Modules: Membership vs. Volunteer

jess t

I am trying to determine what module would be the best acquisition for our team. Here is some information:


We want to track several boards, including current and historic roles (president, treasurer, secretary) and possibly committees (finance committee, fundraising committee). 

We have an "alumni association" -- membership is based on annual dues. 

In the next six months, we will probably add several more donation-based giving club memberships, like Parents Club, Presidents Council, etc. 

We will have BB NetCommunity and want our dues-based members to be able to renew online and update membership information. 

Our volunteers outside the board are primarily event-based, often times just once a year for a specific event.

It would be great to track volunteer service in a way that helps us count level of engagement, idenfity people with employers who match volunteer hours, and remind people to submit their hours for matching. 


What should we do? Any sage wisdom? Thank you! 



 

Matt Page

I don't know much about the membership module, but it sounds like you need this one more. We have the volunteers module but it gives you a lot more than the few tasks you're describing here which you might be able to manage using a combination of Constituent Codes and Attributes.


Matt

Gracie Schild

Hi - we have the Membership Module but not the Volunteer one.  If you have memberships that have dues and renewal dates and renewal letters, you definitely need the membership module.  It's a bear to deal with - our consultant said it's the most labor intensive module in all of RE - but when it's working right, it's great.  We send out three renewal reminders, each time with an embedded form (really a two page letter, with the 2nd page as the form), and have two different acknowledgement letters (individual and family/dual or higher), and also separately run membership cards.  The set up with levels and renew/lapse/drop dates, as well as benefits, is tricky, so if you decide to go with it, print out the entire section on memberships from the How-To Documentation and read it cover to cover!  I'd also suggest joining the Membership community here for asking others how they solved problems.


We have very few volunteers - or rather a pile of them but only for one event a year.  We track our "volunteer" board members and Trustees by constituent codes.  We haven't really tracked the amount of activity or assignments - we're a tiny shop and we know everyone involved.  If I were going to start noting things like board office held or similar, I'd use constituent attributes. If I needed more than one, I'd start the name of each with "Board" so they'd all appear together and be easier to find when querying. We're having the first change-over of board members for our young Foundation, so I'll be putting their from and to dates on their records - probably not as part of the constituent code, because we just change them to "Former Trustee/Board". This will probably be my first Board related attribute, so I'll have to think all that through carefully.  I always find that talking to the ED about what he might want to know in the future gives me the plan for set up now.


Hope that helps!