Hello!
We currently keep the "Lapsed" status on an expired membership for 6 months. The Membership Utility Update does not end the active Member Constituency when someone changes to "Lapsed" after their expiration date because of the 6 month membership rule we have set. I'm wondering if there's a way to keep the Lapsed status on the membership, but end the active constituency. I read that the active constituency remains as part of a grace period for the member, but I would like the Member constituency to end so that not all benefits are granted to lapsed members. With our ticket sales moving online, there is no personal intervening to encourage the lapsed member to renew before receiving free admission. We still send our magazine to lapsed members and include them in communications, but I'm just looking for a little more control over what benefits lapsed members do and do not receive.
Thanks for any insight on this!
Genevieve
Hi Genevieve!
In the current version of Tessitura, there is no way to end an active constituency of a member in their lapse period. This is because, as you note, Tessitura v15 considers lapsed members to still be "current" and qualify for benefits. Changing end dates for membership-based constituencies, either manually or through the Manage Constituencies Utility, is not recommended because it will interfere with the Membership Update Utility. You note that you send your magazine and communications to lapsed members, but otherwise don't offer them benefits. The recommended configuration to support this in v15 is to have a lapse period of 0 months (so they stop receiving benefits) but still include them in your lists and extractions for communications using criteria like expiration date. To say this another way, with this suggested configuration, your organization would consider these expired members "lapsed" even though Tessitura doesn't label them that way.
To get the same effect on your website (no benefits for lapsed members) without changes to your membership configuration (which is a much larger project), it depends on how you are delivering the member benefit. If you are using a rank-based mode of sale shift, you could adjust your ranking algorithm to ignore lapsed members so they can't get into that mode of sale. If you are using pricing rules, you could add an Exclusion List criteria to your rules that excludes any lapsed members. If you're unsure about doing that, or you are using some other method of benefits online, feel free to open a support ticket for some assistance.
I keep saying "in version 15" because many of these membership concepts will change in version 16. In particular, we will offer the ability to define a "grace period" in which the constituent still receives benefits and a "lapse period" in which they don't (among other implications). Our August Open Studio webinar contains a really great preview of this functionality and much more.
I hope that helps!
-Michael
Hi Michael,
This is very helpful - thank you! I just watched the section on membership in the August Open Studio webinar and I am really looking forward to the changes mentioned here. Adding the grace period is excellent news and certainly will solve what we're trying to accomplish. We will look into the website change in the meantime, that sounds like a good solution for us. Thank you for your response!