Hi everyone,
I've noticed a change in how constituencies behave from V10 to V11when they are connected to a membership, and I haven't been able to find any documentation about the change, so I want to see if I'm understanding it correctly.
In V10, we have each of our membership levels set to trigger a constituency. So if someone buys a membership on 1/1/10, the appropriate constituency triggers with a start date of 1/1/10. The end date will read 00/00/0000 at this point. If that membership expires on 12/31/11, then the constituency will automatically have an end date of 12/31/11 assigned at the end of that day. At the same time, the "inactive" box will be checked for that constituency. If the person then buys another membership a month later on 1/28/11, the start date of that constituency will be reset to read 1/28/11, and the "inactive" box will be unchecked; however, the previous end date will stay as it was set when the previous membership expired. It looks a little weird, but whatever; it works.
In V11, however, the "inactive" box seems to have been removed from constituencies. The start and end dates are automatically assigned based on the membership exactly as in V10. However, when a person repurchases their membership after expiring, the functionality seems to have changed. The start date does not reset based on the new purchase date; rather, the original start date remains there. What DOES change is the end date: the end date from the previous membership is erased and the end date goes back to 00/00/0000. So V11 seems to use the end date exclusively to determine whether the constituency is active. Which is fine....except that I have 33,000 current members who have end dates on their constituencies if they have ever lapsed, and believe me,, lots of them have.
We use constituencies as part of the system to grant the correct online benefits to our members, so it's important that I understand this correctly. Any experts out there who can confirm that this is all expected behavior, and that there aren't any other changes that we haven't noticed in our testing? And am I guessing correctly that after we do our data conversion, we'll need to use the "Manage Constituencies" report to change the end dates on the memberships converted from V10 to 00/00/0000? Right now, all those constituencies are inactive and don't show in the header, etc because they have a past end date, so the system isn't showing constituencies for any active members who have lapsed in the past.
Thoughts, anyone?
Thanks!
Beth
Hi Beth,
We spent some time last night trying to determine if there was a difference in this area between v10 and v11 General Release and were unsuccessful. In both cases for us, adding a new membership contribution keeps the original start date and sets the end date to null (00/00/0000). Also, although the look and feel has changed, you can still see that a constituency is inactive in v11. The checkbox is no longer there but the row does have the inactive icon on the left hand side and the color is grayed out slightly.
I know that you are still testing with v11 and if this continues to be a puzzle, I think you should open a support ticket and we'll work through it with you.
Thanks for all the great testing!