Changing levels is sort of like increasing prices. You would not want a
price increase for an item to go back and fix all the old invoices to show the
new price. That is historical information. Similar with levels. If you change
your level structure, you do not want to rewrite history.
Your
problem is the exception as the existing data is wrong. There are no
automated facilities for helping you.
You
seem to have an unusual notion of memberships. Usually memberships are a
property of the person who is a member (no matter who paid for it) not the
person who gave someone a membership. That is why it is best to record gift
memberships as a gift by the giver and and a $0 dues payment by the
recipient.
Ebase
does not do a good job of separating out membership levels and giving levels.
And indeed many organizations are confused about this as well as they have
membership levels called sponsor or benefactor. My view is that you are either a
member or not. If you pay more than the minimum required, the excess part
is a gift and should affect your giving level. Ebase has a field called level on
the payments screen and it uses the level table to assign categories to a single
payment whether it is a contribution or a dues payment. For most purposes this
number applied to contributions is sort of meaningless as it only measures a
single gift. Many people give multiple gifts during a year and their real
"giving level" should be based on their total contributions during the year.
Some organizations may want to lump membership payments and contributions into a
single total that reflects their notion of "level". Ebase sort of does this in
some places but not consistently IMHO. One could argue that payments for events
or merchandise should also be considered in determining
"level".
I
realize that many organizations do not have a formal "membership" and that
anyone who pays anything is considered a member. It would be helpful if these
organizations did not refer to membership levels but rather to giving levels. It
is important to use the proper terminology that is consistent with ebase rather
your internal terminology. If you do not have dues, then do not use dues
payments. Perhaps we should change the terminology so the "membership" implies
dues payments and "supporters" is used when there is no dues structure.
I
belong to several organizations where just showing up at a meeting makes you a
member. Since there are no dues or contributions involved, it is hard to decide
which terminology to use. Frequently these organization have a rather loose
definition of expiration date as well, e.g. you are member until you say you are
not or mail bounces and contact is lost.
It is
not unusual to have people who are supporters who are not members, i.e. never
paid dues even though there are dues requirements.
There
is another concept which is worth tracking for some organizations. For advocacy
organizations, active member vs inactive member is frequently the most
important characteristic. I would rather have someone who writes their
congressperson weekly than gives $100 a year. Time is frequently much more
valuable than money. Those envelope stuffers who come in every week are a very
valuable contribution. If we total up the volunteer hours at $10/hour and added
to our contributions, it would increase our income by about 1/3. We use lots of
this as inkind match for grants but do only a mediocre job of tracking it (and
not in ebase). Since it is "funny money" that never really appears, it is hard
to justify staff or volunteer time to track
it.
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