Support

We are looking at a way of offering as a benefit to our members a website to them.

So ideally it would be great (even through a third party) if we could intergrate it so that our members could be directed to get a free website from us.

Can you recommend a third party intergration? Or do you have any plans for members to have their own page they can update personally through there account?

Thanks Kim

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Love & Light Kim Stompor

Each member currently has a basic profile page (accessible via member-directory) and we have a number of enhancements planned which should transform it into a pretty decent member micro-website over the next 4 months.

So if you could provide any specific ideas and feedback - what kind of features would benefit your members the most, we would appreciate that and definitely consider in our work.

Regarding external websites - Google pages might be an option to consider, but no integration is possible at the moment.
 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Thank you for the feedback.

Since our members are health and beauty professionals discriptions of their office hours would be great and a service menue with pricing would be great.

Also directions would be a good feature. I know that you can sometimes intergrate things like google maps into pages ......but I can imagine it would be a little more complicated to have it in each member account etc.

 Of course one things we are still trying to get is a affiliate program. Since most of our clients come word of mouth and we credit our clients billing with referral bonuses the affiliate program would be extremly beneficial.

Thanks for listening to all of our thoughts! Kim

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Love & Light Kim Stompor

Thanks for the details. We will definitely consider this as we work on this function.

The affiliate function is in our pipeline... but for the moment it is a relatively infrequently requested among other clients so it will take us some time before we get to it.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Another idea for a Members-only micro-website:  My Friends

I would like my members to be able to link to other members' micro-websites, through a "My Friends" section.  If you are looking at someone else's micro-website or if you see someone's name listed in the Member Directory or if you see someone signed up for an Event (next release?), you could click an associated button that would ask if you wanted to add that person to your "My Friends" list.  Allowing users to create a list of acquaintances is great for community building.  This would be like a mini-Facebook or LinkedIn concept just for your WA site.

Of course, there's a lot to do to make this work well.  You will need to build editing capabilities so users can add, remove and rearrange the order of their Friends.  Ideally, the ability to group Friends into (single-level) categories would be great, i.e. My Neighbors, My Fishing Buddies, My Bowling League, etc. with "My Friends" being the default category.  Maybe Friends could appear in more than one category?  Also, it would be nice to know what members have added you to their Friends list with a simple button-activated report.  Finally, the associated button seen next to member names should be different for existing Friends versus members who are not currently a Friend.

Hi there,

these are good ideas. We actually had a bunch of social networking  enhancements in our plans for Q1. However as we have encountered some problems with performance and also identified some membership management areas which were creating headaches for our clients we had to reprioritize. We are still moving ahead with social networking stuff, but now it is scheduled to be rolled out slower. You should see quite a enhancements within Q2. It might not be exactly what you have listed but we are thinking along the same lines.

Thanks  for your input!

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

social networking enhancements will be great features to add...I would like to have short messaging functions between members since some members are not comfortable to public their contact info in member directory.

Yes, messaging is part of what we plan to add.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

There almost seems to be 2 ideas moving in this thread -

social networking
vs
member web pages or micro sites

I don't know exactly how our group might use social networking, as we already have tools such as a public bb w/ chat room feature, private messaging, etc in place and I don't really see moving off those platforms as they are pretty established an have a wealth of back data.  Would be an issue of member only or public also.  (They are a separate vendor from our current website and will not be impacted when we move to Wild Apricot).

However, the member web pages or micro sites, I could see used.  We have had requests for members without websites to be able to post and control an individual page (pages) within our website.  From a minimal just give basic info and contact for the public to be able to contact a juried member without a personal website to a more involved "mini-store" where they could post 10, 20, however many items for sale.  This moves into e-commerce and mimics some of the art sights, which I could look up if anyone wanted the more specific example. 

This 2nd part is a pain in the butt if the individual does not have access to those specific pages only for updating - who has time to update the site in general let alone individual's pages.  But could be used to generate revenue for the non-profit. 

Most of our juried members have websites and we provide a link to their site.  Having the personal page available for members without a site would keep everything consistent and would be nice to have. 

If "mini-stores" were available, we would find a way to put them to use - but we would want the monetary transactions for their sales being totally their own and not tied in any way to our organization.  So it is a bigger project and a further out time line.

Members already have individual profile pages and we are moving toward making them more of 'microsites', for example we plan to allow adding picture and using HTML fields. So any other specific ideas re member pages/microsites would be highly appreciated.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Are the individual profile pages available other than as part of the directory?

I'm not thinking directory information, but a webpage that could be formatted however, within the constraints of the site's css.

Also, our directory is member only viewing - and limited info - we need all names showing on the directory, so we just show the basics so all will participate . . .

The individual pages would be for public viewing, from links in places like the juried galleries.  Would probably not be offered to all members - probably need to meet qualifications - but might change if mini-sites were available with an associated fee for those that wanted to use them.

Here is an example of a site with "mini-sites" -  http://www.natureartists.com/artists/

Click on any of the artist names to see individual mini-sites -

This site just tells people to contact the individuals for purchases - which takes all of money stuff out of the picture and is an ok solution . . . if they need money transactions, they can open their own website.

Each site has a standard look/feel - mini-menu - and a url that can be linked to

http://www.natureartists.com/home/content.asp?pageID=7 gives some info about the mini-sites, but I don't see a way to see any further without joining

Member profile pages are currently reachable in different ways - via member directory, links from member names in Blog and forum posts/comments, via direct URLs.

I think our thinking for future in enhancements is in line with what you have described.  Thanks for the minisites example, it is quite useful

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I would like there to be a match type thing, kindof like a dating site but that is not what I need it for.

members would offer something and others are looking if there is a match they are notified. 

also have a link to larger photos, the profile pages that dolphin by boonex has are quite nice with fading in and out images. 

Thanks for the input.

We would appreciate if you could describe 'matching functionality' in more detail on a specific example so that we can get a better idea of all aspects. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Our members are each responsible for a certain "minimum" fundraising amount to maintain their membership. While WA can accept online donations, we are currently using Firstgiving instead because of their flexibility for users own "mini" fundraising sites. I would like each member to be able to accept donations on their own site and have those donations be tagged with their name or ID number for our records. Even if it was a simple link to the donation site that tracked whose page you were on when clicked the donation link. That way we could track donations based on which member to 'credit' for the donation.

This is a very interesting point and I will make a note of it. Our current functionality for donations is pretty basic (compared to what we have for membership or events) but we are compiling a list of potential future enhancements and I will add your point to it.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I would like to see the mini-site feature implemented.  I work with schools, and the individual teachers would like to have a mini-site of their own that is part of the school's main site where they can post information about their class, homework, important dates, schedule, photos, maybe even a mini-forum, etc.  This would be great!

Thanks for the input. If you come across any existing examples of such teacher pages - please send examples our way - it will really help in our analysis.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot