Recurring Memberships

Natalie Siegel

Are there recurring membership, like recurring donations?  Also, can you add attributes for Members?  

Chris Martin

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

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

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

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).