Membership Module for tracking Giving Clubs - Blackbaud User Society

**Donna W** · 08-13-2008, 10:56 AM

Hello All,

I'm wondering if anyone has used the Membership Module to track Giving Clubs? We are a university so we don't have "memberships", but we are attempting to adapt this module to track our Giving Club members.

Giving Clubs are new to our organization and we will be tracking cash gifts by fiscal year, so someone could move up to a higher Giving Club in a fiscal year.

There are a lot of issues here:

Determining what Club they currently belong;
Have they moved up into another Club;
Which premiums/letters will they receive for the club in which they now belong?
Lapsed members.

I'm sure there are more things that I haven't thought of, yet!

I spoke with Customer Service at Blackbaud and they recommended that I speak with our account rep. We will do so when she's available.

I'd love to hear ideas (positive or negative!) from Blackbus members! If you've attempted to use it in the manner, I'd love to hear what did/didn't work.

Thank you!

Donna

**jas.** · 08-13-2008, 02:09 PM

i don't see how your giving clubs are different from memberships in any real way. databasically speaking i mean.

**MCardwell** · 08-18-2008, 07:58 AM

We have just started using the Membeship module to track giving societies. We link their gifts within the membership. One problem encountered is RE does not allow you to link Planned Gifts to a membeship so we put the PG in as an attribute within the membeship. Not ideal but the best we could come up with as a work-around. Pledges can be linked to a membership but the membership will only count payments in the totals. Another irritation is after you have all the gifts linked, you look at the membership tab, and it shows a total paid amount but RE does not allow you to export that total as a separate field. (Knowledgebase does have a work-around solution.) Gifts must be linked to a membership one-by-one - option to globally link gifts to a membership is not available. This is incredibly time consuming for donors with many gifts!

**Donna W** · 08-18-2008, 08:26 AM

Thanks for your feedback! I did speak with our account rep and a Software Engineer late Friday. Their suggestions were that we run the Donor Category Report and create an output query, thereby allowing us to Globally Add memberships; or we could use queries to determine who fits what giving level and then use the query to globally add memberships.

They did mention one negative to the first solution: you have to manually change the end date on a donor's membership.

It was late in the day when I spoke with them so will play a little bit this morning. I was wondering if we could query as we commit our batches to make the data entry easier to handle? Small chunks might be the way to go! Also I'm thinking that if we can't use global add, maybe importing might work.

I do appreciate your tip on Planned Gifts. We just purchased that module and we do have a Planned Giving Society!

I'll let you know if I come up with any viable workarounds. Maybe we can help each other out!

So many projects... so little time!