Recurring Memberships

Options
Natalie Siegel
Natalie Siegel ✭
Fifth Anniversary First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Are there recurring membership, like recurring donations?  Also, can you add attributes for Members?  
Tagged:

Comments

  • Chris Martin
    Chris Martin ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Hi Natalie Siegel‍. Online Express doesn't natively support either of these concepts (automatically recurring memberships or membership attributes). Both of these have been suggested before and are in our idea backlog, but at the moment, neither are currently planned. To find either of these, head to the OLX Ideas page in the community and search for these idea numbers:

    BBOX-I-205   Support recurring memberships
    BBOX-I-374   Support membership attributes


    Thanks,

    Chris Martin

    Blackbaud Product Management
  • Natalie Siegel
    Natalie Siegel ✭
    Fifth Anniversary First Reply

    Chris.  We are
    new to RENXT and OLX and learning as we go.  


    In additions to memberships not
    recurring, I also just discovered that recurring donations are not
    automatically run and that I have to manually do this from within
    RaiserEdge, correct?  I also just learned that it does not
    notify donors when their card is about to be run or expiring, nor
    enable them to update this information themselves.  Seems like
    a lot more work for me.  If this is true, then I think we may
    stick with Moonclerk for this reason, and will need to keep using
    Stripe as our Merchant processor for our donation and membership
    forms, when we were hoping to use BBMS for everything.


    Secondly, I wondered if
    OLX enables email merge fields? I don't think it does. 
    Therefore, we may stick with MailChimp for this reason.
     



    Is there someone I could talk to about OLX and
    its capabilities, or lack thereof?  We were not aware of
    these limitations when we purchased the
    product.



    We justified the increased cost
    of using RENXT, BBMS and OLX to our board by telling them we could
    discontinue using Moonclerk, Stripe, MailChimp, and
    Eventbrite.  But it sounds like we would be making a lot of
    sacrifices with lesser capabilities with OLX.  We were really
    excited about everything being integrated with our
    database.  Please advise.



    Thank you,



















    Natalie
    Siegel
    Director of Finance and
    Administration

    Council for Life
    accounting@councilforlife.org

    cell)
    214.709.8101





















  • Chris Martin
    Chris Martin ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Hi Natalie Siegel‍. I'll coordinate with you offline to make sure you get answers to all of your questions and concerns about OLX‍'s feature set. To answer some of your specific questions:

    Automatic recurring gift processing - Online Express doesn't do this but RENXT does. Here's a KB article with lots of information about how this works in RENXT.
    Donor notification of expiring cards - You're correct that OLX doesn't notify donors of pending credit card expiration
    Self-service updating of stored credit card info - You're correct that OLX doesn't offer this either
    Merge fields for OLX emails - Yes, OLX supports basic biographical, organizational and salutation merge fields


    Hopefully that helps some. Thanks Natalie.

    Chris Martin

    Blackbaud Product Management
  • Gwendolyn Williams
    Gwendolyn Williams ✭
    Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Photogenic First Reply
    We are starting a monthly subscription membership service for our online course content and are having difficulty figuring out how best to do this. The NXT form does not support international donations which account for 25% of our income, but the Online Express forms don't support recurring memberships. We've tried to set up recurring donations as memberships, but this will require hand linking every month (a crazy amount of work for a small team!) plus there is language in the Online Express donation form that cannot be edited that makes it sound like a donation (not a good idea legally...). What are other people with subscription membership program doing? Are there third party sources that we should be looking at--the lack of recurring membership options and the lack of NXT's international capabilities is making me wonder if it is the right fit for us (or anyone with a large membership program).

Categories