Hello!
I would love to hear some ideas or how your organization currently deals with/manages memberships with two or more adults. How do you manage your household to determine who the primary and secondary member are? Do you have a separate membership salutation? Do you make your two members A1 and A2 within the household? How do you manage members who might not be in the same household?
Currently, we put the two members into a household and make them A1 and A2. However, this changes the structure of the household so any solicitation might be going to, for example the mother and daughter while excluding the husband because the mother and daughter are the named members. I am hoping to hear how other organizations manage their memberships in the households.
Thanks!
Samantha WilsonThe Neon MuseumSenior Database Manager
Hi Samantha, I asked the person in our development department who handles membership processing and here's what she had to say:
For The Historic New Orleans Collection, all members are supposed to live in the same household, and other than an individual membership, all other level are for only 2 adults in the same household or 1 named member and a guest. Thus, we too use the A1 for the primary member and A2 for secondary.
If an individual membership is on a Household account, only the member is indicated with A1. Therefore, in our case we remove the A2 from the other household member. When part of a household, we have found this to be the easiest way to identify the member for benefit purposes. This, however, does illiminate the other household member from being included in any mailings. In our case, we haven’t needed it but if we did, we would likely set up a salutation type for this purpose.
I personally find using the Salutation Types for mailings have worked the best for us.
Note: In our case, if the account is set up as a household with both an A1 and A2 and only the primary is to get the mailings, after clicking the Gen Sal button to populate the Constituent Header correctly, we edit the salutation 1, and 2 lines (if needed) and the Dear (sal) on the General Tab to reflect the change. Important to note that we do not hit Gen Sal button again because it will not keep the changes and reverts everything back to the default setting. This can be problematic if there are many users updating information, or if someone hits the Gen Sal button, however in our case at least for now, it is working.
For our membership correspondence, we use salutations that we have set for our President, Dev. Director and Chair. We than choose the salutation type that best fits the mailing.
Hope that helps!Anne RobichauxCRM SpecialistThe Historic New Orleans Collection
Thank you SO much Anne for this information! That really is very helpful on a few different fronts. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with your development department and then letting me know.