Hi,
I'm pulling lists for budgeting purposes and break down members into various pools for renewal projections. One of those ways is by how long they have been a member. Is there a field in the output set that gives you how long they've been a member - something like years a member, or times renewed?
Is this what inception date is for? I have hardly any for years before 2022, though we recently transitioned to Tessitura.
thanks,
Nathaniel
Hi Nathaniel,
Counting the number of years of membership can sure be a pickle. As I'm sure you know, there's a lot of nuance to the many ways Tess counts memberships. Beware of Inception Date, this one bit me a long while back. It will deliver the first start date of the first membership in an unbroken chain of membership renewals. If you lapse even one day and then "renew", you have a new Inception date.
I went hunting around in our system for something that might help. We have custom output set elements for First Initiation Date but that doesn't get you the number of years they've had a membership, so I kept hunting around. I did find something in Analytics that might be useful:
In the memberships cube I used the Value "Membership ID" and had it select unique (IDs). It's just counting the Memberships we see on the History tab regardless of there being a gap between memberships. I spot checked a few of these and the counts were right so far. I would definitely vet this more though. Something that pops to mind that could trip it up are Deactivated memberships. I'm sure there are other things, but maybe this will get you moving in the right direction?
Jenny
Hi Jenny!
Do you mind sharing more about the custom output elements you have for First Initiation Date? We have some membership types that we would like to track their true 'start' with us more than the # of years/memberships they have purchased.
Thank you, Claudia
Sure!We have a local view for "Membership Firsts" that pulls together things like the first initiation date, first renewal date, first expiration date, and some other things (happy to share). Basically it just pulls out info from TX_CUST_MEMBERSHIP and grabs the MIN date for those types we want. Then those dates are in the Query Elements as is. No formulae to mess around with.
Thank you, that is genius!