[crobbinsparrish]

Hi all,

We are considering dropping all of our lapsed members that have lapsed after their renewal cycle which is at 90 days. Members have not been dropped for years and back then, it was only for one category. We have several new and old categories and we will be dropping all of them that are out of their renewal cycle. The reasoning for having me do this is to make reporting more accurate, especially retention rate reports. Can anyone give me details about why to drop and why to keep them lapsed especially how the different options will work with canned membership reports? We have not had much luck using some of the canned reports and I am wondering if others have had issues with the reports and if dropping all of the older lapsed memberships will benefit us as far as accurate reporting goes.

Cheers,

[HeatherS]

We did the same thing a little while ago, I have not had a chance to explore those canned reports yet to see if it worked but we have run across one issue. If you import membership renewals as we do dropping members adds a couple of hours onto the process. RE cant decide for itself if its a rejoin or a renewal or an upgrade and we don't have this info in our excel import document since its a list from our zoo which we have a combine membership with so we have to "guess" then get the error log and "guess" again until we get it right. This is the only drawback I have seen since we started dropping lapsed members.

[AngelaBJ]

We drop memberships after 90 days and have no problems with the canned reports. Of course, when someone renews on day 91, they are a rejoin rather than a renew but that hasn't posed any problems for us.

[hrodriguez]

We drop members after 12 months of being lapsed. The primary reason we decided to implement dropping (about one year ago) was so that we could separate constituents that are true rejoins from people that were slightly lapsed and then renewed. We prefer to lump rejoins and new/joins together and keep renewals separate.