thelontx
commented
3 years ago This is exactly what I am doing with my other client using the Salesforce NPSP (non-profit success pack). Salesforce serves as this database and has significant additional capabilities for memberships and donations that help facilitate those exact kinds of analyses. NPSP has "native" capabilities to identify thing like last membership amount/date, largest gift, membership/gift amounts over last N days, etc.
I'm in the middle of rolling out a new trend report that allows the membership directors to see historic and forecasted revenue by month, based on the membership level and options chosen at renewal.
This set-up is too complex to set-up and maintain for a small association, but may be good for larger organizations.
asirota
The interesting thing about our architecture is that it is "sweeping" the finances module on a scheduled basis. In this process we can also record some customer information in a datastore to be able to do further analysis on it. Specifically things like
all customer data (userID, name, company, arbitrary common/membership fields as asked for by the customer, membership renewal date, status, creation date) all financial details (source module of transaction, total amount of transaction)
Why would we need this data? We can do cohort analysis and see how the organization is growing financially over time. This is currently impossible to do with built in reporting because everything is "point in time". Having an archive of customer financial data will allow an organization to see who their best/worst customers are and eventually be able to even analyze which customers stay for the longest and contribute the most. Using demographics they can analyze why specifically customers who stay/pay the longest are the best customers. Real customer insight!