[smithj]

I am finally getting around to changing how we track membership in our presidents society - lead annual gifts.

The current structure implemented long ago makes querying and especially exporting difficult.

Category - Description - Short Desc - Date - Comments
Activities - Presidents Society - NA - Date of turning this year - year history i.e. 05,06,07,09

Unfortunately long ago we ran out of room to keep all years in the comments area and someone created a second attribute under activities called "president's society B" which holds simply more years. The attribute of "Activities" also covers any of 50 other items which is a pain if I want to export anything.

I am thinking of changing it to:

Category - Description - Short Desc - Date - Comments
Presidents Society - Years in PS as # - NA - date they became for current FY and - Years combining all but the last 5.

The reason I want to keep the last 5 is so that I can easily query on past membership without using gift amounts since our dev. ofcs. unfortunately get some lattitude for people who miss the end of the fiscal year by a day or 2 months (laugh but it happened last year).

I wondered, those of you who are tracking membership via attributes, what data do you track and how do you store it?

Thanks.

[rmatthews]

Have you thought about using gift attributes instead of constituent attributes? This way you can record the year on the individual gift and still use query to pull all of the constituents. Since this would make it difficult for users to determine who is on the Presidents Society, you may still want to have an attribute on the constituent record but with no years. It is more work but I think gives you greater flexibility and allows you to retain all of the information.

[Elizabeth]

I think it depends how someone qualifies--is it cumulative giving? If so, then a gift attribute might not work. Could you do an action? You could put all the past years in the action note. Maybe an action type of "Recognition Level" or "President's Society". I haven't actually tried this, but it is an idea to explore. The export filters for Actions are pretty robust and may give you more flexibility. The problem is that it is not super easy to see on a user's record, unless you know where to look for it.