Membership & COVID-19

Elizabeth Grover · March 2020

Our institution has decided to close to the public for the next two weeks out of an abundance of caution. For our members, we are thinking of putting out messaging that we will proactively extend all memberships for another month. Does anyone know if there a global way to change all membership expiration dates?

Stay safe everyone!

Debbie McKenzie · March 2020

I asked BB this very question yesterday. Expiration dates can't be changed globally. It will require writing a special data script to add a membership transaction to the member's record.. I have our Blackbaud Altru consultant/guru looking into what this would cost. I also suggested others would be needing to do this too! I will let you know what I hear back.

Elizabeth Grover · March 2020

Here is what is being suggested by support:

After some testing I was able to see that the batch process that has an "expiration date" field available is the membership dues batch process. This process would involve you renewing all memberships in your database, and editing the expiration date to reflect a one month renewal, not a full term renewal. You would have to check their current expiration date and add on month to it, and change the expiration date accordingly. This would be extremely time consuming. You could change the renewal options to show a grace status after the expiration here for example https://www.screencast.com/t/N8sNsHRXZn and notify staff that these should be treated as active for the months/years to come.

If anyone has a better, easier or more seamless solution, please let me know!

Michelle Sweany · March 2020

I also asked Blackbaud the same on Thursday, the day before we decided to close for 3 weeks. The answer I got was no global change, but 2 possible alternatives:

Add a grace period to all active memberships in the program you want changed. This will not change the actual expiration dates, but will be a visible reminder to staff that the membership is not yet expired. We currently only use a grace period for our donors, so this would be a noticeable change to our memberships. I was hoping to change all the exp dates and send out new digital cards to all, and this method will not allow that.
We can batch change memberships. This would require changing each expiration date individually - i.e. batch all memberships that expire March 31, 2020 and extend them to May 31, 2020, then continue probably 14-15 more times (without looking, my guess is that I have expiration dates extending from this month through May or June 2021, with a few outliers that can be changed manually). This is still a lot of work, but better than changing all memberships individually and manually, and would allow me to send new cards as stated above.

I have consulted with other membership managers, though, and several advise not globally extending memberships. They have done it in the past and found that it significantly affects their budget and income for several years after. Others have found that members all already being very understanding and generous with the situation, even going so far as renewing with an additional donation to help them through this difficult time. I have decided to wait and see how long this closure actually ends up being and how angry members really are over it. I will likely extend anyone who is angry and requests it, but will wait and see how it goes.

Good luck everyone and stay healthy!

Lori Elder · March 2020

I would hope the folks at BB are working on a global expiration date change since most of us are facing the issue of members wanting an extension. With over 20,000 active records, it's not possible for me to edit every record.

Rosita Bradham · March 2020

Good afternoon! Please see a new KB tip that explains options to extend active membership expiration dates. https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/193036

Maria Sainz · March 2020

Has anyone completed option 2 in the recent KB article?

https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/193036

Symone Avery · March 2020

Just an FYI, There is an Altru idea that could be voted on in the hopes that a feature is added to make a global change. You can find it here https://altru.ideas.aha.io/

Unfortunately, neither of the options in that article would work for our institution.

Elizabeth Grover · March 2020

Neither of the options presented are viable for our organization. Plus, these suggested workarounds will have a huge impact on our reporting going forward as mentioned in the KB article:

Please be aware that this will affect your reporting by considering these new transactions - this could affect retention rate, revenue reporting, and these transactions could pull into your acknowledgement process. We will use a promotion code to adjust the amount of the renewal to $0. Constituents will also have a new revenue transaction on their record for $0 with the Other payment method.

All member organizations that are currently closed need a solution that can be easily implemented upon reopening that does not impact future reporting. Blackbaud needs to move forward with a solution to this immediately! I am telling members that they will not lose any time off their membership, but I have no plan in place to make it happen once a decision has been made to reopen.

Wendy Scardino · April 2020

We're in the same situation wanting to offer extensions globally instead of managing potentially hundreds individually. Is there any plan for BB to work on this?

Regina Holten · April 2020

Did everyone see the announcement posted 04/21 that Altru was going to be...updated to provide global change on expiration dates? It was in their press release re covid-19 and arts and cultural orgs...hoping I read it correctly - said the change was coming soon.

Henry Petree · April 2020

Good morning!

You need to be able to globally extend memberships during this unprecedented time. We’re excited to share that the Blackbaud Altru Membership Utility is now available for download giving you the ability to extend memberships for up to 12 months in bulk. Technical resources and knowledgebase can be found on the utility download page. Our Customer Support team is available to answer any additional questions you may have and our Professional Services team can assist with query creation and reviewing the standard options. Keep the requests and feedback coming.

