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Jill Oster
Jill Oster ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Why is so hard to get a total number of active memberships in a calendar year?  I have been on support and through this before and still can't figure out why this isn't a simpler process.  Can it be done by writing a separate query?  I am looking for all active  membership for 2015 and the membership statistics by category is the closest canned report that i can use.  The checkbox "only include active membership is memberships as of" though is complicating it.  I don't want to consider who was lasped or dropped at the time.  I only want to report on who was an active members from Jan 1, 2015- December 31, 2015.  Has anyone figured out a way to get this number in a easy way?
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  • Daniel Noga 2
    Daniel Noga 2 ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    I wish I could give you a simple answer, but the way RE: tracks membership history is A) ridiculous and B) way more complicated than it should be.


    RE: makes no effort whatsoever to keep an accurate, static record of membership transaction history. You would logically think, "I was a member until xx date, when I dropped, then I wasn't a member, and then I was again." RE: does not work that way. It has "T-Rex Vision" and only registers movement and change; Upgrade or downgrade your membership and it will add a record of this to the membership transaction history; maintain your membership via regular renewals for 5 years straight, and it doesn't much care. It will just keep updating the most recent membership transaction with the latest expiration dates and transaction dates. If your membership Lapses and you renew it at the same level, RE: appears to lose track of the time you were "MIA;" once you renew again, your Lapse record just changes to Active again and the record of your time as a non-member disappears unless a whole separate membership is created.


    Prior to working in RE:, I worked in a database that was custom-written by an amateur programmer. It was the first thing he'd ever coded in his life. In that system, there was a screen on which I could literally enter a date, and it would tell me who was a member on that date, broken down by category and summed up for me in about 5 seconds. I challenge Blackbaud to duplicate it.

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