I would like to submit the idea of creating a membership feature on the site. A way to separate prospective members from the actual members. Currently, there is no way to do this, other than manually.
e.g. A person signs up after learning about the organization. Then they get general messages and decide that they want to become a "member" and "join." The person can do so by either making a donation of a specific amount on a given page or they could take a number of actions on advocacy alerts (a threshold of, let's say, 5 separate actions) that entitles them to membership. From there the UID that Salsa generates for the record is their membership number and each year the system will automatically generate a message to re-up their membership if they haven't donated or taken enough actions over the year to qualify at the membership threshold.
Once they are members they get more messages with distinctive opportunities, such as a special product giveaway for a certain donation amount or an opportunity to register for a conference earlier than others and as such will get special treatment as an early-bird register or perhaps they get a special e-newsletter at the end of the year showing all that the organization accomplished that isn't sent to prospective members.
What would happen on the backend is when a donation is made on a certain donation form a prospective member is taken out of the prospective member group or untagged with from that tag and moved to the other group and/or tagged as a member for the 2011-12 calendar or fiscal year. The system will have auto-launching e-mails to remind about membership each year and it will also generate a printable membership card once the membership is confirmed for another year.
All of this seems do-able from technical perspective. I hope it can happen in the near future with future iterations of the Salsa platform.
Tagged:
Donations,
Email,
Membership Management,
Supporter Management,
Website Features