Thank you,

Hank

Devendra Shrikhande · April 2020

Thanks Hank!

As a quick follow-up, I would also recommend checking out this KB article first that has excellent step by step details on how to access and implement this utility. This article is included in the resources of the utility - just thought it would be more convenient to have it available up front!

:
I need to globally extend memberships

The engineering team purposely set up a utility that one can self-implement. However if you need assistance we are here to help:

If you are live (i.e. using Altru on a daily basis) and have a quick question as you self-implement, please reach out to support.
If you are live (i.e. using Altru on a daily basis) and on an Altru retainer, and would like an Altru consultant assist you, please let your consultant know and they would be glad to follow up.
If you are live (i.e. using Altru on a daily basis) but not on an Altru retainer, and would like an Altru consultant assist you, please reach out to your Account Executive and they would be glad to follow up and set up consulting assistance.
If you are currently in implementation, i.e. not yet live with Altru and are curious on how to adjust your membership configuration at this this time, please reach out to your Altru consultant.

Friendly reminder that we are in uncertain times, and it is best to review the resource and set up a plan so you are completing this upgrade only once.

As Hank mentioned, we are here to help and please share feedback and questions.

Thanks again for all that you are doing to keep our communities together and engaged in these trying times!

Devendra

Kelly Olson · April 2020

I am wondering if anyone has used the new membership extension utility? Any words of advice? Is it as straight-forward to use as it seems?

Regina Holten · April 2020

I am following this thread! I'd also like to know if it straightforward - would be done by my IT guys. Can it be done even if we end up NOT using it? It doesn't change anything immediately?

Heather Thorwald · April 2020

I haven't run it yet, but it looks pretty straightforward. It's a utility that you download onto your computer (or someone in IT would download onto their computer), so it has no direct effect on your Altru client until you run it.

Something to note, however. You first need to create a membership query to select the memberships to extend. In the KB article that describes how to create a membership query (No. 193206), it recommends querying on Status = Active.

However, by the time we run the utility, many members who were Active when we closed on March 13 will now be Status = Lapsed. So instead, I am going to query on Expiration Date = On or After March 13.

I have no idea when we'll be ready to reopen and run the utility, but I'll let you know how it goes!

Laura Schmid · April 2020

I started to test the Membership Utility Tool today. I decided to
just start with my 4/30/20 exp dates to experiment with. I did not
go through with the process.

Please take note - the utility tool appears to me to only change
exp. dates 1 month, which = 30 days or the same day as the previous
month. So if you want to extend 4/30/20 to 5/31/20, it won't do
that. It wants to extend to 5/30/20.

What concerns me is what happens when I process an extension for
1/31/21. Will it extend to 2/31/21? There is no such date. And then
will 2/28/21 become 3/28/21?

I brought this to the attention of support today. The person I
spoke to said she would bring this to the attention of the
engineers. I expect most organizations set their
expiration dates to the last day of the month. If you are one of
these organizations, you might want to sit on your hands and
wait.

Laura
Schmid | Membership
Manager
4949 Tealtown Road | Milford, OH
45150
(513) 831-1711, ext. 416 | Membership Office
(513) 965-4893
www.CincyNature.org

Regina Holten · May 2020

WOAH - that is interesting - thank you for sharing.

Angela Brown · May 2020

Thanks for sharing that Laura! I found the same issue when I created a promotion in batch to extend memberships for 3 months. It will extend from 4/30/20 to 7/30/20. All our memberships expire at the end of the month. The question I have is we have the batch memberships handled and it's easy to extend manually, we need to use this utility to extend our online memberships. We have almost 200 memberships since last Thursday and each one will have to be extended manually and to do this you have to change the expiration date in 2 to 3 different places on the membership record. This is maddening as you are slowly changing the dates and need to export the records you have cleaned for card production we are still selling memberships and there is a constant flow of new records and duplicates that have to be cleaned before printing the cards. We need to build a membership query (we already have a revenue query but can't use that one for the new membership utility process) to pull only online membership sales. Does anyone have any tips on how to write that? I could use some help. :-)

Laura Schmid · May 2020

Angela – I am not extending exp dates for
anyone who is joining or rejoining going forward. We were only
closed for 2 ½ weeks so we chose to only extend exp dates 1 month
for anyone active on 4/30/20. Anyone joining or rejoining after
that time is not getting the extension.

