If your school is launching a Membership Form, your gift processing team needs to know a few things before the first dues payment lands. Membership payments flow through the same gift pipeline as everything else in GC Online Giving, but they carry new fields, they use two familiar fields differently, and they do not flow into the Raiser's Edge NXT direct integration.
Share this with whoever reconciles your deposits and posts gifts to your CRM.
How a membership payment is stored
One membership payment equals one contribution record with donation_type = membership. Multi-year memberships create one record per annual charge, the same way recurring gifts do.
| Membership | What gets created | Recurring fields |
|---|---|---|
| Lifetime | One contribution | Blank |
| Annual, 1-year | One contribution | Blank |
| Annual, 2 to 5 years | One contribution per annual charge, plus a recurring subscription | Populated, with subscription_type = membership |
A 1-year annual membership is a single charge with no subscription behind it, so it looks like a one-time gift in your recurring reporting.
Only multi-year commitments create a subscription record.
New fields in reports
These columns are available in donation reports, the custom report builder, and scheduled or SFTP-delivered custom reports. They populate on membership rows and stay blank everywhere else.
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
membership_type | The level the member selected, for example Gold or Silver |
membership_group | The internal grouping the level belongs to |
membership_type_price_label | Which variant was purchased: Annual or Lifetime |
membership_type_price_amount | The configured price for that variant |
membership_type_price_fmv | The FMV captured on this specific charge. Could be $0 if no FMV value configured by admins. |
membership_fmv_designation | The fund receiving the non-deductible FMV portion. Configured by admins on the form level. |
membership_donation_designation | The fund receiving the tax-deductible portion. Configured by admins on the form level |
Two dedicated reports also live under Reporting > Donations.
- Membership Payments gives you one row per processed payment, for reconciliation and CRM posting.
- Membership Commitments gives you one row per membership, so you can see who is committed to what and for how long. Both support filters and scheduled email delivery.
How existing fields shift
donation_type is your primary filter. membership is a new value alongside donation, general, match, challenge, installment, and pledge. If your import routines or CRM mappings work from an allowlist of donation types, add it to your integration flow.
Do not use tax_deductible_amount or fmv_of_incentive for memberships. These were built for gift incentives and do not read membership FMV.
- On a membership row,
fmv_of_incentivecomes through blank andtax_deductible_amountshows the full payment amount even when the level carries an FMV. - To get the deductible portion, subtract
membership_type_price_fmvfrom the payment amount. Donor receipts already do this math correctly for you.
The API
Membership payments come through the API as contributions with donation_type = membership, along with the standard donation and subscription fields and new membership fields. Check out our API documentation [LINK] to learn more.
Raiser's Edge NXT direct integration
Membership payments are deliberately excluded from the Raiser's Edge NXT direct integration.
Memberships behave differently enough from standard gifts, particularly around the FMV split and the two designation destinations, that we did not want to guess at the right gift-record mapping and push data your team would have to unwind.
For now, process membership payments to Raiser's Edge NXT using the Membership Payments report or a scheduled custom report.
We would like to fold memberships into the integration, and the right mapping depends on how your school treats dues in Raiser's Edge NXT. If you run memberships and use the NXT direct integration, reach out through your Partner Success Manager. Partners who join that conversation early will shape how it works.
FAQ
Why does tax_deductible_amount show the full payment on a membership?
That column reads gift-incentive FMV, which memberships do not use. Subtract membership_type_price_fmv from the payment amount instead. The donor's receipt shows the correct figure.
We edited a level's FMV. Do past receipts change?
No. Every payment stores the FMV that was current when it processed, so past receipts and report rows stay as issued. The new FMV applies to future charges.
Why is subscription_type blank on some membership payments?
Lifetime and 1-year annual memberships are single charges with no subscription behind them. Only multi-year memberships create one.
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