How to setup Memberships

The membership feature will show a donor's Active, Pending, or Inactive memberships. You can assign donations to a membership or you can just enter in the amount paid if you do not want to add donations for membership fees.

This article will go through the process to setup the membership sections and how to add memberships to the donors profile, as well as donations assigned to the memberships. You can also create SmartLists, or run reports based on the memberships you set up in GiftWorks. You can track the benefits donors get based on the membership level and if they update or downgrade their membership.

To get started you will go to Settings/ Fields, Lists, and More/ Change GiftWorks Built-in Fields. In the list you will see 3 items related to Memberships. - Membership Benefits - Membership Programs - Membership Statuses

You can start by clicking on Membership Benefits then entering in the Benefits available for members. Depending on your organization you will have different items to give as a benefit for the different levels of memberships or you may only have one level and no benefits. You can enter a value for each benefit. For example, a benefit you may issue is a T-Shirt which may cost you $12 to give. You can run reports to see your expenses versus your income for memberships.

Next, you will want to setup the Membership Programs and Membership Levels.

Click on Membership Programs and click Add a Program. Here you can assign a Fund, Campaign, and Appeal that are associated with Memberships.

Once you add your program(s) you will click on Manage Levels at the bottom of the screen. You may only have one level, or you may have several. At the bottom of the following screen you will click Add Level. Then enter in a name for the level, the dues for that level and the number of years, and months or days the membership is for. Then choose the duration for the membership, (i.e month, year, etc.) For example, each membership level you have may run for 1 year. Then enter in the start of the membership. The last items to choose are the benefits for this level, if this is your highest level then all benefits may be checked off.

After setting up all of the Program levels you can then edit your statuses. You may just use the statuses already listed in GiftWorks or you may have others that you use instead. You can edit the statuses by going to Settings/ Fields, Lists, and More/ Change GiftWorks Built-in Fields/ Membership Statuses.

After everything is setup, you are then ready to add Memberships in for donors in GiftWorks. There are two ways to track the income you are receiving for the memberships. You will see two fields, Other Dues Paid and Donations Dues Paid If you want to enter in the membership fees you receive as a donation you will want to follow the steps below. If you do not enter in membership fees as donations you can scroll down to the section about Other Dues Paid.

NOTE: You will not want to use both options because the Dues Paid field will show double of what the donor actually gave.

Donations Dues: Under a donors profile you will click on the tab for Memberships. Then on the left of the screen you will see Add a Membership or you will see to the right a blue link for Add a New Membership.

When you click on Add a Membership (to the left) a dialog box will come up. Here you will select a Program and Level, the fields will automatically populate with the information you selected when you first setup the levels in the settings area.

After you add the membership for the donors click Next, and Finish. You are then ready to add the donation received for this membership. There are two ways to add a donation for a membership.

1. On the left of the screen click Add a Donation and enter in the amount of the membership.
2. To the right of the membership click Options> Add a Donation

When you click on Add a Donation (to the left) in the dialog box that comes up enter in the amount of the membership dues and then click Next. Check the box for Gift is a payment for a membership and then click Select a Membership. On the following screen choose your membership and click Next.

Click Next once more to finish adding the donation.

After you have finished adding the donation you can look under the membership tab and see the dues paid field. This field should reflect the amount you added for the donation.

Other Dues Paid: **Dues Paid field can be used if you do not want to enter the dues in as a donation. When you first add the membership to a donor in the Dues Paid field you can enter in the amount of the membership dues. This will be the only step you will need to do to track the income for memberships. This field will only be used if you do not want to enter in membership dues as donations. Remember, if you want to track membership dues as donations, you will not use this dues paid field.

Once you save this membership on the Membership Details page you will see the Total Dues Paid field reflect the amount in the Other Dues Paid field. This is also seen in the summery section under the Membership tab in the donors profile.

The Total Dues Paid will show the same amount that the Total Donations Dues Paid or the Total Other Dues Paid fields show. If the Total Dues paid field is showing an amount in parenthesis then it means that both the Total Donations Dues Paid and the Total Other Dues Paid fields have values. You will either need to delete a donation assigned to the membership, or remove the value in the Other Dues Paid field.

Membership Renewal: If a Donor already has a membership and would like to continue paying for a membership they will have 3 options; renewal, upgrade, or downgrade. On the right on the membership click on Options> Renew.

When you renew a membership you will see two listed when you click Select Membership. You will want to select the one that is pending and within the correct date range.

On the following screen you will be asked what status the membership renewal should be. If you received the request early you can keep it pending until it reaches the start date. If it has already reached the start date then you can select the second option Make the existing Membership inactive. Then the membership renewal you are adding will now be the Active Membership.

If you choose to keep the membership renewal pending, then on the donors profile under the Memberships tab you will then see two memberships listed under Active/ Pending Memberships.

Once the old membership hits the expired date you will click Options> Edit and change the status to Inactive. You will then change the membership renewal to Active.

Process Memberships: If you have several donors who have pending Memberships rather then going through and editing each membership separately there was an added feature for processing memberships. On the Home Screen on the right side panel under reminders it will show if you have memberships that need to be address. Click the link Process Memberships.

Then on the next screen you will check off all of the memberships and in the active column it will tell you what will be done to that specific membership.

It will then tell you that they were processed and the number of activated memberships and deactivated memberships.

SmartLists & Reports With the new Membership feature you will also see more options when creating a SmartList. You can pull lists together to see who has an expiring membership. You can also use already created reports to view specific Membership information.