Hello!
We went live with Tessitura in March and are beginning our YE fundraising/membership reporting. I was wondering how others calculate their consecutive years of giving and consecutive years of membership. Do you take into account a little lapse? For example, if your fiscal year is calendar year and the donor gives in Dec19 and Jan21, is that still considered consecutive in 2020?
And, what are you using in Tessitura to obtain this info? Do you have any samples?
I really appreciate any and all help and tips/tricks.
Thanks so much!
PS. I also asked this question on the reporting/analytics forum, but I thought we probably compare things apples to apples being in a similar sector.
We just hit our first 5 year anniversary, and honestly, this was a huge struggle for us for a few reasons...
1) In an ideal world, we would have used the 'Inception' date that is saved for the membership to calculate how long someone had been a member...but unfortunately, in our original setup, we set our 'lapsed' period to 0, so this reset the second a membership 'expired' even if it was only 1 day.
2) So we ended up deciding that we were going to give a 3 month grace period between each year to account for a variety of event or delays in processing, etc... We ended up creating a series of extractions and lists that looked for members in each year (plus three months) and then essentially excluded anyone that wasn't on all of the lists. We then did a huge data review to make sure that we weren't including or excluding anyone. It was a lot of work...but if of interest, I could go into more detail...3) We have now set our lapsed period to be 'correct' (3 months) so long-term, we will eventually be able to get this 'right' by simply pulling based on the 'inception' date.
I would love to hear more about the work you put into segmenting to compensate for the lack of initiation dates, if you have the time Derrek! We used to segment our first year members, but realized that a lot of our multiyear Members lacked initiation dates in order to suppress them. I've been trying to find work arounds, but only had slight success.