Tracking New vs. Replacement Memberships

Haley Ruth-Ognoskie · July 2015

This goes out to all you RE Smarty Pants! I've got a brain teaser for you -

My organization has been tracking new vs. replacement members through fund and it is just not an efficient way to track this info. Some background to help that make sense: We currently record memberships primarily by the organization as opposed to the individual. Example: John Doe signs up to be a member. Based on the email address he provides we can identify his organization. In batch, I change his name to his organization's, include his name in the gift reference field (so we can see the name associated with the charge on his Org's gift tab) and link John's name to the gift of membership (so it appears in John's Membership tab). In batch I also select one of two funds - 2015 New or 2015 Replacement. In order to determine if John is a new or replacement member, I first have to open the company's gift record and manually count how many memberships the company has "opened," which sometimes means having to go back years! To further explain - If a company has 5 of its employees as members and one decides to leave, the company now has one "open" spot. John Doe's membership will fill that spot as an replacement membership, regardless of the fact that this may be his first time ever joining our organization. This method gets very convoluted and tedious when a company has 25+ employees as members.

I am writing to ask if anyone knows of a better way to track this information. I am needing this to be recorded in a way that is pullable. The goal here is to be able to identify how many new memberships we've received, so hopefully I've been able to communicate that by just tracking by name doesn't necessarily mean new.

Hope that makes sense and I look foward to your feedback! Thanks to everyone who takes the time to post a response!

Haley

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE · July 2015

Wouldn't the payment indicate a new (or renewed) membership as opposed to a replacement? Not sure I understand your process.

Haley Ruth-Ognoskie · July 2015

jbekerman@collegefund.org:

Wouldn't the payment indicate a new (or renewed) membership as opposed to a replacement? Not sure I understand your process.

Not necessarily because a company's "open" memberships span the entire length of their involvement with our organization. Our membership dues are invoiced annually so a company could have 5 active members in 2013, only 4 in 2015 and then want to have 7 for 2015. There would have to be payment for all 7 memberships in 2015, but 5 of those would be replacement and 2 would be new.

Julie Hiland · July 2015

I'm not sure I'm entirely clear on what information you're looking to report. It sounds like you already have the RE Membership module, which is good. When you process a membership transaction in Batch, you have the option of Renewing the membership or creating a New membership, and that information can be reported out easily in the Membership Reports. But are you linking to a membership on the organization's record, or are you linking only to a membership on the individual's record? It's been a while since I've worked with Membership records and reporting, but if you link to a membership on the organization record, then wouldn't you be able to quickly see the individuals on that membership? Sorry, not sure if ANY of my babble is helping...

Nicole S · July 2015

I may be a little rusty on my membership module skills, but I assume that you are "dropping" members after a certain time. Then when they return, you can use the "rejoin" feature (How to rejoin a dropped membership). I think that when you query/export membership info you should be able to use "rejoined" as the criteria (How to query on active memberships that were new, renewed, or rejoined in a specific date range).

But this might not work for you if you aren't really dropping member because it's an organization with employees holding memberships. Perhaps something with the membership category might work for filtering these out.

Tracking New vs. Replacement Memberships

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