Would love to hear from nonprofit staff who are using the membership module. We'd be using it extensively if we go with RE. Would like to know what's really great about it, what's not so hot, what should we be looking out for, and any other advice you have about it.

Thanks!

-- Jillaine

[JillB]

Hi Jillaine,

We currently use the membership module to track our different levels of members and I will admit that I am less than thrilled with the module. However, we are a cultural organization where a membership is more like a season pass than being a member of world wildlife fund or planned parenthood or any type of association. So my complaints about the module might not be things that would be a problem for you.

A few issues:
1. there is no way to track the history of the particulars of the actual membership (you can track the history 'level' but you can't track the particulars of historical memberships like names on the cards, how many children or when the cards were printed for past memberships - frustrating for us).

2. we can't seem to clean-up old membership card levels - i.e. the historical info in a person's record indicates that they use to be a 'Toucan Family' level member and then became a 'ZooKeeper Family' level member, but that doesn't mean anything to us as that was 10 years ago. My membership manager wants to be able to change the names of those membership levels so they match levels from today since no one around here even knows what Toucan Family level is... but we can't.

3. we are also having a problem with the calculated field of Years as Member and Consecutive Years as Member in that they don't seem to be taking into account the years the person may not have held a membership with us... we just realized this last week when we were running some analysis on member retention so we haven't researched it yet, but it makes me a little upset...

4. we are using export to get our membership card information out of the system to send to our mail house because the Mail tool doesn't give us all the fields we need - not that big of a deal I guess, but it is one more step.

Sorry if this sounds negative... Hopefully someone with more postive experiences will reply to balance my opinions out.
(and maybe someone will tell me how to fix my historical membership names too!)

[LBEHAM]

Jill,
Are you having issues with the standard membership reports? Have you spoken with Blackbaud on this issue. They may have ideas on how to convert the old membership. It sounds as if you are part of a zoo organization rather than the swedish medical center foundation. Have you changed locations?

[JillB]

Hi Jillanie,

I Have changed locations (in July) I use to work for the zoo, but now I work for Swedish Medical Center Foundation.

I have spoken with Blackbaud about the membership issues (which we are also having at Swedish) and was told that all of the things I need have been 'filed as suggestions' or i can hire them to do 'custom' work. Not really the answers I was looking for!

[Peter Gulka]

make sure that you guys check the Ideas Inventory for these issues. IF your problems aren't in there, go ahead and add them.

Here is the link to the RE Optional module ideas, which includes Membership: http://www.blackbus.org/ideas/RE-OptionalModules

[a_cole88]

I too have noticed that conscutive years do not match the actual number of years that a constituent actully held a membership. One solution for this is to drop the memberships when they lapse for a certain period of time, select rejoin if they renew later. This will show a total years and consecutive years that are more congruent with the actual membership.

As for changing the Memberships to match current giving levels, you might have difficulty doing that. If you change a membership category, and it does not match the preceding one, you will have to mark it as an up grade or downgrade, R.E. won't allow it to remane a same level renewal. If there are no other membership categories associated with the membership, however, you can globally change them. But if you have the same luck I do, that will be to simple.

As for printing cards, try using a constituent export, it may allow you more otions to choose from. If I am not mistaken, you can access all fields through constituent type queries and exports.

Unfortunately, I have no input on the family history question, this does not apply to the way my organization organizes their memberships.

Hope this helps...

[RMH]

We have an integrated RE/PE/PEO system. And we do ALOT of merging of duplicate constituent. Many of these constituents are active members...so once merged, it'd be wonderful if their memberships could also be merged. Too many of these records involve rebuilding member history records or extensive clean up on the the member tab....anyone else experiencing this?

[SwannSong]

Good advice on the constituent export. After a few failed attempts that is what we started doing.

[crobbinsparrish]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RMH

We have an integrated RE/PE/PEO system. And we do ALOT of merging of duplicate constituent. Many of these constituents are active members...so once merged, it'd be wonderful if their memberships could also be merged. Too many of these records involve rebuilding member history records or extensive clean up on the the member tab....anyone else experiencing this?

We also do a ton of merges (one of the reasons I was hired). It's part of everyones job description to report any found or suspected duplicates. We started a team to handle parts of the process. Our data entry person checks to make sure that the records are truly duplicates or runs the merge report if we run out of the ones people have found. She will research the history and make sure that addresses and relationships are all up to date. I do the actual merges. We don't merge biographical information, we merge from relationships down. So I end up having to clean-up and transfer over biographical data into the record that I'm keeping. Then I send a list of the records that have memberships that didn't merge to our membership supervisor and she does the membership tab clean-up and linking/unlinking to gifts, etc. We add notes so that we know which records were merged and track how many we have completed. We try to do at least 30/month but it's hard to find the time. Does anyone know of an easier process for this? Our system seems to be working and having all of us involved, it's easier people being held accountable and keep the project moving forward.