Membership and Covid 19 - offering free months to members

Isabella Raeburn 2

Is anyone else running membership through RE and offering free months to members when they renew because of closures due to Covid 19? If so, how are you handling this, in particular in relation to recurring gifts/direct debits?

Morag Paterson

Hi Isabella

We are offering extra months on membership at renewal to help make up for closures during the pandemic.  We have a huge number of our members pay by Direct Debit and felt that for resource, cost and our sanity this was the best option.  We have advised all our members that if they renew they'll get the extra months automatically applied at their renewal.  For Direct Debits we are globally adding appeals to all recurring gifts in the month they are due to renew so that we can flag those that are due the extra months.  RE is set to renew our members every 12 months, so once 'renewed' we have a global change to add the additional months to their membership expiry date.  We also have an export/import process to 'roll forward' annual Direct Debits after their renewal (so they're set for their next collection after 15 months, not 12).  For monthly DDs we have a similar process in place to catch the final 12th payment so we can roll forward the direct debit after it has been taken.  Happy to discuss this in further detail if you'd like to message me.

Morag

Isabella Raeburn 2

Dear Morag,


Thank you so much for this. I've been adding a membership attribute via import of all the people who have responded - either for or against the additional three months. We have been asking them to waive it if they feel generous! That part of the procedure works fine, and can be used to create a query so I can globally change the membership end date - also straightforward.


The bit I've struggled with is adding the amendment to the schedule for direct debits for those who want the extra three months. Would you be able to share your export/import files with me? Obviously not the content, just the headings so I know how to do that? So far I've done them manually, which is fine, but very time consuming. My email for doing this offline is isabella.raeburn@obg.ox.ac.uk. Thank you again so much.


All best, Isabella