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!
We did do this last year: we were adjusting levels significantly for our memberships: some remained, some were changed in value, some removed, some added. Our analysis was that doing direct comparisons between the old and the new membership level structure would be at best confusing and at worst misleading. We also felt that the way that this would change trends between the two level sets was distinctly misleading. However, changing to a new membership organization would, as Michael says, leave you without any trends. We undertook the change knowing that I could do a massive scripting project to keep the trend lines in place and translate current memberships into new memberships while appropriately decommissioning the old memberships that had been superseded. It was very complicated and we certainly ran across a number of additional gotchas along the way, particularly about how contributions are connected to memberships and how the system will attempt to make adjustments or change membership statuses based on that. So unless you're willing to do a lot of back-end work, I'd try to avoid it.