Hello!
I'm new (ish) to my institution and they were not previously aware that the Membership Update Utility needed to be run on a regular basis and therefore has not been run since memberships were rolled out. We are now looking into implementing scheduled runs of the utility but are facing an issue:
Because old (ie. 2021 and before) memberships were never appropriately renewed or deactivated, all recent contributions have been inadvertently associated with these old membership instead of renewing and creating up to date memberships. Now, when we try to run the Membership Update Utility, because the old membership is long past it's expiration/lapse date the utility deactivates the old membership and the constituent is left with no active membership, despite having made a gift recently.
Does anyone know of an easy utility or fix that can correct this? The only route I am seeing currently is to manually create new memberships for anyone that has fallen into this crack (several hundred individuals) and correct the recent contribution to be associated with the new membership (I assume this is possible but have not looked into it). Hoping not to do this since that will take quite some time but let me know if anyone has any pointers. Thank you!
This is a common and calamitous occurrence, but in most cases too complicated for a simple easy utility. You probably need a membership savvy dba working on the back end with a membership savvy development staffer to do the updates creating new memberships, possibly manually, and moving contributions to the new memberships according to date ranges, as if they had been done right over however long the update utility wasn't running, or maybe compromise just going back a bit. You mentioned several hundred patrons, but not how many contributions or what time frame is involved. An alternative might be to manage the past benefits and contributions matching in Excel and begin fresh for the future with the Update Utility running as a workaround depending on your circumstances. That said, I would think this is common enough issue that it's worth a support ticket to Tessitura so see how they advise.