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Membership Management

Jazmin Jernigan

Hello, our association operates off of membership dues. Could anyone give me insight in the Membership functionality used in Blackbaud?

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Comments

Karen Diener

@Jazmin Jernigan Not sure what information you are looking for specifically, but here is what I can share:

It is not useful for situations where Members get discounts when registering for events, or access to free information on your website. Since you are with an association, that might be be important for you.
I only used it to track giving society memberships. Two were lifetime (lifetime giving and planned gift commitments) and one was annual. For the annual membership, which was $10,000 per year, we did link gifts to the Membership which was very useful for our later reporting requirements. That membership society allowed for family foundation gifts to be attributed to different members of the family. So if the Foundation gave $50,000, five family members (or couples) could be granted membership for the year.
On that note, you can multiple constituents to a membership. So enter the membership on one record and then attach other members to it. Almost like soft crediting gifts.
Membership barely shows in webview. If your fundraisers are familiar with webview and need to see Membership information, they'll probably be frustrated. Many people asked about the plans for Membership at BBCON and it basically isn't in Blackbaud's plans for the next couple of years.
Is it easy? Impossible to answer. I spent A LOT of time testing it before I settled on the structure, but found it to make a lot of sense after figuring it out. The setup is not entirely intuitive, and aspects of it are overthought IMHO. For instance, you can indicate that a membership was an upgrade or a downgrade from someone's previous membership. Maybe that isn't “overthought” but it didn't have any use in my scenario. And every organization I've encountered since then who has tried to use upgrade and downgrade has found that to be very cumbersome.
There are a lot of fields on the Membership record. Do not feel like you need to use all of them!

Those are the first thoughts that come to mind, and it has been a few years since I've worked in it.

Karen