We're just about to start our first round of membership auto renewals and its become apparent we did not plan this through very thoroughly.
It's pretty concise that it will only renew pledges. So the people who only did 1 time gifts, that were entered as gifts will not auto renew. We'll simply have to wait for their renewal period and then enter their new gift in as a pledge instead of a gift, that way they will auto renew next year.
The other thing that really concerns me is the whole "more than one contribution for the membership" will not renew. Most of the renewals were people who pledged $X amount and then are paying monthly for it. And that is their only gift. However, at least one of our monthly givers who opted into Auto-Renewals gave us an extra gift through a special city wide giving campaign back in the summer. The gift was entered under an account for the foundation hosting the event and then the membership was assigned to the individual who already had a contribution pledge with a payment plan. So am I to believe that the system will not auto renew her membership? The second gift was entered as a gift and not a pledge. I guess I can understand why it wouldn't want to do that, but it seems kind of limiting to say that these people can't add to their membership without it screwing up their auto-renewal. We could try to get them to donate to a different fund, but our main organization is its own entity, so when we take in money for them, its technically not our money till we gift it back. And they probably wouldn't appreciate it if we pushed money intended for them into a different fund entirely.
If that's how it works, well we'll just have to deal with it. But I wanted to make sure I am understanding how the utility works since I never bothered to before now.
I am wondering about the same thing (sorry I don't have an answer, maybe my reply will help boost this post??) We want to auto renew our Women's Board memberships, which are 1) not pledges as of now and 2) they all have many more gits/pledges on their accounts, so this utility may not work at all for this (which is incredibly disappointing, since it seems like this is something Tessitura should easily do.) Wondering if anyone here has used this utility for something similar and has any suggestions.
We were in a similar position a few years ago. For a lot of reasons we weren't keen on the idea of opening a bunch of relatively small pledges so we opted to make our own utility. Each month I pull a list of households enrolled in the program that are expiring in the next month and the utility references specific attributes to know which card on file to charge and checks the membership recognition amount to know how much to charge. The process is working really well us and each month IT promises they are getting closer to giving Development the keys to the utility.