from their annual gifts.
The first idea was to create a new membership organization. I hesitate to do this. I've had two competing membership organizations before. The members were not mutually exclusive (they wouldn't be in the new initiative either) so some people had two active memberships. Reports, custom features, and output set elements all broke because of this. Not to mention, I created an entirely new membership organization for what turned out to be 7 donors.
Another idea was to incorporate this new initiative into the existing membership structure. Gifts to this fund would upgrade an existing membership. The downside of this idea is that we can't track the non-deductible amount in Tessitura and someone wouldn't be able to decline benefits for the new initiative while keeping their benefits from the annual membership.
How do other organizations handle situations like this? I can see the pros and cons of creating a new membership organization, but also the pros and cons of incorporating it into the existing membership structure. Does anyone have any other ideas?
Allison