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Membership Best Practices

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jniler edited this page Feb 11, 2021 · 4 revisions

The below is the start of a document (created in the Feb 2021 sprint) that could eventually be shared with the community, either as documentation on the Power of Us hub or in some other format. These are not specs for a new Membership package, but rather a guide for new admins looking to understand the membership defaults and extend the NPSP membership functionality with custom fields or some simple automation.

Membership Overview

Memberships in NPSP are configured through the Opportunity object. NPSP includes membership-specific fields on the opportunity like level, expiration date, and “origin” (new/renewal/rejoin etc.) NPSP also has a feature called Customizable Rollups which allows data from opportunities to “roll up” to the contact or account, so you can see things like first or last membership date, or total membership amount given. More documentation on membership in NPSP, including a list of fields, here: https://powerofus.force.com/s/article/NPSP-Working-with-Memberships

Membership Setup: Grace Period

If you go to the NPSP Settings tab, then click on Donations in the sidebar and then Membership, you will see the option to set the Grace Period. Updating this changes the Membership Status formula on the account. If this is set to 30, then the status will equal “Grace Period” for 30 days after the Membership End Date, and then change to Expired. This is important to understand if you’re creating reports based on the Membership Status field - if your report only contains Active or Expired members, you’ll be excluding the recently expired members with the Grace Period status. If you don’t need this feature, you can set the Grace Period to 0, and the membership will change directly to Expired after the End Date passes.

Membership Setup: Customizable Rollups

  • Details on setting up filter groups
  • Recommendation to set fields on contact or account as read-only for ALL profiles, including sys admins
  • If you need to manually update membership information for a contact or household, you must do so on the most recent membership opportunity (or create a new membership opportunity, if necessary)

Beyond the Basics: Extending Membership Functionality

NPSP assumes that a user will manually fill in Membership Start Date, Membership End Date, Member Level and Membership Origin every time a membership opportunity is created. This is a great place to build some automation to save end users time.

  • Automate start date to today
  • Automate end date based on your business processes (for instance, today + 365 or account end date + 365, whichever is greater)
  • Automate member level based on amount (and/or program and/or recurring status)
  • Automate origin based on original join date (from account) and membership date

Other common customizations:

  • Custom field to indicate "program" (examples: Legacy Society, Major Donor Program, Monthly Sustainers)
  • Customizations for recurring memberships
  • Reports to email and/or mail people up for renewal
  • Reports to email and/or mail lapsed members
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