Does anyone have any experience dropping memberships in the membership module en masse? Particularly after years of not dropping memberships except in isolated cases? Any information or advice you could provide would be helpful. Thank you.

Not really sure what kind of info you are looking for? RE does all the work once you execute the Drop Lapsped Members function in Admin. We drop members at the beginning of each new fiscal year - last year I dropped nearly 800 members. Anyone who has not renewed in the past year (so they've been lapsed for a whole year) gets dropped. If you are not marking your members as Lapsed, you may need to complete that step before you can Drop? But I think you can choose a query of ANY member types you want. Let me know if I can answer any other questions for you! Tracie Cassidy Database Coordinator Seattle Children's Hospital Foundation (206) 987-6833 [Email Removed]

JENNIFER LONG: We, like you, have not dropped lapsed members except on an individual basis until this week. I just researched the topic and have started to drop lapsed mems, beginning with the oldest expiration dates. I run the Lapsed Member Report for expiration dates before a certain date, creating a constituent output query which I then use to actually drop the members. The Lapsed Member Report gives you some idea of problems you'll encounter when you go to actually drop the members, and you can also look at the output query to see who's going to be dropped. First problem I ran into is that the Drop Lapsed Members function won't let you drop members with inactive member categories -- you have to activate the categories. OK, we solved that problem. Second problem (ongoing): Drop Lapsed Members also won't let you drop anyone with inactive benefits on their records. Which, it turns out, many of our members have. I haven't quite figured out how the 10 or 20 benefit codes (all gibberish) got created or put on members' benefit screens (possibly when we converted from our old database format to RE years ago). At any rate, you can't globally delete benefits from membership records, so if I activate the unused benefits in order to drop lapsed members, once a membership is dropped you don't have access to the former memberships to remove the unused benefits. So they'll probably stay there forever, unless... RE comes up with a plug-in or the ability to globally delete benefits ("it's been filed as a suggestion," I'm told -- sound familiar?). Anyway, let me know if you have any other questions. (And perhaps you can give me some feedback on your progress.) We're hoping that when we get all our lapsed members dropped, some of the membership reports will make more sense. (Can anybody support that hope???) Walter Koenig Membership Coord. New Jersey Audubon Society 908-204-8998 [Email Removed] [i]--- Edited at 6/14/2006 10:50:43 AM by Walter Koenig[/i] [i]--- Edited at 6/14/2006 11:02:44 AM by Walter Koenig[/i]

Walter, I have been fighting the DROP members-well-forever, but like you, am so fed up with the RE Membership renewal reports (100% retention rate!), that I'm feeling pressure to change my ways. I worry about picking up those dropped members later - either on their own or through direct mailings - and then their ending up with two memberships, when what we really are seeing are reinstated lapsed members. Do we have to give in to BB? Judy Judith Bromley Audubon Naturalist Society Chevy Chase, MD [Email Removed]

JUDY: I'm always amazed when someone responds quickly to a post -- I confess that sometimes days go by without my looking at the Forum. Thanks for your response. Anyway, it sounds like dropping lapsed members hasn't made the canned member reports any more valuable. Is that a fair statement? Walter Koenig Membership Coord. New Jersey Audubon Society 908-204-8998 [Email Removed] [i]--- Edited at 6/14/2006 11:08:29 AM by Walter Koenig[/i] [i]--- Edited at 6/14/2006 11:09:13 AM by Walter Koenig[/i]

Walter:

I haven't tried dropping the members yet, so don't know the effect on the reports. Are you speaking from experience? Did it not help to drop them?

My quick response came out of frustration. I scan the incoming forum emails for my burning topics. I'm having a go-around with BB Support who says nothing's wrong with the Comparative Membership Statistics report. Well, I'd love a 100% retention rate, but sadly it ain't so.

Judy

JUDY: I've just started dropping lapsed members, so can't answer your question. However, I ran the Comparative Membership Statistics for the first 5 months of this year, and I see what you mean. The retention rates were between 99.94% and 99.99% (we wish!). However, looking at the number of members the report found leads me to believe that the report is counting active and lapsed members. When I queried on Individual and Family memberships that are either lapsed or active, I got totals within a couple of hundred of the actual totals on the report (which of course were way larger than they should be). So my guess is that, if we were up to date on dropping lapsed members, the report numbers MIGHT make more sense. On the other hand, if the report is only counting lapsed/active members and I've dropped all memberships to date (which in our case would be up to Feb. 1, 2006), how can RE do a report on memberships in January 2006, when all the memberships for that month would presumably be dropped. So something else is going on here. I'm going to call cust support and see if they can shed some light. Walter Koenig Membership Coord. New Jersey Audubon Society 908-204-8998 [Email Removed]

For All- When I used to work at the Detroit Zoo, we had numerous problems getting accurate member counts and retention counts from the system. I know when I looked into it, the number it is counting, is the "number of members" field under the membership, so if you put 2 in that field, it is using 2 to count with, so your member numbers will always be askewed, unless you count your members that way, we counted them by household, so all the canned reports did nothing for us. This is a constant problem and BB really needs to talk to organizations about it because I think most orgs count their members differently. Renee A. Klish Systems Database Analyst Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit 248.642.4260 x388 [Email Removed]

RENEE: Thanks for your feedback. I would expect that the report was counting members instead of memberships, except that when I counted Family memberships using a query I got a number HIGHER than the Comparative Membership Statistics Report (and slightly lower for Individual memberships). This is the opposite of what you'd expect. I do agree with you about RE needing to talk to its customers -- the Membership Module has several anomalies that could have been avoided if they had asked "real" membership organizations how they operated. For example, the expiration date normally defaults to a year from the date paid, when actually most organizations would want it to default to a year from the previous expiration date (of course, it depends on whether you're entering a new membership or a renewal, but it's harder to update the previous expiration date than to calculate a year from the date paid). Walter Koenig Membership Coord. New Jersey Audubon Society 908-204-8998 [Email Removed]

This is just a workaround - BB definitely needs to address the issue of the retention report not being accurrate. We used to always calculate our membership manually - by taking the total active members from the prior year & dividing by total active members for the current year (minus NEW members). We didn't have family members - each individual member had their own constituent records & membership. Typically, our retention rate was around 80%. Walter - FYI: If you go to Config/Membership Categories and open each category, you can adjust the default expiration date to be Beginning of the Month, End of the Month, End of the quarter, or Specific Date. Tracie Cassidy Database Coordinator Seattle Children's Hospital Foundation (206) 987-6833 [Email Removed] Check out the "other" forum! http://reusers.server-planet.com  --- Edited at 6/14/2006 6:56:02 PM by Tracie Cassidy

TRACIE: Thanks for the feedback. We calculate retention rates by month, keeping track of how many first renewal notices we send out, then second renewal notices, then subtracting the latter from the former, which gives us the number that renewed. Of course, you have to do this for each renewal notice, and then you have to do the end-of-cycle total to get the overall renewal rate. It works, but it's a lot of work for the data entry person who keeps the chart of renewal notices sent out. As for adjusting the expiration date default, choosing "same month and day as start of cycle" is OK for new memberships, but for renewals, we want to keep the same expiration date, and there's no choice for "a year from current expiration date." Walter Koenig Membership Coord. New Jersey Audubon Society 908-204-8998 [Email Removed]