We're planning on changing our membership categories to different names. I was hoping that someone would have recommendations on how to do this without losing the membership history (with the old level names) of each constituent. Has anyone done this before? How did you go about it? If anyone has any recommendations, please email me at [Email Removed]. Thanks! [i]--- Edited at 11/8/2007 10:59:36 AM by Jessie Salpeter[/i]

Did anyone ever respond to this message?
We also need to change one of the names of our membership categories in RE from "Member" to "Individual."  It seems like a simple thing but these things never are.  The category is one of our basic membership levels and we have a large amount of households in this category.
It seems to me we should create a new membership category and globally change active members with old category name to the new category name.  This way we can still see these members' past histories with the old name. 
If someone could please confirm this or give any input, I would appreciate it!

-Michele

We did the same thing when we changed some of our membership names and added some new categories.  We added the new categories and globally changed the old categories to the new ones on the records.  We added a notepad with the old category information.  It seemed to work fine.

Thanks for the response Chris!

We want to retain the old membership category name in the constituent's history so we didn't want to just go into Configuration and change the name "Member" to "Individual."  That's why I thought global change would help.  I tried doing this and hit a snag.  I created the new membership category and tried doing the global change.  It seems the system won't change the membership to the new category without requiring you to renew the current membership.  There too many members at this level and it seems not worth the effort to attempt.

 We may end up just changing the name in Config. afterall or start renewing all "Member" memberships to the "Individual" level as they come in.

Did you or anyone on this forum have this renewing issue arise?

 -Michele

We have new membership categories with new gift amounts associated with them.  If I inactivate the old membership categories does anyone know what happens to the constituents that are associated with that membership level?  Does Raiser's automatically update membership to new level?  Will old membership level stay until it is time for renewal?

 

Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.

Cindy