Best Practices for PE/RE integration, part II

 This is the second part of my three part series on integration between Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge. Today, let's look at some common issues and best practices with the integration of memberships.

Membership gift information: In Patron Edge, a membership is seen as something of monetary value that can include benefits for the cardholder. In The Raiser's Edge, a membership is frequently seen as a giving club or form of recognition. Because of this difference, Patron Edge does not assume that a membership should have a gift associated with it. If your organization requires a gift for memberships in The Raiser's Edge, you can set the system up to automatically create gifts when a membership is added.

Membership expiration: Since memberships in The Raiser's Edge are pretty much a giving club with a little bit of reminder functionality, it's not really important to a lot of development offices if two membership periods overlap. In Patron Edge, this is a big no-no because of the benefits that can be associated with memberships. If Bob Hernandez has a membership that doesn't expire until June and he does an early renewal in April, make sure that the start date for the new membership is for the day after the current membership ends. Otherwise Bob, who normally comes to the zoo once a week with two free tickets as a member benefit, now gets four free tickets since he technically has two active memberships. If you enter memberships in PE, it will start the new one automatically after the current one. In RE, there's a rule in Configuration, Business Rules that will set new memberships to automatically start at the end of the current period; turn this on to save time and headache!

What practices are you following to ensure a successful membership integration? Leave a note in the comments.