We imported an attribute on the primary
members records who “deserved” the extension. The attribute is the
original exp date. That way, we’ve documented who got the extension
and what the original date is. So if anyone comes back to us asking
if they got the extension, we have that documented. Then I built a
query identifying anyone who had the attribute = 4/30/20. Then I
ran the tool so they were extended to 5/31/20. Then changed the
query to attribute = 5/31/20. Ran the tool so they were extended to
6/30/20. I went month by month by month. The instructions for the
tool say don’t do more than 1,000 records at a time for optimal
performance. 1 month of exp dates at a time worked for me. It took
SEVERAL hours. I had about 12,000 records to extend. I think that
took me at least 6 hours to run month by month.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach
out lschmid@cincynature.org.

Laura

Heather Thorwald · May 2020

To pull online membership sales only, you'll need to query on Sales Method=Online Sales. On the Membership query, it's Membership Transaction\\Revenue Application\\Revenue Details\\Sales Order\\Sales method type is equal to Online Sales.

Hope that helps!

Regina Holten · May 2020

So for you Laura you could extend something through a 31st date? I thought I read above maybe that it could only do 30 days or some such? We're not back and haven't run the utility.

Laura Schmid · May 2020

Yes, the tool will only extend for 30 days
right now. HOWEVER, I have received information from my awesome
account executive at Blackbaud that the engineers are working on
updating the tool so it will extend to last day of month. If you
are still waiting to use the tool and that is a concern for you,
you may want to wait. I have no idea when an updated tool is
coming. You probably will want to reach out to your own account
executive to find out more.

For those who have already run the tool, I
understand that the next version of the utility tool may have the
ability to fix the weird 1-3 day off issue. I recommend you reach
out to your account executive to find out more if this is a concern
of yours.

Laura

Angela Brown · May 2020

Thanks Laura, we closed on March 30th and are only open now for trail access. We decided to extend new memberships and renewals for 3 months. Our reasoning behind this is that we have a gate system where members have to scan their membership cards to gain access to our property. The gate software does not connect to Altru and we were not able to extend existing cards and printing new membership cards and postage to mail for every member was too cost prohibitive.

Thanks Heather! I am building a query to start using the utility to extend our online memberships prior to printing cards. We are extending with a promotion from batch and that is working well for us except the off day or 30 days in a month vs. 31. I did talk to chat support this morning and if you have a membership that ends in 30 and you extend to a month ending in 31 it will not extend that extra day but it will work if you have an starting expiration date of 31 and extend to a month ending in 30.

Laura Schmid · May 2020

Angela – we have a second location for members
only. We have a gate system too. Members have to swipe cards there
too. It also doesn’t connect to Altru. I run a query and export
data, upload it to our gate software 1x/week. I’ve figured out a
way to work around the extension issue. I’m so happy to find
someone else in the community who has a similar setup. If you ever
want to talk about it, feel free to reach out to me!

Laura

Devendra Shrikhande · May 2020

Hello Everyone

Slipping in a quick note that V2 of the Membership Extension Utility is available . Same location as previous. It now has the ability to update memberships to end of month if you prefer.

I have found it useful to set up smaller groups and keep the convenient exports of records selected and records output for reference and keeping tabs.

After you complete the update, if it would help, you can import this selection of members that you have extended and connect them to a constituent attribute identifying those you have given this membership extension.

Kristine Carter · May 2020

Hi Devendra,

I have not downloaded the utility as I am waiting until we have a reopening date set just in case there are further updates. But to clarify, we will have to run the utility multiple times for each month we want to extend the memberships?

For example - we closed in mid-March and assuming we reopen in June: the members with the original expiration date of 3/31/2020 will have to go through the utility three times to get the new expiration date of 6/30/2020? Or will we be able to set the date for 6/30/2020 and just run the utility once?

Devendra Shrikhande · May 2020

Hello Kristine

Glad to hear that you are waiting to run the process until your reopen is confirmed. Best not to have to repeat the process.

In terms of your question about multiple months, you can select how many months and also expiration date (end of month or exact date, etc.)

Please refer to Item #2 in the KB instructions on the utility:
https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/193270

Kristine Carter · May 2020

Wonderful, thank you Devendra!

Heather Thorwald · May 2020

Hi Devendra,

If we downloaded the previous version of the utility, should we deinstall it first before installing v.2?

Thanks,

Heather

Devendra Shrikhande · May 2020

Hello Heather

We recommend deleting the previous instance and installing the new version of the utility.

Thanks!

Devendra

Membership & COVID-19

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