2021 Feb Sprint Notes

Project Team

Chris Pifer, Jillian Niler, Amanda Styles, Duncan McGovern, Rachel Whaley, Brandon Mead, Emily Wilson, Michael Beaty, Rex Clark

Continued to validate proposed data model; brainstormed additional use cases & wishlist features
Consolidated and improved documentation, project Wiki organization, and requirements
Additional code-based automation created re: membership rollups
New best-practices page for using existing NPSP membership functionality

Review of the current schema
Discussion of CDM and how this plays in
Reliance (or not) on Products?
Additional "Membership Type" object vs using a picklist & custom settings or similar to control logic
- This is a big sticking point before deciding how to automate things like dates
- Talked long and hard about this; want to keep it as a custom setting in order to make deployments etc easy
Auto-creating Memberships from Opportunities
- Assumption that external systems will be creating Opportunities, would like to automate creating memberships for these
- Possible wizard NPSP-settings style for mapping business logic
Lookup on Contact to most current membership (same idea as Levels) - ability to include/exclude based on some criteria

Targeting a roll-out some configuration/automation to mimic existing NPSP features (date & status rollups)
Challenges of managing up/downgrades & reporting on this
- Paying for an upgrade
  - Opportunity
- Gift membership, complimentary membership
- How do Opportunities fit into this?
  - Lookup could go from Membership to Opportunity (purchase personal & gift memberships) OR vice-versa (one Membership record remains over time with annual payments - Opportunities - made over time)
Importance of being able to report on one person/account with multiple concurrent memberships types
Importance of separating financial (Opps) from membership details
Some organization might want to create a new Membership record each year (easily report on members in a given year); others might prefer a single Membership record (preserve a membership number) where multiple Opportunities (or Opportunity Products) look up to it (child transactions)
Some organizations auto-create memberships based on donations; others do not; some remove membership dues from donations reporting
NPSP pain points - automation around amounts, levels, dates; reporting on fundraising campaigns - how many successful upgrades?

It will be important to provide a recommendation for orgs that use this package, but allow flexibility

Every membership-related transaction creates a new membership record
- No $0 Opportunities
- External integration/batch entry won't need automation to find existing Membership
- Closest match to existing NPSP model
Only ever have one Membership record per type of membership