ODB’s powerful membership management functions are designed to help you build and maintain a strong membership program. (For organizations that do not need these features, or have legal reasons they cannot use them, the features can be hidden.)

While ODB is set up for membership management by default, it is also possible to exclude most of your donation categories from membership management using the membercategories setting. It is also possible to hide some of the buttons related to payments or donations, using hidepeoplecontrols, hidemaincontrols, and hidegroupcontrols settings.

If you are interested in using ODB as a donor database but not in assigning membership expiration dates, examine the template: "standard – not a membership organization" to see what settings are needed in order to achieve this.

1) For initial donations, ODB automatically sets up someone’s joined and expiration dates. As we stated earlier, ODB assumes you are operating on an “annual giving” model where members are expected to give every twelve months. However, this twelve-month period may be customized: you can set it to six months, or 24 months, for example, by entering the number of months in RenewFrequency.

2) For subsequent donations, a box labeled “Renew based on ” will be visible in the Add Payment screen. The box may or may not be checked. By default, ODB operates with a 45-day “renewal window”. This means that the "renew" box will be checked if a donation is entered within 45 days (before or after) the date a person is supposed to renew their membership. Reset the RenewWindow feature by entering the number of days of your window (which will be the same for before and after).

Example: John Jones pays $25 to join your organization on January 1, 2002. You receive the check on January 4 and enter it into the computer on January 10. John’s membership expiration date would then be marked as January 1, 2003. The year goes by, and then you receive another check from John on December 2, 2002. You find John in the database and click New Payment. Since John’s gift was within the expected renewal window, the box “Renew to 1/1/03” will appear and will be checked. This means that even though the check from John was received on 12/2/02, John’s expiration date will be advanced to 1/1/04.

Example 2: John Jones pays $25 on January 1, 2002 and you enter it as described above. Then you receive another donation of $25 from John on November 1, 2002. This time, when you click Add Gift, the “Renew to 1/1/03” box will not be checked since this may be an "additional" gift. If you proceed and confirm the donation, ODB will give you an option of leaving the expiration date alone (assuming this is an additional gift) or change the expiration date to November 1, 2003 (assuming this is a renewal). Or you can decide to back out and check the "Renew to 1/1/04" box, which would advance the expiration date a full year (assuming this is a renewal, but you don't want to take advantage of your member donating early to push up her/his expiration date). The idea is that when you have the check or donation slip in hand, you can best determine how to treat this gift.

Example 3: John Jones pays $25 on January 1 and you enter it as described above. Then you receive another donation of $25 from John on July 15. This time, when you add a gift for John, the “Leave Expiration Date Alone” box will be checked. This donation came so soon that John probably intended it to be an additional gift. If you uncheck the box, ODB will ask you how you want to advance the renewal date (based on the check date or the expiration date) before proceeding.

3) If someone enters a donation of less than onehalf of the renewal amount at a time when they are supposed to renew, ODB will by default give that person a six-month membership (if you enable the usehalfmemberships? setting). Thus, if your organization has dues of $30, and someone gives $15, ODB will treat this by default as a full renewal donation. But if someone gives $14 or $10, ODB will by default add on only six months, or half the renewal period, to her/his membership.

4) If someone enters a donation of $250 or more, ODB will offer to print out a tax receipt. The tax receipt printout has been improved based on feedback from ODB users. You may change the threshold for printing a receipt by changing the dollar amount in the "TaxReceiptAmt" setting. Changing it to 0 disables the feature.

5) Customizing Donation Slips. ODB will generate two different donation slips depending on whether the slip is for current up-to-date members or new prospects and members who have lapsed for a long time. You can modify the tagline text for the slips in the settings named DonationSlipText and RenewSlipText.

A person’s donation options will be based on the AskAmount field in the People Entry screen, which will automatically increase to the person's largest gift. You may also manually adjust the AskAmount so that people with an ability to make a major gift will receive slips that start off at $50 or $100 per year instead of the DefaultDues amount (which is $25 in the standard ODB template but can be modified). Or if a lapsed donor is low-income, you can reduce the AskAmount to a level in their giving range. MinimumDues is the lowest amount you would accept for a donation to be considered membership dues.

You can also write up to three customized checkoff lines on the slips such as: please send me your newsletter, add me to your email list, send me more information, or I've included the names of friends on the back of the slip.