Tracking Membership

Amie Bossi

We are trying to find the best way to track membership in eTap. At first, it was suggested we have it as a UDF, which worked for the fist year. Now that we have people renewing, it doesn't work because we end up losing the date that they originally became a member and have no way to show them as a renewal. Support recommended we add a Membership Fund and a Renewal Fund, so we could run queries by dates to see who was a current member, who was up for renewal, etc. This is creating confusion when someone gifts someone else a membership, especially if that person is already a member. How do we track that in the system? We've only been using eTap for a year and a half; we only incorporated as a nonprofit in early 2013. For general donation tracking it has been great but we just keep running into so many issues with membership tracking and cannot seem to find any good best practices anywhere!

Samantha Frazier

Hi Amie!

 

Have you tried using a pledge? We are a child sponsorship organization and that is how we track donations towards the kids. Each person can be setup for their next payment date and how much each payment is for. eTapestry has a lot of queries and reports setup for pledges.

 

One of your problems will be when someone else gifts members for another member. The way we solve this is to soft credit the account that was paid for by someone else, then open the pledge and move out the first payment date by that equal amount that was paid. In your case I assume it would be a year. eTapestry has it on their list of things to change when they get to the journal area, sometime next year I think. So that you can apply a soft credit as a pledge payment.

 

Once pledges are done, you can run reports on when the next payments are due, who is behind (arrears), or who has canceled (written off).

 

Because of the longevity of our sponsorships, we setup the pledge with the maximum pledge amount. The system will allow 300 payments to be scheduled, so we take the dollar amount times 300 and enter that as our pledged amount.

We never, ever, tell our donors that we have them down as pledged this amount. It is an internal way that we track things.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Pam Anderson

We have used UDF for our membership tracking too and are finding the same problem.  I set up a UDF for a particular membership and then added values for each year.  It is working for us but I realize we will eventulaly have too many values and that is not what we want.  I would be interested in knowing how other organizations are tracking annual memberships.