Hi everybody,
We have just discovered a strange and problematic feature of how memberships are handled, and I'm wondering if anybody else has had problems with it and knows a good solution.
Sometimes it's necessary to manually change either the initiation date or the expiration date on a membership. For the most part this is fine. If you process a renewal, the new membership starts one day after the existing expiration date, and the new expiration date is one year after the existing expiration date--all as expected. The problem is that if the donor makes an additional gift (before the start of the renewal period) the expiration date gets automatically recalculated based on the initiation date. So your deliberate manual change gets automatically undone, without warning.
I don't know if this is a deliberate design choice or an oversight ('m waiting for an answer from TASK on that question), but if it's deliberate I think it's really bad design, and if it's an oversight it really needs to be fixed. It's also not mentioned in the documentation.
Does anybody have a solution or a workaround?
-Galen
Our Development department has created "Additional Gift" campaigns to deal with exactly these sorts of non-membership-effecting contributions. We can report on both via a shared campaign category, as/when we want to, while only the desired contributions modify membership init/expir dates.
Thanks Chris. Unfortunately, that approach won't work for us since it's essential to our business practice that additional gifts be counted toward memberships. We actually try to get people to upgrade during their membership cycle.
Hi Galen -
We've struggled dealing with that feature as well (which has been around since as long as I can remember - so I'm guessing is purposeful). The best we've come up with is putting a note in the membership that indicates the start/end dates were manually changes so the next time someone enters a gift and checks the membership they see that and can reset the dates again.
I guess we could get swanky and have some sort of proofing report that flags these or something, but we haven't quite gone down that path yet.
I'd be interested in what you hear back, if there's any suggestions or better ways of going about it!
- Heather