Need help with setting up group membership in Raiser's Edge

Annie Luong · May 2019

Good afternoon,

My name is Annie. I am totally new to raiser's edge, and I need help to understand how the group membership works.

Currently, my organization has 2 categories just for individual:

- Free membership (for individual)

- Professional membership (for individual)

Now, my organization wants to reach out to individuals within an organization.

We are planning to add a new membership category called group membership (for a group of 5 individuals).

However, we don't want to process the organization membership through RE membership module.

All we want is to key the 5 individuals with their memberships in RE and somehow linked or grouped their membership together, so that we can see they are part of the same membership paid by their organization?

Can I do that? Or is there any better way to keep track of my group membership?

Thank you so much.

John Heizer · May 2019

Look at putting the Membership record on the Organization and adding the individuals at Joint Members.

Annie Luong · May 2019

Many thanks for your quick response, John!

By that you mean to use the organization membership instead, is that correct ?

At the moment, we don't want to use the organization memberships in RE.

The reason is because when processing memberships for organization, there are too much work-around, and it is more difficult to manage.

All we need is to use the membership module to manage the enrolled individuals that make up the group membership.

John Heizer · May 2019

Creating this kind of group membership that you want tied to an Organization is going to require changing everything about how you process memberships.

Annie Luong · May 2019

Hi John,

As I have little experience on the membership module, would you mind explaining a bit more about what you mean on"require changing everything about how you process memberships" ?

Thank you!

Alan French · May 2019

I would echo what John said. Could you elaborate on the reasons for not wanting to process the organisation memberships in RE? You could probably write a query that would exclude those from any reporting and only pick up the individual members.

It would be possible to put the membership on the record of one of the 5 individuals and then add the other four as joint members, but what would you do if member number 1 left the organisation? Presumably you'd want to drop their membership but not that of the others.

Annie Luong · May 2019

Hi Alan,

In the past, we used one membership category called organization affiliate.

When an organization A purchased an organization affiliate membership, the name of the person B who paid for the organization's membership got pulled into the membership module.

Then, we had to go into the organization's record, broke the link of the person B with the organization membership, and re-linked the membership with the organization A.

This extra work was the reason why we phased out the organization affiliate category, and now use only individual membership category.

In the near future, we are going to reach out to as many small/medium organizations as possible for the purpose of fundraising,

Hence, we want to create the group membership category to target these audiences.

Hope my explanation makes sense!

John Heizer · May 2019

I've worked with RE and Memberships since 1995. The way I have explained it, with the Membership on the Organization record and Joint Members for each of the Individuals is the easiest way this will work within RE as it is designed. This is how RE is designed to handle a "group membership." Yes, it's more complicated than what you've been doing with just Individual Memberships, but you can't expect to make this kind of big change in your membership program without expecting to change how you handle things in the database.

The Membership belongs to the Org. The Org is who has the Gift record. The Org is who gets the renewal notice. The Individual Members are just a benefit of the Org's giving. This is why the Membership should go on the Org record and tie to the Individuals with Joint Memberships.

You might be able to do something crazy with Attributes, or a rogue Excel spreadsheet, or pencil and paper, but it will all be more complicated than what I've suggested.

Annie Luong · May 2019

Thanks, John!

Your explanation helps me understand more about the membership module.

I wonder if there is a work-around to avoid the manual task of correcting the membership link when the payment is paid by someone who is NOT a member of the group membership?

Thank you.

Elizabeth Perron · June 2019

Moving forum to the RE product community. Lots of great info others could benefit from in that community!

Need help with setting up group membership in Raiser's Edge

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