Greetings All,
We are working on a major renovation to our contribution membership levels. This includes not only changes to contribution amounts and the number of levels, but also the benefits. Since we have rolling benefits, we need to be able to maintain a record of the old contribution levels for constituents for the next year before they are fully inactive. To manage a switch to the new levels, I am thinking of creating a new membership organization and then shifting incoming contributions to the new organization on the go-live date. My hope was just to change the membership organization for the individual giving campaign which, in my mind, would update all new contributions coming into that campaign (on TNEW or manually entered) to fall into the new levels. Are there any issues with changing this? Will it cause any issues or changes to current memberships in the system? I am hoping this is as easy as I think it should be, but I am rarely that lucky so I am turning to the Tessitura brain trust to try an foresee any issue.
Thank you!
Hi Joshua,
As it turns out, this is a topic we have been looking at in version 16. Changing the membership organization associated with an active campaign is not a typical procedure, and we have found it can have several negative consequences. Specifically, trying to make payments on pledges or adjusting contributions in these campaigns can end up causing errors, because Tessitura will be looking for a membership in the new organization, and of course the constituent wouldn't have one yet.
Aside from that, setting up a new membership organization would cause other issues. You will break all membership cycles and their associated reporting. All memberships in the new organization will be coded as "New" and you would have a difficult time figuring out which are actually renewals vs. which are truly new. And, any donor who renewed ahead of their expiration date would have two active memberships (one in the old organization approaching the expiration date, and a second in the new organization).
In general, it would be better to change existing levels, or inactivate them and create new ones within the same organization. This ends up with better data and reporting, and avoids the errors I mentioned. (And you can look forward to smoother functionality in version 16 with successor levels for this very situation.)
Thanks so much for your response Michael! I will adjust my plan. So glad I asked before doing something ill-advised : )