Our membership department sends out renewal notices on a monthly basis to constituents with memberships expiring that month.  In total, they send out 4 notices for each month, with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th going to those who have not yet renewed from the previous notice.  We are not currently tracking each of these notices separately in RE, but we want to start.

Right now we have one membership renewal appeal set up in RE.  However, we do not use it as a way of tracking who we are sending the mailing to, but rather as a way of coding the gift when it comes in.  My thought was that I could create gift attributes for each of notices and then mark them on the gift record when it comes in.

Does anyone have a better idea?  Should I be creating separate appeal?

Thanks.

Keith Tramantano, Assistant Manager of Development Operations, The Jewish Museum

Hi Keith,

To capitalize on some of RE's canned reporting tools, I would create a combination of appeal and package records to report on your renewal notice performance.  If you were to add gift attributes, you would later need to develop a custom report using Crystal Reports.  Using appeal and package records you can quickly create reports using the many Appeal reports found in the Campaigns, Fund, and Appeals Reports section of RE.

And before you start creating multiple appeal and/or package records, look at the sample reports for Appeal reports to know what's available.  You could create an appeal record for every notice to have the most flexibility, but perhaps one appeal and four package records representing either the mutliple notices you send to one group of members with Z expiration date or the multiple notices you send in any give month could work too.  You could just run with the one appeal record you have and create multiple package records.  By creating multiple package records within one appeal, you may loose the ability to use some of the canned reports, but I'm not sure.  It all depends on how you want to compare performances of each of your notices using the canned reports.

Hope this helps,

jwant