[ereastman]

Can anyone give me their opinion on best practice in regard to people having multiple current memberships going at different membership levels?

We have a new"group" that the manager wants to be an actual membership level, but most of the people joining the group already have memberships at either a higher or lower level. She does not want the current membership to be overridden to this new one, but for them to have both at the same time.

If other orgs do this, can you please answer the following questions for me, as I am against this idea, but I don't really have any reasons why, other than we had a major mess in our membership tab at the last place I worked, so I am very wary of making the same mistakes I spent so many hours correcting at my last job.

• How do you handle members having two different membership cards with two different categories and expiration dates?
• Do members get confused/irritated that they are being billed to renew both memberships at different times of the year?
• How to you handle benefits - do you default to the "higher" level and include them in the benefits of the higher membership, or do you include them in both?
• Have you found any problems reporting or querying when there is more than one active membership at different categories in a record?

Any other issues I might not have thought about?

Thanks for any and all info. on this issue; RE has a business rule to prevent multiple current memberships, so there must be reasons against doing this, but the fact that you can do it makes me think that there are instances where this is done as normal practice.

[bairder]

We have constituents with multiple memberships, however, they are for different programs (e.g. Friend of Library, Friend of Museum, etc.). We do not have constituents with multiple memberships in the same program as I think this would create a lot of confusion for the member and an administration nightmare for staff (reporting issues, renewing the wrong membership, etc).

If it is important to track a separate membership instead of upgrading or downgrading the current membership, I would recommend creating a new membership program.

[ereastman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bairder

We have constituents with multiple memberships, however, they are for different programs (e.g. Friend of Library, Friend of Museum, etc.). We do not have constituents with multiple memberships in the same program as I think this would create a lot of confusion for the member and an administration nightmare for staff (reporting issues, renewing the wrong membership, etc).

If it is important to track a separate membership instead of upgrading or downgrading the current membership, I would recommend creating a new membership program.

We don't use the membership programs here, we just have different categories of membership. So you are saying that if someone has more than one current membership, even if they are different categories it will mess up reporting?

[ckotlarski]

• How do you handle members having two different membership cards with two different categories and expiration dates?
• Do members get confused/irritated that they are being billed to renew both memberships at different times of the year?
• How to you handle benefits - do you default to the "higher" level and include them in the benefits of the higher membership, or do you include them in both?
• Have you found any problems reporting or querying when there is more than one active membership at different categories in a record?

Any other issues I might not have thought about?

Boy howdy, did/do we have have fun with this situation! A bit of a novel here-

Back in the mists of time (10+ years ago), our general members (annual fee paid) and donors (annual donation or cummulative donations) were set up as separate and unequal. If a member made a $150+ donation or gave $150+ in donations in period (varied), they were given a new, additional "donor club" level membership. The "donor club" membership lasted 12 months from the date it was given with little consideration given for the general membership expiration dates. Make it easy on the member/donors and staff. Set the bar high enough that you don't create a lot of these situations. Alert the staff - all customer service staff should be able to trouble-shoot.

Benefits were a problem. The donor club level benefits were not always outstanding, stinted on some general level benefits, and the whole process caused a lot of confusion for the member/donors and staff. The member/donor also received more forms of identification/access than they needed, didn't always show the right ID in every situation, and had a tendency to "share" the identification with friends/relatives. Don't set up contradictory or excessive benefits. When adding benefits, think thru how they will impact at every level and over time. Make sure the different benefits tracks make sense.

In the last few years, we've cut back on the concurrent membership assignments. Got rid of the cummulative giving based memberships at the lower donor levels - this was where we found the most confusion. Gving to access the higher membership levels was not their intent in the first place, duh. Listen to the feedback - if these concurrent memberships lapse at a higher rate that non-concurrents - you've got an issue not the member/donor.

We still use/maintain suppression codes re the renewals that suppress one or the other level per member/donor feedback - send renwals for this level but not that level. This is helpful but not perfect - "Oops, I changed my mind/giving this year". Pay special attention to the concurrents re renewals, re-acquisition mailings.

Reporting is an issue - lots of work arounds/pouring over conflicting data/date ranges, avoiding double-counting. Biggest aggravation is calculating longevity or # consecutive years data. Concurrent membership histories will complicate membership reporting.

[ereastman]

Carolyn - Thank you, thank you, thank you! This was a great amount of info. to get, so helpful!

Our membership issue actually is dealing with the higher-end donors, as this new group is $500 to join. But, the problem is that some people are coming in from a lower level membership and others from a much higher level and so it is difficult for me to see how this will play out. I am especially concerned with renewal billings, and how the regular level members will be able to be maintained and not billed at the same time their higher-level membership is billing. Also, there is concern for people coming from the higher levels into this group to renew the new group next year and quit their higher level support. Reporting is a big concern, and I am not happy to hear that you have had issues. . . I was expecting that.

Anyhow, I REALLY appreciate you posting your experience, it gives me some background to be able to question and correct before anything goes into RE and turns into a big headache for us.