How to Consolidate Multiple Memberships / Manually Rebuild Membership History?

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Dee Kitchen
Dee Kitchen ✭
Tenth Anniversary
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
I have recently inherited an RE database that was imported from who knows where a long time ago. The import process caused existing constituent's membership history to be split into multiple individual memberships. I.E. Joe Schmoe's membership from 1999 - 2009 now shows as three seperate dropped memberships and one active membership. Now when I print cards and run reports, I often get three or more results for the same constituent. How can I consolidate or manually repair these records without losing a constituent's entire history?
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  • Kim Rich
    Kim Rich ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    Hi Dee-



    I know exactly what you are going through in that I have the same issue at my org.  There is no easy way to consolidate or merge memberships. I have been complaining about this for years but nothing has changed on that front. You have two options: 1. contract with Blackbaud to do a custom service to merge multiples or 2. Do them manually, one-by-one yourself.  Neither is a great option. I have had to accept that my database is going to have these multiples and try to deal with the newest/most accurate membership only.  I have done as much global due diligence as I can including dropping out of date memberships but I have no way to accurately run statistics on membership.



    When I do clean-up, I take the latest/most accurate membership and then manually add each preceeding transaction to it while deleting as I go.  It's painstaking and easily messed up so it requires complete attention as you are linking gifts as you go as well.  I normally print the current membership page before I start so I can see the number I should have as well as beginning and end dates on each transaction.



    I wish I had better advice, I once tried a global export and import on a test database, but that didn't work either. Access can be your friend here, but it's never been a friend of mine and caused more harm than good when I played around with it for cleanup.  Reach out to Blackbaud to see if they have come up with any new utilities, but thus far I have not seen them.



    Kim



     
  • Jessica Smith 2
    Jessica Smith 2 ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    When you are rebuilding the membership history manually, watch out for gift memberships! If a membership transaction was funded by someone else's gift and you delete this, you may lose the data if you aren't carefully checking who made the gift befoe you delete the transaction and/or membership record. I check all the linked gifts first to make sure they are from the donor whose record I am working on before I delete anything. If you haven't already done so, I would highly recommend limiting the number of memberships allowed per record to one. With this approach, RE will kick back an error message to users who try to attempt adding a duplicate membership record to a constituent who already has an existing membership history. Good luck!
  • Nicole S
    Nicole S ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Cleaning up those old memberships is no easy task!  Very time consuming and almost totally manual.  Hind sight has taught me that you have to think about your membership program and guidelines.  I have had to go back and change hundreds of memberships because they wanted to alter criteria for certain programs.angry
  • John Heizer
    John Heizer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    It's a nightmare.  Even great tools like ImportOMatic can't help.



    There's a suggestion on the Discovery site for something similar to this.  It could use more votes!  http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/3465346-allow-membership-records-to-be-merged-rather-than

     
  • Jessica Smith 2
    Jessica Smith 2 ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    John Heizer:

    It's a nightmare.  Even great tools like ImportOMatic can't help.


    There's a suggestion on the Discovery site for something similar to this.  It could use more votes!  http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/3465346-allow-membership-records-to-be-merged-rather-than

     

    John, thanks for the info on ImportOMatic; it's good to know that's not a silver bullet either. The Discovery site suggestion's posting has closed voting. I'm not sure why, but thought others would like to know in advance before they went out to try voting for it too.
  • John Heizer
    John Heizer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic

    Jessica Pionke:

     

    John Heizer:

    It's a nightmare.  Even great tools like ImportOMatic can't help.


    There's a suggestion on the Discovery site for something similar to this.  It could use more votes!  http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/3465346-allow-membership-records-to-be-merged-rather-than

     

    John, thanks for the info on ImportOMatic; it's good to know that's not a silver bullet either. The Discovery site suggestion's posting has closed voting. I'm not sure why, but thought others would like to know in advance before they went out to try voting for it too.

     

    That post was from 3 years ago.  The uservoice.com site was mothballed a couple of years ago and all the ideas moved to the "Ideas" tab at the top of this site.

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