I am wondering how other organizations determine how many members they have year to date compared with the previous year in query.  Thanks!

Misty,

Unfortunately, it's not a function you can do within RE Query. I thought there was a donor retention report in the canned reports section; but I can't seem to find it? You may be able to use one of the analytical or statistical reports to get the comparisons you need. I used to work closely with membership several years ago; I had to come up with a "manual" way to calculate rentention where I had to capture the prior year stats to compare with the subsequent years...it wasn't pretty. And it doesn't look like BB has added any new functions lately to help?

Hopefully someone with current membership experience will chime in to help you?!

Thanks for your response. There is a report but it's not very accurate which is why I was hoping to get more accurate numbers with query.  (It is amazing how the retention rate in reports is always 99%...)

I don't know if this is quite what you're looking for but it may help. We have a membership group called Founders and all that is required is a one time commitment or gift of $1,000 to get a year membership. The time frame is one year from date of gift. I needed to capture who was a member during 2007 for our annual report. I had trouble finding a way around the fact that some have renewed and some have not and couldn't use their payments since some our given membership as an extra perk. So, the best I could come up with was creating a membership query with the following criteria:

History Program equals Founders AND History Expires On between 1/1/07 AND 12/31/08 AND History Membership Category one of Founders, Associate AND History Lifetime equals No.

This was a few months ago so I can't explain what my train of thought was except that lifetimers were listed seperately and anyone who expired on 1/1/07 was still considered a member for 2007. By extending the expiration date to 12/31/08, I captured all donors who joined/renewed all the way up to 12/31/07.

You could use this method to capture the members from any two time periods to compare them. I contacted Blackbaud but they said there was no way to track donors from a certain time frame. Hope this helps!