[Odb-help] Conference Call; 4 Membership List Management Tips
odb-help@lists.democracygroups.org
odb-help@lists.democracygroups.org
Tue, 09 Dec 2003 12:57:17 -0500
Dear ODB Users:
Two updates, as we work (as many of you might also be doing)
on getting all our end of year mailings out the door!
1. Great news: we had 12 people sign up for a conference call!
I would like to schedule that call for Tuesday, January 6 at 5pm,
eastern time, for one hour. You all have 4 weeks notice to plan
for that time, and it is unlikely to conflict with daytime meetings...
Anyone else who wants to join, please let us know and we will
send you the dial up number. (email oc2004@organizenow.net)/
2. Suggestions for generating lists to current and prospective donors,
making use of the membership management feature.
ODB was designed to have a very simple but powerful
membership renewal feature. I only know of a few dozen
organizations using it, as it requires a 2-hour training
and we are just beginning to roll out the training materials.
But I want to describe to you one way in which is useful.
Basically, when you enter donations, four things happen,
in addition to entering the person's donation into a separate
"ledger", or "donations" table inside your ODB database:
* by default, the person's Membership Expiration date will
advance. By default, the advance will be 1 year, but there
are a number of ways this can be customized, and if you
have someone who is already caught up, it is most likely
(and you can fine tune this) that ODB will treat the payment
as an "additional donation", often the result of what is known
in fundraising lingo as an "appeal." Basically, the people
who give you $100 a year are very likely to respond to
additional requests occasionally.
* in all cases, the payment and the payment date will be
recorded in the lastgift field (dollar amount) and lastgave
field (date).
* if the payment was a membership oriented donation (you
can set "tshirt purchase" to not affect membership
status, so I am talking about regular dues or donations),
the Joined date will be filled in with the date of donation,
if that date was not previously filled in.
* If the payment was larger than any previous donation
given by that person, then the person's "askamount"
field will be replaced by this amount.
The nice thing about having these things done automatically
is that it makes it really easy to select people for end of
year mailings, AND to add people to a list of those who should
receive end of year mailings, even if those people have never
given before. Your end of year letter can be addressed:
Dear Members and Supporters (or)
Dear Members and Friends
a) Selecting People for your End of Year mailing
to select all people who have ever been paid members, or who have
done something in lieu of payment which qualifies them as de facto
members (in fact these people are often more important due to their
time commitment), you would just open the Record Selection
tool an put the following the date range you need inthe "Expires" box.
So to get everyone who has been a member at some point in this
milennium, you would just put the following in the box.
>1/1/00
This method can actually include people beyond the group of folks
who are paid members. To make this happen, you need to individually
go into the record of each "de facto member" and put a membership
expiration date into those fields. For example, you could plan on checking
that volunteer status every 6 months, in may and november, in
preparation for annual mailings. For those people who are still
active volunteers with your organization, all you would do is open
the people entry screen and put a date several months into the
future in their "expires on" field. This way, all of your volunteers are
automatically given 6 month memberships. So for our purposes, we
are putting "6/1/04" in that field for key volunteers. This will enable these
folks to also receive the newsletters and organizational mailings they are
entitled to. Remember that with all postal mailings, it is important to
check off the "Omit Bad or Incomplete" addresses box in the Search screen.
Finally, you can use Custom Queries to broaden your search to include
additional people based on their activity codes. (If you have the SRC feature
enabled, note that is not possible to add people to a query based on those codes
in the current ODB version).
b) Sending Out Renewal Notices
In addition to membership mailings you should be sending out
renewal notices to people about 45-75 days before their membership
will expire. To do this you can select a date range and generate a
very small renewal mailing. So you would put the following in the
memexpire field:
2/1/04...2/29/04
for a renewal mailing that you planned to send out
on December 15. Many organizations will repeat this and send a
second renewal out 15-45 days before the expiration (in this case
you would send out the renewal from ODB on January 15).
If you do a renewal mailing, just make sure that you:
- enter recent contributions before you generate your list
- make sure that you print your labels and your reply slips at
the same time, so that they are in the same order. (We
recommend using "last name, then first name" order.)
- we recommend printing the reply slips on colored stock.
- we may add a feature to ODB to allow the slips to be printed
so that after they are cut, just stacking the piles will put them
in order. Do you want us to add this feature? If we did that,
and your mailing had 15 pieces, then you would get slips
1, 6, 11 coming out on page 1/ with 2, 7, 12 on page 2/
with 3, 8, 13 on page 3. Do you understand how this would
make things easier?
Note: ODB will allow you to customize a special tag line that
is automatically put on the top of each reply slip you print. The
ODB setting for this is called "RenewSlipText" and is documented,
along with the other 98 settings, at www.organizersdb.org.
c) Automatically Giving People Free Issues or Trial Memberships
One organization has requested that we add a feature to ODB to
automatically give EVERYONE who is added to the database
a membership in the organization, just to start them out. For
example, if you send out a quarterly newsletter and you meet 83
people a month who are added to ODB, you would want each person
go get two free newsletters before they are prompted (through a
renewal mailing) to pay. The new feature will use the expiration date
just like a publication/ subscription expiration date, to give people
free issues. So your subscriber base starts at 1000. Then in 1/2004
you add 83 people a month to your database, and they begin getting
issues of your publication in March, June, September, and December.
Well, by the time that May 2004 rolls around, you will have invested
significant resources to send free copies to 1000 people, and by this
time you will have asked all 1000 people to renew. The likely outcome
of this is that your subscriber base will grow! As for the 75% of people
who do not reply: ODB has already dropped them off of your list so
you wont need to spend more postage on them.
For a typical publication it is quite reasonable to do this: It might cost
only 45 cents per issue to increase your print run a bit and pay the bulk
postage. If you commit to two free issues for 1000 people the investment
is $1,870. The long-term potential gain is enormous, however, if you
can get 10% of the new people to become members on a long term
basis with an annual payment of $25, then you will bring in $2,500 a
year from this activity.
d) How to Separate Out High Donors for a mailing.
Say that you wanted to do an end of year mailing but you didn't
want donors of $500 or more to be included. Well, that's easy,
all you would do in the Record Selection Tool is:
- View Custom Query
- Add SQL to further restrict your search
- Type "AskAmount<500" in the box (you can leave out the quotes)
Then when you want to generate the same list but just include
the high donors, you would type "Askamount>=500" in the box.