You guys have been SO helpful to me as I've been muddling through trying to teach myself Tess. I'm basically an end user posing as an IT person since we don't have anyone who can do this stuff on a full-time basis. I've read a lot of older posts about this, but wondering if someone can confirm what options I have here.
We use the constituencies to identify memberships (mostly for the Box Office to see who is who at a quick glance) and right now we want those constituencies to reflect the same start and end dates as the membership. We are doing this manually because noone knows if there is another way. For some things, like sponsors and committee members - obviously this will be manual, but the membership levels are a bear to have to update manually.
I don't know anything about utilities, but have read the utility for this to understand what it CAN do, but I want to know if something can be set up for constituencies to update when the membership updates. I know they get added, but the start date is based on the date the contribution is entered and that's not accurate as we process renewals before people have lapsed/expired and their memberships are rarely entered on the date they start or are renewed. Then obviously there is no end date. Is this something that can be done?
Thanks so much!Jennifer
Maybe I’m not asking in the right way? How do you manage your membership constituencies? They can’t all start on the date a contribution is entered, can they? Do I need a sql expert to change some rules? If we could get the start to match actual membership that would be a start. Thanks for any intel.
From the Membership Levels documentation:
7.If desired, select a Constituency. When a constituent purchases a membership at this level, the selected constituency is automatically added to the constituent’s account. When the membership changes levels or becomes inactive the constituency is automatically inactivated.Note: Constituencies used by memberships should not be manually applied to constituent accounts or applied by any other system process. Membership transactions might inactivate membership constituencies that have been added by other processes.
I don't think you can set a start and end date automatically unless you have a process created to do that.
We have to manually do this because the constituency dates are not correct. Memberships are good for one year - every member starts and ends at different times and the membership contributions are entered at different times, depending on when they renew/send payment etc.... with no connection to the actual membership dates. The membership dates are what are important, not the contribution dates.