Managing Members with GiftWorks August 26, 2010

by Karen Schaller

Have you been successfully using GiftWorks to manage data related to your prospects, donors, and volunteers, but wishing you could do more to track and cultivate your members?

The most obvious approach to membership within GiftWorks has been to use the member-since and renewal-date fields, assign a group code to indicate membership, and use a custom field to record the level of membership. However, these donor-based fields don’t link the membership details to donations, and so don’t support retention of membership history or analysis of membership activity. Group codes can’t be output into a report, and because donor custom fields are attached to the person, they can be used for only one piece of information and therefore are not effective at retaining membership details over time.

Read on to move beyond the obvious and explore the possibilities of using membership donations to record and work with member levels, changes in member activity, gifted and life memberships, and concurrent memberships.

Storing membership details in donations

Donation custom fields can track membership history and provide analysis of activity because each donation custom field exists in every gift and can hold information unique to each gift. Therefore, only one of your limited donation custom fields is used to track membership levels over time. The same holds true for any donation custom field, so a total of four custom fields could store all membership details and history. And you can record concurrent memberships simply by adding another membership gift.

Examples using Donation Custom Fields: For gifted memberships, the monetary gift would be entered in the donor’s record with the member level indicating “Gifted to.” Another donation custom field holds the name of the person who is receiving the gifted membership. The membership level of “Gifted to” allows you to exclude this donor if you do not want them in a member list, or if you want to retrieve them separately to send them a different type of solicitation or reminder notice than you would for someone who purchased their own membership.

With GiftWorks 2010, you can create gifted and lifetime memberships by adding a zero-dollar donation directly in the gifted or lifetime member’s record and recording the details in the custom fields.

The example below shows the detail within a zero-dollar donation placed in a lifetime member’s record. The custom field for level would indicate “Lifetime,” and this designation could be used to include these members in or exclude them from SmartLists. A dated campaign code could represent the year they were given lifetime membership.

For all membership gifts, dated campaign and appeal codes further define your membership details and provide for more effective filtering and sorting in SmartLists and reports.

Analyzing membership data

When membership detail is in the gifts, you can analyze your member activity right along with gift amounts, campaigns, and appeals. You can filter SmartLists on the basis of any gift detail, including donation custom fields, and the gift detail can be included in the output—the printed or exported list.

Donation reports filtered on campaign or appeal, or based on a SmartList, can also include the gift details, as shown in the examples below.

Donation History by Campaign report—grouped by campaign:

Donation History by Campaign report—grouped by donor (member):

This report could also be grouped by appeal or by any of the donation custom fields.

Letters

When all membership details reside with gifts, the thank-you letter templates can include merge fields for these details. You can generate membership renewal letters by sending a donation-based SmartList to the mail center. With a list based on gifts—the membership details are from previous membership gifts—you are able to access the donation letter templates. This gives you the opportunity to include any of the past gift or membership details along with the current renewal date. With the membership details recorded with separate gifts, you can generate letters for separate, concurrent memberships within one record.

There are limitations with this strategy. When the membership information is stored within gifts, it is not easily viewed in the donor record. Unless you open a gift, you can’t see whether the person is a member, and at what level. Determining membership activity is also more difficult during gift entry.

Combining options to achieve your goal

Each option for membership management in GiftWorks has particular strengths and weaknesses, as detailed in the chart below.

When these options are used in combination, however, new possibilities emerge. One possibility would be to use gifts plus detailed group codes like 2010 Patron, 2011 Supporter, and 2011 Life Member. This strategy would require you to add only a group code after entering all membership details in the donation, and it would provide a visual history along with the analysis available through the gift method.

No single option within GiftWorks can do everything, but if you creatively combine options, you can achieve data management goals that once seemed out of reach.

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Karen Schaller, fundraising database consultant, has nearly a decade of experience helping nonprofits utilize fundraising software. Karen works with organizations to learn their database needs and evaluate their current software use. She helps them handle new information, merge and update old sources, and most importantly make data accessible, analyzable, and profitable. As a service to nonprofits in the community, Karen presents workshops with the Maine Association of Nonprofits. For more information, visit www.karenschaller.com.

Comments

Can you link a membership donation to renewal date in GW? i.e., when you enter a membership donation it would automatically add a year to the renewal date.

We would like to use this software for tracking membership information in our church (date received into congregation, ages, address, etc.) We are not interested in maximizing or focussing on donations, we simply would like to attribute weekly donations to a member and provide a yearend receipt for tax purposes. We will need to do mailouts targeted more to an age group than anything else. We would also like to produce a membership directory from the information we've input. Is this the software for us?

Molly, the renewal date attached to the person does not link to donations. That is why I suggested including a donation custom field for renewal date instead of using the existing renewal date field in the donor record. Using donations you would enter the appropriate renewal date (1 year out) in the custom field within each donation, rather than having to remember to adjust the field in the donor's record after entering the gift.
There is no membership feature in GiftWorks that will do anything for you automatically.

Gerlinde, to answer your questions:

Date Received into Congregation - You could effectively use the members since date.

Ages - There is no built in way to track ages in GiftWorks. You can use a donor custom field to track birthdate, but there is no functionality that will calculate the age for you. To get a list for an age-based mailing, you would need to enter the range of birthdates that reflect the ages of the people you want to include. For this you would want to use a custom date field. (For other users who want to retrieve people who have birthdays in a particular month, a custom text field works best in the format mm/dd/yyyy.)

Membership Directory - you could export all the pertinent contact information to have a directory printed, but the data would be in spreadsheet form; all information horizontally in one row.

GiftWorks is designed to maximize and focus on donations and communications with donors. While you could make GiftWorks work for you, it isn't designed just for what you want.