Printed Issue Management
I have been waiting to post about this, since we are wrapping up a pretty major modification to our subscription system. We have run into an interesting challenge with regards to subscribers, in that our subscription system was basing subscription information on a time period, based on when someone subscribes online. Seems reasonable enough, right? Wrong.
As it turns out, we were experiencing an overlap between when people would subscribe online (their subscription duration based on time) and when printed issues were going out. This overlap was causing us to send printed issues to subscribers whose subscriptions had expired, and in some cases it was causing some subscriber's to miss their last printed issue. More importantly, it is very difficult for new subscribers, since often times people will subscribe just after the mailing list has gone to the printer. Sometimes this would cause people to receive their first printed issue almost a month and a half after subscribing. Obviously this time-based thing wasn't working absolutely perfectly. So we changed it.
Our system will now keep track of mailed printed issues, in addition to the time-bases website access method. Thanks to this change, we can now track how many issues a subscriber has received, they are automatically notified when they subscribe which issue will be arriving first, and make sure that every subscriber gets their last issue, regardless of whether or not their subscription has expired when it mails. I'm excited about this one, and have been wrapping up the testing on it over the weekend and early this week.
Since we are on the subject, I want to thank Alex and the other great people over at CGI-Central.net, who have assisted us on this project. They did a great job of coordinating with us to make sure that we got the functionality that we needed, and that it was properly implemented. I appreciate their hard work, and this improvement will really help us and our subscribers.
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