Giving Societies Tracking Recommendation in RE

Evan Greene

Best practices recommendation for tracking Giving Societies in RE? Memberships module? Attributes? Implications for Query/Export for either place? Thank you!

Angela Tuttle

We use membership but I am interested in what others say.

Karen Diener

I think you possibly asked this in the Facebook user group as well. You could use Membership if you have it, but Attributes work well too.

I would not necessarily keep or get Membership just for this purpose, but it depends on how many giving societies you have, how complicated they are, and what your staffing is like to support membership in general.

The membership module isn't super intuitive, but once you figure it out, it works pretty nicely. I've only used it for giving societies (annual, lifetime, and estate planning) and not for a paid membership the way you might use for a museum, for instance.

It does not “find” memberships for you - there is no way to automatically apply a membership if someone reaches $5,000 in during a fiscal year, for instance. But you can easily set up queries to see who has reached a giving threshold and then update their record as needed.

Karen

Faith Murray

We use constituent codes as well as attributes - constituent codes provide easy donor segmenting (along with alumni, etc) on communications. Attributes allow us to track nuances such as Honorary, Lifetime, Prospect, etc. Memberships would also be an excellent place to track.

Dan Snyder

We use attributes to track this information. We chose not to use Memberships because the year counting for consecutive was calendar year based, not fiscal.

Shannon Moats

We use the membership module! Can track levels as well as gift anniversaries.