Hi Museums, Zoos and Aquariums Members:
We are working on the Benefits feature of v16 memberships, and have a question about one particular aspect of benefits. The Benefits feature is a replacement for the Entitlements Plugin that some of you may be using today.
Our question is this:
Do you have a need today for benefits that are tracked on a monthly basis?
The current entitlements plugin does not do this, but we can imagine some use-cases that make it desirable. We want to know if any of you are tracking monthly benefits in practice today, or if you have programs in place now that would benefit from it.
For example: “Jessica” buys an individual membership to her local zoo. She can go as often as she wants and she gets up to 2 additional admissions per month for guests.
Bonus Question:
Would the ability to have perpetual/sustaining memberships billed monthly change your opinion on whether this was a useful feature?
Thank you!
Chris Szalaj
Product Owner, Business Facing Products
Hi Chris! The closest benefit we have is Member Appreciation Month in which members get extra benefits in February, so they're not recurring, but they are time-restricted. (Currently just putting pricing events on those perfs to give members extra discounts.)
Everywhere I've worked has been x people per visit plus an allotment of annual guest passes to be used anytime, but if a membership is month-to-month we would indeed want to divvy those up monthly.
Hi Chris,
We don't have a big need to track benefits on a monthly basis. However, the ability to have perpetual/ sustaining memberships billed monthly would be amazing for both our Development memberships and our Memberships sold as Products. Yup, we do both.
Hello Chris,
We do use Entitlements.
Currently we do not have a need to track monthly benefits as our benefits are based annually. It might be useful to be able to utilize this format in the future, such as one monthly parking benefit or one guest pass per month - monthly allotment of entitlements would give us this option.
For our Family memberships, I don't foresee us moving to monthly billing but this may come in handy for our higher end membership levels that tend to be transactional memberships who do use their benefits and then their benefits would need to be available by month.
Chris,
Perpetual/sustaining memberships billed monthly is a feature that Museum of the Bible is looking forward to-- we have been wanting to offer sustaining monthly payment options from the start. However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that not having monthly billing would completely negate the usefulness of the feature. We're glad to have these improvements coming at all.
Are you weighing whether to push monthly tracking to version 17?
Thanks,
Shelly Binkley
Business Analyst, Museum of the Bible
Hi Chris, I've asked our Membership team and this is the reply -
We don’t currently have a monthly member benefit, but I’d love to create a program where members can do something monthly – like borrow an audioguide (fairly low-lift engagement and gives me a reason to talk to them month to month). I’m sure I could/would come up with other things, but that’s an idea I’ve been playing with for a little while.
Yes please to monthly memberships and double that to the ability to make those perpetual. Doesn’t change my answer to the first, although I’d have to explore what we do if/when we change that benefit (probably just some messaging a few months in advance).
We don’t have a big need to track benefits on a monthly basis either and are not currently using the Entitlements Plugin. But! I am already thinking of the possibilities if this feature was available (Members Month incentives, year 2+ renewal incentives). While we currently already offer monthly installment payment options for our lower level memberships levels, set-up as Membership as Products, through a Tessitura customization, my colleagues in our Development Department (higher level memberships set-up as contributions) are very interested in offering the ability for our donors to support via perpetual/sustaining memberships billed monthly.
We have discussed the need for monthly entitlements as we continue to evolve our member benefits, but have not put it into practice. The closest we currently have to a monthly benefit, and this may not make any sense out of context, is a recurring monthly performance to track a retail discount; we print a ticket as the member’s coupon for our retail locations.
We rely heavily on entitlements, especially web entitlements. We have a “member portal” that members can access their benefits from. We use entitlements to track every member benefit and are slowly transitioning benefits for most membership levels to a self-service model in the portal.
We are always very interested in understanding more about the future standard functionality, how the transition from the current customization will work, and other potential features we may be able to utilize.
Thanks!
Hi , We are weighing whether or not it should be in v16 for the moment. If we don't do it in v16 that doesn't necessarily mean v17; it may be possible for us to introduce the feature in a non-required version between v16 and v17.
Thank you very much for the feedback!
We have a sustaining membership option at the Walker, through which members pay monthly and are auto-renewed at the end of their membership year. It would be fantastic to manage their benefits on a month-by-month basis, allowing us to better navigate sustaining membership cancellations. This monthly benefit functionality, when combined with a digital membership card in TNEW, would allow us to immediately end a membership when a sustainer cancels their payments. That would be incredible!
Alycia
At first glance, the membership team members at the Minnesota Zoo don't see a lot of use cases for benefits tracked on a monthly basis; however, they like the idea of having the capability and possibly finding a way to utilize it. For your bonus question, the Minnesota Zoo Foundation (our fundraising arm) would be very interested in the ability to bill monthly for perpetual/sustaining memberships.
Michael Dorsey