Switching memberships from fixed to rolling

Hey TC, 

We did this a few years ago in v15 and changed our fixed-year memberships to rolling memberships with the start date = first of month after gift received.

Here are the basic steps we took:

1. Review with Development all areas of membership set up that would be changing to ensure they understood 1) what they were asking for and 2)how this change in set up would affect memberships going forward. For this, I made a visual guide for how giving, and giving dates, affect memberships in the a rolling structure which seemed to really help folks understand how it all relates in the abstract. Happy to email you this doc if you're interested!
2. Pull list of donors in the past two FYs along with last gift amount + date, and cumulative giving for past 3 FYs, including soft credits, and current membership info. 
3. If last gift amount = most current FY or last FY (if not current FY) total cumulative giving, membership start/end dates based on last gift contribution date applied.
4. List of patrons where last gift amount did not equal total cumulative giving (ie patrons who gave multiple times/year) sent to Fundraisers for review to confirm new membership start/end dates. If fundraisers needed help, they could send me a cal appt and to walk through their portfolio updates needed together. Any patrons who did not have a dedicated fundraiser, membership start/end dates assigned based on FIRST gift date. 
5. Extended Services helped us updated memberships in bulk on the back end - though we still definitely manually updated some records as needed.
6. Once we started updating memberships start/end dates, we began running the Membership Update Utility manually each month and reviewed the data in detail to ensure everything working correctly. Manual membership updates were/are still made as necessary and we put ALL the notes in changed/updated/new memberships as needed.  After a year in the new structure, once we were confident that things were working/updating as expected, we set up the membership update utility on a monthly schedule and members of the devo dept review it for accuracy and make any updates to memberships manually as needed.

The biggest hurdle with the actual process was getting the membership info that needed a manual review back in a timely manner so the giving data wasn't too, too out of date. I believe I pulled updated data for anyone who still had a fixed membership monthly for about 3, maybe 4, months, until all memberships had been updated appropriately. I would NOT recommend stretching it out over a couple months like we did, but we had staff change-over and other extenuating circumstances and it all ended up working out. 

The other big hurdle was really just retraining our Development dept. on how to read/understand memberships in the new rolling structure and how to pull the data they want in lists/extractions. With lists/extractions, we emphasized the need to include membership end dates and membership statuses as needed, and also showed folks how to use relative dates rather than hard dates, if they wanted to create, say, an evergreen renewal list.

There are still some growing pains with this change (especially when our higher end donors deviate from their normal giving schedules) and with v16 on our horizon we've added another level of fun on the membership front, but overall after about 2+ years on this new rolling membership structure, I'd say our Devo dept is much happier with this set up, at least in terms of being able to pull renewal contact lists easier than they used to.

Hope that all helps!

Meghann

The Dallas Opera

Hi Meghann,

Thanks so much for your reply.  I would be interested in the document you mentioned in item 1.  My email is tcbrown@trustarts.org. 

Thanks again.

T.C.

Hi Meghann,

Thanks so much for your reply.  I would be interested in the document you mentioned in item 1.  My email is tcbrown@trustarts.org. 

Thanks again.

T.C.