Membership levels get retired all the time. A “Family Plus” tier gets folded into “Family,” a pandemic-era virtual level is dropped, a price restructure replaces three levels with two. The members who bought those old levels don’t disappear, though. They still have active memberships, and they still expire. When renewal season comes around, they are the people most likely to fall through the cracks.
There are really two separate problems hiding in this question, and it helps to pull them apart:
- Finding them. Your renewal query or mailing list may only pick up members on current levels, so people on a retired level never get the reminder at all.
- Offering them something. Even if they do get the email, the level they hold may no longer be for sale, so “renew your Family Plus membership” leads to a dead end.
Problem one: they never make the list
Start by checking how your renewal audience is built. Renewal lists in Altru are usually driven by a membership query filtered on expiration date, and very often on membership program or level as well. If someone built that query by selecting each level by name, any level added or retired since then is either missing or still hard-coded. If the filter includes a condition on the level being active, retired levels are excluded by design.
A few things to look at:
- Open the query behind your renewal mailing. Note every filter on program, level, or level status. If there is a list of specific levels, compare it against the full list of levels in the program, active and inactive.
- Filter on expiration, not on level. For most renewal series, the cleanest audience is “membership expires between X and Y, membership status is active or recently lapsed.” Add level as an output field so you can segment later, rather than as a filter that quietly drops people.
- Run a quick count. Build a separate query for members whose current level is inactive and whose expiration falls in the next six to twelve months. That number tells you how much this matters for your organization. For some it’s a handful of people; after a level restructure it can be a large share of the file.
Whether Altru’s query fields expose level status directly, and how inactive levels behave in a given query type, can vary with how your programs were set up. If you’re not sure, test with a known member on a retired level and confirm they appear in the results before trusting the list.
Problem two: there’s nothing for them to renew into
Inactive levels generally can’t be sold on your public web forms, which is usually the whole point of retiring them. So a renewal email that simply says “renew your current level” and links to the standard renewal form will confuse these members. They click through and don’t see their level anywhere.
Decide on a policy before you write the email. The common options:
- Map each retired level to a successor. “Family Plus” becomes “Family,” “Patron Legacy” becomes “Patron.” Write the mapping down so the desk, the phone team, and the email all say the same thing.
- Honor the old price for one cycle. If the successor costs more, some organizations let legacy members renew at their old rate once, then move them to standard pricing. That’s a policy decision, and it needs a way to sell the discounted renewal, which may mean a phone or desk transaction rather than the web form.
- Let them choose. For a full restructure, show the new levels side by side with a note about which one is closest to what they had.
If your organization needs to sell a retired level one more time for a specific member, check with Blackbaud support or test in a sandbox whether that’s possible from the back office in your configuration. Don’t assume a reactivated level will stay off your web forms.
Write a separate version of the email
Once the query finds these members, segment them out and send them their own renewal message. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should:
- Name the level they currently have, so they recognize it.
- Explain plainly that the level has been replaced, and what replaced it.
- State what they’ll pay and what benefits they’ll get under the new level, especially anything they’re losing.
- Link directly to the successor level, not to a page full of options they have to sort through.
- Give a phone number or email for anyone who wants to talk it over. Long-time members on legacy levels often do.
Keep the same timing as your regular renewal series so these members don’t get a reminder later than everyone else. Then check the results after the first cycle: compare the renewal rate for the legacy segment against the rest of the file. If it’s noticeably lower, the message or the successor level probably needs another look.
Keep it from happening again
The next time a level is retired, add a short checklist to the change: update the renewal query, write the successor mapping, draft the legacy version of the email, and tell the front desk. Retiring a level is easy; the follow-through on the members who hold it is where renewals get lost.
Where Social Good fits
The query and policy work above is all doable in Altru. If you’d rather not export a segment each month to send the legacy version, Email Designer sends automated, branded renewal emails from Altru queries, so a query that includes members on retired levels can drive its own renewal message without manual exports.
