Multiple Active Memberships

Steven Koplin · October 2013

Friends,

I'm trying to address a long-standing problem which I know other institutions have as well...

Namely, when adding and updating memberships in RE, some of our users do not thoroughly check for existing constituents. We all face this problem daily. Duplicate constituents is at least a manageable problem - they can be merged easily. But duplicate constituents with duplicate active memberships is another thing entirely. Duplicate memberships cannot be merged. We even have a few constituents who have multiple active memberships! (to be honest, on the rare occasion we do this purposely). We always try to save membership history, so, how do you fix this and still retain membership and gift history?

It's occurred to me to break gift links from one membership and link to another, but I haven't thought this through very far... (which usually means there's a good reason I haven't).

Any help at all would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

James Andrews · October 2013

Steven Koplin:
Friends,

I'm trying to address a long-standing problem which I know other institutions have as well...

Namely, when adding and updating memberships in RE, some of our users do not thoroughly check for existing constituents. We all face this problem daily. Duplicate constituents is at least a manageable problem - they can be merged easily. But duplicate constituents with duplicate active memberships is another thing entirely. Duplicate memberships cannot be merged. We even have a few constituents who have multiple active memberships! (to be honest, on the rare occasion we do this purposely). We always try to save membership history, so, how do you fix this and still retain membership and gift history?

It's occurred to me to break gift links from one membership and link to another, but I haven't thought this through very far... (which usually means there's a good reason I haven't).

Any help at all would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

The only way I know of to do it is exactly what you've said -- break the links and rebuild the membership history from scratch. Of course, this only really works if the two memberships don't overlap; if they do, it becomes much more tricky. I don't think there's a great answer, but really it wouldn't be that big of a problem if RE had more flexibility in exporting membership information.

Steven Koplin · November 2013

James Andrews:
The only way I know of to do it is exactly what you've said -- break the links and rebuild the membership history from scratch. Of course, this only really works if the two memberships don't overlap; if they do, it becomes much more tricky. I don't think there's a great answer, but really it wouldn't be that big of a problem if RE had more flexibility in exporting membership information.

Thank you James. I was hoping I'd see a couple more alternatives...

Nicole S · November 2013

Steven Koplin:
Thank you James. I was hoping I'd see a couple more alternatives...

It looks like it's a problem for a lot of people.

Allow Membership Records to be merged rather than copied

Ellen Kim 3 · August 2017

I wanted to check in with this thread to see if anyone found a workaround to "merging" multiple membership tracks. I see this post was from 2013 so if others have found a solution for this, please share!

Steven Koplin:

Friends,

I'm trying to address a long-standing problem which I know other institutions have as well...

Namely, when adding and updating memberships in RE, some of our users do not thoroughly check for existing constituents. We all face this problem daily. Duplicate constituents is at least a manageable problem - they can be merged easily. But duplicate constituents with duplicate active memberships is another thing entirely. Duplicate memberships cannot be merged. We even have a few constituents who have multiple active memberships! (to be honest, on the rare occasion we do this purposely). We always try to save membership history, so, how do you fix this and still retain membership and gift history?

It's occurred to me to break gift links from one membership and link to another, but I haven't thought this through very far... (which usually means there's a good reason I haven't).

Any help at all would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

John Heizer · August 2017

Ellen Kim:

I wanted to check in with this thread to see if anyone found a workaround to "merging" multiple membership tracks. I see this post was from 2013 so if others have found a solution for this, please share!

Steven Koplin:

Friends,

I'm trying to address a long-standing problem which I know other institutions have as well...

Namely, when adding and updating memberships in RE, some of our users do not thoroughly check for existing constituents. We all face this problem daily. Duplicate constituents is at least a manageable problem - they can be merged easily. But duplicate constituents with duplicate active memberships is another thing entirely. Duplicate memberships cannot be merged. We even have a few constituents who have multiple active memberships! (to be honest, on the rare occasion we do this purposely). We always try to save membership history, so, how do you fix this and still retain membership and gift history?

It's occurred to me to break gift links from one membership and link to another, but I haven't thought this through very far... (which usually means there's a good reason I haven't).

Any help at all would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Unfortunately, no. This problem remains and probably will remain for a long time to come. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very high on the LONG list of needed improvments/fixes for RE and NXT. It's a very complex issue when merging two membership "chains" of renewals/upgrades/downgrades that may have dates that "cross paths." You could easily wind up with an upgrade that should be a downgrade (or vice versa).

Multiple Active Memberships

Comments

Allow Membership Records to be merged rather than copied

Categories