Tracking memberships

Turn on memberships in your LGL account

Click on the Settings tab, and then in Subscription settings click on the General settings.

Scroll down the page, and check the box shown below to turn on membership settings:

Set up your membership levels

Now you will see membership-related fields in your account. The next step is to set up the membership levels you want to track. You can do this in the Constituent Menu Items section (in Settings > Menu Items).

In the screenshot below, we have created five membership levels, or tiers. We’ve included the dollar amounts in the names of the fields themselves. This is not required, but it can be helpful when you are entering membership gifts to see right in the tier list what gift amount qualifies a member for each level.

Assign constituents to membership levels

From the Constituent details page, or within the gift entry form, you can assign constituents to a membership level. You must indicate the "Start Date" for the membership, and you can optionally indicate an "End Date". You can also enter free-form text in the Note field.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Membership records are separate from gift records. A constituent can have a membership without a gift record. Membership records can, however, be added or updated from the Add/Update Membership section of the gift record as a convenience, in addition to directly in the constituent record in the Related Information section.

Membership data at a glance

If you navigate to the Constituents tab in your account, on the left side of the page under Filter Results you will see your membership statuses and a list of your membership tiers. Within the parentheses that follow each status and membership level, you can see how many constituents fall into each level or status.

You can also see basic membership data in search results when searching from the Constituents tab:

Build reports and send mailings

You can query for constituents based on their membership settings. And then you can either export your results if you want a spreadsheet, or you can begin a mailing to the result set. This is ideal for sending out reminder mails when your constituents are approaching the end of their membership period.

In the example below, in step 1 our query selects the constituents whose membership is expiring "next month". Using a variable phrase like "next month" is beneficial because we can save this query and run it every month. We can also specify that we are searching membership end dates on the latest membership, the first membership, or on "any membership". We click Search in step 2, which then displays the one constituent meeting our criteria. In step 3, we can either start the process of sending a mailing or email to this group or exporting the results.

For any membership report you create, please note that the "Memberships" report column offers custom options so that you can select multiple parameters for your membership/s data:

Uploading memberships via the Flex Importer

You can import multiple memberships at once by uploading an Excel or CSV file via the Flex Importer.

Required fields are:

Constituent identifier (either an ID or a name or names to identify the constituent)
Membership start date
Membership level

A membership end date is not required but is usually included. If you want to always add 1 year to the start date, you can do that by clicking "add rule" in the Flex Importer and then setting a default for "Membership end date" as "+1 year" as shown in the screenshot here and just below:

Renewing memberships

LGL customers often set up memberships either to expire one year from the start date of the latest membership, or on December 31, regardless of when during the calendar year the membership began.

In the context of managing memberships, a membership for a constituent generally “begins” when they first pay for/receive the membership. It then "renews" each time they pay for/receive the membership thereafter. Fundamentally, most LGL customers consider someone a “renewing” member regardless of what level of membership they pay for/receive. A separate consideration is whether the person paid for/received a “higher”- or “lower”-level membership upon their renewal (sometimes referred to as moving “up” or “down”).

Below are three basic approaches to managing “renewal” membership entries for constituents:

1. Always “extend” the membership entry by changing the end date. This is a simple approach and allows for managing one membership entry per constituent. It is easy to see the original “member since” date because it will always be present in the single membership entry. Downsides of this approach include:

It can be difficult to search for who went “up” and who went “down” in membership level because changing the level is required each time someone renews
It is not possible to see “gaps” in membership history; someone who took 3 years off between memberships will have a new end date and the original start date on their single membership entry

2. One membership entry per membership period. This method is more complicated and with that comes greater granularity for analysis. It will be easier to see “gaps” in membership and one can see all memberships for a person displayed with levels according to what they renewed at for any given year. Finding the “member since” is more difficult and over many years of tracking membership data the number of membership entries will be large.

3. A hybrid approach of #1 and #2 from this list means an organization would a) “extend” a membership entry when the level of renewal is the same but b) add a new membership entry when someone changes their level or has no active membership at all (they had a gap). This approach allows for a combination of ease of entry when there is consistency in membership level but adds the ability to see “up” or “down” and identify “gaps” in membership. (NOTE: this is the default behavior of LGL for importing data and bringing data in from LGL Forms. There is a setting available to disable this default behavior; when disabled, this would set the account up to follow method #2 above.)

A membership can be renewed manually by either a) editing a constituent record directly or b) during gift entry by completing the membership data entry fields that are available.

Membership renewals can also be imported or brought in through LGL Forms. To understand how to import memberships, please see Mapping membership fields. To understand how to bring memberships in through an LGL for, please see Build and map a basic membership form.