My organization has traditionally solicited gift memberships this way:
Solicit Gift Giver - month before expiration, month of expiration
Solicit Primary Member - month after expiration
We find this system to be very sucessful. During the holidays, we sell over 1,000 gift memberships and our renewal rate is 70%.
Becasue we have found great success with this practice, I would like to continue it. But Altru doesn't allow me to turn off the question in any way.
The whole option of sending renewal notices to BOTH gift giver and primary member baffles me. Why would you ever offer that option? What if you send notices to both parties and both respond? What do you do then? Renew the membership for 2 years. Which renewal do you do first? Who do you solicit 2 years from now?
When running renewal letters, we've set up Altru to ignore the whole choice of who to send the renewal notice to. Though it was tricky. And we did discover that our renewal letters wouldn't merge fields correctly unless all were set to send renewal notice to Primary Member, whether we were soliciting the Giver or the Primary Member. Tell me how that makes sense.
Right now, this is working, but there are challenges and conflicts:
-I forsee a lot of extra data cleanup, running a cleanup query every month, ensuring all fields are set to Primary Member so this system works.
-For back office and daily sales transactions, our customers don't even know this is an option for them. We don't ask. And it defaults to Primary member so this typically isn't a problem. But for our online customers, the web form provides the question and I cannot turn it off. I wish I could just like I can turn off the Gift Message field.
To manage this web form problem, I have changed the Language on the Gift Information page in the web form:
"Send renewal notices to" - I have changed it to "Renewal notices"
"Gift recipient" - I have changed to "We solicit the GIVER the month BEFORE and the month OF expiration, then the RECIPIENT the month AFTER expiration."
"Myself" - I have changed to "Ignore this dropdown option"
"Both" - I have changed to "Ignore this dropdown option"
I am hoping that the customization of language will help us manage the conflict.
Altru designers - please give us more power in managing who we want to solicit when it comes to gift memberships.
What a great work around!
The "send to giver" option has been causing some issues at renewal time for me as well. A new issue that I'm trying to solve: I just realized that the renewal email sends to gift givers.
Thank you, Laura! I appreciate your work-around language for web forms. I agree that this is very confusing both for the customer, depending on sales method, and for the membership office to know how to process all these different cards and renewals letters depending on the options selected when the membership is sold.