Hi: we have a simple membership structure with the names based on the minimum donation amount (so, "100", "225", etc), and we're changing up these ranges. New ranges will be created, but mostly ranges will either be moved or completely eliminated.
It seems to me that there are two ways of going about this:
1) modify and inactivate current membership levels
2) create a new membership organization an start from scratch
I don't have "inactivate all the old membership levels and create new ones" because once used I don't think you can rename old membership levels, although this would be largely the same as having a new membership organization.
For number one I'm worried about confusing our reporting and trends. If you report on some levels, they'll just vanish at on a certain date, while others will persist, but will reflect different ranges before and after the changeover. Trends showing a change might just reflect a shift in the membership structure.
If we create a new membership organization, we'll lose any kind of continuity, including inception dates.
Probably there are more issues I'm not thinking of? I think most of the big issues will revolve around reporting and analytics, but naively it seems like making as clean a break as possible would be best? Does anyone have experience and/or advice?
Gawain Lavers
Over the years, I've done projects like this for both BAM and LSC. And it's been a few years since I've worked on this. So please test this carefully.
If I were in your position, I'd first likely try staying in the current membership organization to keep Trends and the like operative. I'd likely create a whole new set of levels making sure that there are no level dollar amounts that overlap. Then I'd de-activate the current levels as a group. And test carefully. Testing is about all of the membership change rules.
That said in all of my past attempts I've not done it this way. In one case I think I created a new membership organization because we were combining membership from two organizations into a single Membership Organization. And we populated the memberships that were active at the time of the change into the new membership organization. We set end dates in the two existing organizations to the end date for the program. And created new membership in the new membership organization for the remainder of the tenure of the current membership. There was definitely some human discretion as to what level a person ended up in. I think we combined like 25 level combinations across the two membership organizations down two 5 levels. Molly Maloy did a presentation at a conference several years back about this project.
In the other case, we combined two membership organizations into a single membership organization and paid Network Consulting to come up with a script that worked to populate the memberships from one of the two membership organizations into a single membership organization. The membership levels were descriptive in this case and the names did not really change. So we changed the dollar values on the existing membership levels in that case.
This type of project is sort of a pain to test. In testing, you want to look at the impact of current memberships as the membership update utility runs. To activate and inactivate membership. What happens to mid-year upgrades and a number of other scenarios, non-payment on a pledge. You also need to look at the impact of these changes on reporting.
Good luck, these things can be done. However, through testing. Is critical to success. I'd also likely bring Tessitura Support and or Tessitura Consulting into this planning.
I'm approaching a similar situation. My organization deactivated Memberships for the last 2-3 years so it seems that will derail much of the value in reporting and trends. The current levels are slightly different than the old ones (some ranges were split in two, others merged), so I am leaning toward creating a new membership organization. Based on your experience, do you have any advice?