New and Improved Membership Functionality

In Blackbaud CRM 2.93, we redesigned the membership area to allow faster and more insightful membership configuration, membership viewing, and data entry of membership dues.

Starting with the Membership Program setup, we’ve added Lifetime memberships that were once part of your annual program.  They now live by themselves and have their own set of rules.  We also have Sustaining programs that can maximize giving from donors.

The new programs also adapt to the selections you choose, to help streamline setup.  So if you are setting up a Lifetime membership program, you won’t have to bother with renewal rules, since lifetime members never expire.  This means you only see the options that match the choices you make.

Moving past the Membership Programs, we’ve also added Membership as its own functional area and created a Member Services View page.  The new view allows your staff to easily see all aspects of the member in one place.

The first thing you will see on the view is what we call “The Banner”.  The banner shows the level of membership the member has, how much they paid, and the status of the membership.  It will also show the other members, if any, on the membership, how long until they expire with the expiration date, and how long they have been a member.

When you want to view more information about the member, just look further down on the page.  You can view and edit the contact information, see the member’s constituencies, information on the lifetime of their membership, and other memberships they might be a part of.

The page also shows you recent membership transactions so you can see the history of the membership.

Finally, we created a new Enter Memberships Dues Batch to assist with the complexity of membership donations.  For example, you may have a member renewing a membership who may also want to add a make an additional donation with a single check.  They may qualify for a discount or be purchasing the membership as a gift.  How should you enter that in the system?  Before long, you have a stack of checks that all need to be entered in, correctly.  Up until now this process has been a bit of a headache, but with the Enter Memberships Dues Batch, that headache goes away.

The new batch handles all the nuances of a membership transaction, prompting you for the required information and eliminating the unnecessary options. This batch allows for easy review of those payments before you commit them to the database.

As you can see, each section of the form asks a question and as you answer, we default in as much information as possible. You are able to change the defaulted information though. Is this a renewal?  We will put the name of the program, level, term, expiration date, and amount in the form.  If your program doesn’t offer add-ons, the add-on section never appears. If you’re adding a member to a level that allows only one member, you never see anything prompting for additional members, but if the member purchases a dual or a family level, the proper section will appear.

When you are done with a payment, just click the “next payment” button and the current payment moves to the right side of the form. The left side resets so you can enter the next payment. If you notice an error in a payment you already entered, just click the right side of the form and it will reload to the left side so you can edit it.

All this new functionality ultimately lets you manage your membership programs more efficiently.  We understand that one size doesn’t fit all and you shouldn’t have to compromise the way you want to run your membership program.  We want you to have features that not only let you do everything you want with your membership, but also provide features you haven’t even yet considered that will help you take your memberships into the future.

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