Selling Magazine Subscriptions - Thoughts?

Ericka Greenham

Our alumni magazine is going from a free print format to a free electronic format. We still, however, want to offer our constitutents the option of PAID PRINT subscribtions.

My first inclination was to set the paid print subscribtion up as a product in an e-commerce store but this poses challenges around the renewal process (i.e. we'd have to sort the Order Details Report by Purchase_Date, keep track of the date the last paid print subcrbition list was pulled for mailing purposes, and then manually send out renewal notices 3 times a year).

My next thought was to use Memberships as they allow you to run queries on membership types, send emails based on membership type and report on memberships including expiration info.

The above is a long way of asking: Has anyone used Memberships to sell subscriptions? If so, how has the process worked and what are the pitfalls to be wary of?

Any other thoughts on how a subscription process (purchase through renewal) could be managed through Convio are also greatly appreciated.

Noah Cooper

I think Membership would work perfectly, assuming that no one constituent can have more than one concurrent subscription.