Mid-Season Price Change Affect Current Members?

Breeze Kidder

Will changing the price of a membership mid-season affect any data/records for the current members who have already purchased the membership before the price change?

We have a membership that historically has been $2,500 a year - the FMV of the membership is $200 and the $2300 goes towards general donation. Before we switched to Altru this last year - people just gave us 2500 dollars and that was that. Altru does not seem to like that, and we have been having to split payments - which our members do not like as much either.

Our solution would be to hopefully change the price of the membership to 200, and just manually add in a donation of 2300 dollars every time someone buys this specific membership (it's a very select amount of people, less than 50).

However before we do this - does anyone foresee any problems with changing the price mid-season? I plan on chatting with Altru but I thought I would use all the tools available I have at the moment. Thank you!

Chris Nungesser

Hi @Breeze Kidder,

CHANGING THE PRICE
My gut feeling is that changing the price will not affect current members. You could test this in your Staging database just to be sure that everything functions and performs the way you are intending. You might consider creating a different Membership Level and transitioning people over to that level just so you don't lose any historical data (if that matters to you), so it doesn't appear that people were at the $200 level the whole time. You could test how that looks and functions in Staging as well.

MAKING PART OF THE MEMBERSHIP TAX DEDUCTIBLE
I feel like you can get around this move altogether though and provide a better giving experience for your member/donors. I assume that, in Altru, this Membership Program is a Annual, Dues Based membership - that it's $2,500 a year. Is that right? If so, if you go to Memberships and select that Membership Program, there are a number of tabs along the top of your screen (Activity, Revenue, General, etc.).

There is one called Benefits. On this tab, you can choose if all, part, or none of the membership dues are considered tax deductible. If you select "a portion is considered tax deductible" then some fields appear below your various Membership Levels asking what the tax deductible amount is - so you could say that $2,300 is tax deductible.

The next tab over is the Rules tab. It asks if the "tax deductible portion from benefits is contributed membership revenue." You could select “yes” and then, next to that section, you can set a Designation that the tax deductible portion will go toward.

You may want to test that out in Staging just to see how that works for you. The way the Revenue will display on a constituent's Revenue History may be a little busy to look at, but I think it would be a better giving experience for your member/donors as it would all be one transaction to them. You can also acknowledge the donor properly, if desired, since there is a Membership transaction or a Designation to reference.

Chris ?

Breeze Kidder

Hi Chris - thank you so much for your detailed response, I felt like this was doable and your explanation was very clear and confirmed that it probably is- I chatted with Altru and I believe that making part of the membership tax deductible would be the best way for us to keep everyone happy. (fingers crossed) We did not even know about the staging database (!) so that is something new to investigate as well. I really appreciate your reply!