Free Membership Program?

Carol Radel
Carol Radel
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

Hi. Does anyone have a successful free membership program that you manage to run through Altru?

We have a new program that gives a comp membership to students who complete a course that we give though NYC schools. I didn't realize that this was an issue until we tried to print welcome letters, and they won't print because membership acknowledgements only run from the membership GIFT, which doesn't exist here.

Has anyone found a good simple way to pull letters and mark them/keep track (so they don't keep pulling) without having to mark things manually or do imports/exports, etc?

Thanks in advance.

Carol

Comments

  • Chris Nungesser
    Chris Nungesser
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi @Carol Radel,

    I have two thoughts. I hope one gets you where you are needing to go.

    The first idea is to create some internal comp for the membership. So the cost can be zeroed out. This could be nice since it works within your existing levels. And you could, presumably, include these folks in your renewals process if they wished to transition to a paid membership at the end of their free membership period.

    The second idea is to create a new Membership Level for this program (or possibly a separate Membership Program - depending on how you envision this comp membership being used). The cost for the membership at this level is $0. And then you'd register the students just like normal. There would be a transaction, it's just zero dollars. You'd want to ensure that this level is not viewable on your Web Forms (so that people cannot see it as an option when they go online to buy a membership). As a separate membership level, you could tailor renewal time communications specifically to them. So that could be a positive. Or maybe it's too much of a pain to want to create a separate Membership Level just for this program. I guess it just depends on how this new program fits within your future plans and how often you see it being utilized.

    I hope this gets you closer to your goal.

    Chris

  • Carol Radel
    Carol Radel
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Chris Nungesser Thanks Chris.

    We created a separate program My issue here is that for people who join online (they have a link to use to reach this program only), it creates a sales order, but NO payment. The membership acknowledgements in Altru run off payments.

    Since there are no payments, they also don't get marked as acknowledged, and would keep coming up in any query for them without a way of easily marking them.

    If we enter them manually, it creates a $0 payment, so those do work even though it is not ideal, but we really want to steer these people online to cut down on staff time (says the person who has spent ages trying to figure this out!).

  • Chris Nungesser
    Chris Nungesser
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Interesting. I would have thought there'd still be something there, @Carol Radel. But if the user isn't selecting a payment method/type, I guess that might make sense. This is tricky to test since this requires Web Forms (and I can't test that in the Staging database). So just a few things to help me understand:

    • What do you see on the Revenue History tab on a Constituent's record? Does it show anything? How about the Sales Order tab?
    • And then are you able to pull a query by Membership Transaction? Maybe with criteria like Membership Transaction - Action (like Join) and Transaction Date. And then also having Membership Transaction / Membership / Membership Level. Just trying to think about if there's something here we can query.
    • I wonder if any of this is related to your Reporting Filter for the revenue your organization acknowledges. Kind of depends on your responses to the questions above. But that was another thought that I had.

    Sorry that you're experiencing these challenges. This is a tough one. Hopefully, we can find a solution.

    Chris

  • Chris Nungesser
    Chris Nungesser
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Quick follow-up: if it is the Reporting Filters for acknowledgment revenue - that you could make it work if you were acknowledging the Order and not the Payment - the only thought I have is to acknowledge it in a way that does not fit with the rest of your processes, which would be a pain. Create a manual acknowledgment. And then you'd adjust your Reporting Filter prior to running the acknowledgment and then adjust it back after. Obviously, that's not ideal, but that's really where my brain goes if there isn't a payment and you don't make adjustments to your other acknowledgment queries.

  • Carol Radel
    Carol Radel
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Chris Nungesser Thank you so much for all the time and help you've provided. I really appreciate it.

    I think we've found a workable solution, which is to take this membership program completely out of the acknowledgement process, and instead use “Print Membership Cards” with a new/custom template specifically for the program. It will mark the cards printed, and we'll just have to use that as indication that they've been acknowledged.

    I'd prefer to run them with other acknowledgments, but it's a quick and easy process and we'll at least try it for a while and see how it goes.

    I really want to thank you for giving this so much thought! If I can ever return the favor, please feel free to contact me.

    Carol

  • Chris Nungesser
    Chris Nungesser
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    Oh that's so smart, @Carol Radel! I'm glad you all found a good solution.

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