Hi All,
My org does not use memberships, but it would like to have a dashboard that contains essentially the exact same information as the pre-built Membership Renewals dashboard - those who "renew" by annual donation, the giving level that is assigned (we manually update/assign through the donation level drop down in a constituent's Program Names tab), etc. Has anyone created and/or figured out a workaround for tracking this in analytics without memberships?
Many thanks in advance for your advice.
Best,Lauren
This may not work for your configuration, but I have something like this for giving circle folks which pulls off Plans. Maybe a start?
Hi Lauren,
A couple of thoughts come to mind. First is that a Pivot Table grouped by Constituent details on rows, with columns for Campaign Fiscal Year, filtered by the campaigns (or campaign category) they would have given to last year and this year, will show you who has renewed or not. And if the value is set to Total Amount, then you can see the amounts given last vs this FY.
Second is that it would be completely okay to use Memberships without any benefits or external "membership" messaging. This would allow you to track donor giving levels, and movement between them, more easily, as well as monitor renewal statuses.
Best,Chris
Hi Kate, Thank you for this. I would like to know more about how you pull off of Plans if that's possible. Again, thank you!
Hi Chris, Thank you! We are exploring using Memberships for the very reasons you stated. My hope is that this is a change we implement for this season.
Sure thing! We also keep "exploring" membership for internal purposes and have struggled to overcome the inertia and implement. Doing this via Plans has been the stopgap.
I got into using plans because I needed a way to look at things on a per-donor (and not per-gift) level. We build plans for basically everyone being solicited a 4-figure gift and up; this route wouldn't work unless you have plans built for every donor you're interested in.
What I've done is exploit the contributed and recorded amount fields and filter formulas. What I really have is a pair of pivot tables in a larger Dashboard and not the range of visuals in that Renewal Dashboard, but basically, my Value fields are almost all filter formulas to the effect of ([Total Amount/Count], [2020 Individual], [range that interests me]). In some cases, I've also applied filters to just throw out people who have already/haven't yet renewed. Depending on how you use your plans, you could also overlay Complete Dates, Statuses, Sources, etc.
I maybe should have made clearer: the filter formulas are good for "lump sum" numbers. In cases where I need a list of names, the kind of pivot Chris suggests below would totally work.
We went through exactly the same challenge a few months ago and ultimately decided our lives would be much easier if we started using memberships. There were a few areas where our business rules didn't align with standard membership functionality so we created some custom outputs and nightly jobs to solve those. was an amazing guide in helping us figure all this out, especially in creating historical membership records that align with our newly established membership organization to enable apples-to-apples comparison year over year. I would recommend reaching out to Enterprise Consulting if you need some assistance navigating. Best,Rob