Tracking memberships

In this article:


LGL lets you track memberships and makes it easy to generate renewal letters. You can follow these steps (described in the sections below) to set up and use memberships in LGL:

  1. Turn on memberships in your LGL account 
  2. Set up your membership levels 
  3. Assign constituents to membership levels 
  4. Membership data at a glance 
  5. Build reports and send mailings

Turn on memberships in your LGL account

Click on the Settings tab, and then in Subscription settings click on the General settings.

Scroll down the page, and check the box shown below to turn on membership settings:

Set up your membership levels

Now you will see membership-related fields in your account. The next step is to set up the membership levels you want to track. You can do this in the Constituent Menu Items section (in Settings > Menu Items).

In the screenshot below, we have created five membership levels, or tiers. We’ve included the dollar amounts in the names of the fields themselves. This is not required, but it can be helpful when you are entering membership gifts to see right in the tier list what gift amount qualifies a member for each level.

Assign constituents to membership levels

From the Constituent details page, or within the gift entry form, you can assign constituents to a membership level. You must indicate the "Start Date" for the membership, and you can optionally indicate an "End Date". You can also enter free-form text in the Note field.

Membership data at a glance

If you go to the Constituents tab in your account, you will see a list of your membership tiers along the left side of the page, under Filter Results. In the parentheses that follow each membership level, you can see the number of constituents assigned to each level.

You can also see basic membership data in search results when searching from the Constituents tab:

Build reports and send mailings

You can query for constituents based on their membership settings. And then you can either export your results if you want a spreadsheet, or you can begin a mailing to the result set. This is ideal for sending out reminder mails when your constituents are approaching the end of their membership period.

In the example below, in step 1 our query selects the constituents whose membership is expiring "next month". Using a variable phrase like "next month" is beneficial because we can save this query and run it every month. We can also specify that we are searching membership end dates on the latest membership, the first membership, or on "any membership". We click Search in step 2, which then displays the one constituent meeting our criteria. In step 3, we can either start the process of sending a mailing or email to this group or exporting the results.

For any membership report you create, please note that the "Memberships" report column offers custom options so that you can select multiple parameters for your membership/s data:

Uploading memberships via the Flex Importer

You can import a bunch of memberships at once by uploading an Excel or CSV file via the Flex Importer.

Required fields are:

  • Constituent identifier (either an ID or a name or names to identify the constituent)
  • Membership start date
  • Membership level

A membership end date is not required but is usually included. If you want to always add 1 year to the start date, you can do that by clicking "add rule" in the Flex Importer and then setting a default for "Membership end date" as "+1 year" as shown in the screenshot here and just below: