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We have people in our database marked for a group that is actually an annual membership to our young professionals society. Other people are marked as prospects to be a members. Two questions -- As people "expire" they need to renew their gift online. Can I set up a donation page so that gifts made on that page put the donor into the member group? What if the individual is already part of the group? Will the system kick back the online donation?

What if the individual is part of the group for prospects, but not members? When they make a gift to join the group will the system know to move them from the prospects group to members?

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  • Hi Danielle,

    this is an excellent question... Within the Go! program, we are not designing any of our campaigns or activities around Membership segmentation, and membership (as you noted) is a segment that can be tricky to track over time because of lapsed memberships, and changes in status. Because of the complexity we recommend that you hold off on beginning to track membership in Convio. I'll put a brief summary below of "Convio and Membership" but keep in mind that there are other fundamental tactics and strategies that we'd like to stay focussed on during your first year with Convio before tackling that next level of eCRM.

    In Summary, with regards to Membership in Convio, there are two different approaches that clients have taken in the past:

    1) Create a separate donation form in Convio that adds donors to a specific group (called "Member" for example). This way, donors do have a way to go to the website and add themselves by making an online donation.

    Advantage: it's easy to have separate donation forms and having a group of members is helpful for segmentation.

    Disadvantage: managing membership on an ongoing basis becomes a manual process whereby the Convio admin needs to manage who are the people in that group.

    2) Using Convio's Membership module (additional costs to add this to your contract)

    Advantage: This will allow you to set up membership types that donors can become a part of by making a donation to a donation form on Convio. Their membership level will automatically adjust as time moves on (ex: if the time lapses and they have not renewed, then they will lose membership status)

    Disadvantage: The setup up for managing membership types in Convio must be set up perfectly before launching to your constituents because it is difficult to make adjutments as time goes on. It is also important for you to understand the limits of manually managing membership as people begin making donations etc to become members. While Convio does have functionality that helps support this, there will still be a significant amount of time and resources that you need to dedicate to manage the memberships manually, and if this is not a large priority for you, you could easily overwhelm yourself with more to manage than what you have time to do.

    I hope this helps explain a little bit about Membership and Convio. Keep in mind, that after your first year on the Convio platform, you'll always have the chance to grow your online initatives, but it's important to spend our time and energy on getting the fundamentals in place. Sound good?

    Adam

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