Support

Current behavior:
Everyone in the member database can potentially login into the system, view and edit his profile, renew/upgrade.
Quite commonly, the need is to store non-member contacts, for example prospective members, friends and supporters etc.
These are not regular memberships, they do not renew and should not be able to reset their password and to login and use self-service functions.

Desired behavior:
Ability to specify for a certain level that these contacts should not be able to login at all.
Important caveat: System should properly handle the situation if such a non-member contact fills out membership application. Right now user would be warned 'email is already in the system' and prevented from processing membership application. Instead, system should allow it. Ideally, old non-member record should be archived somehow.

Notes:
1) Email unsubscribe link should still work for these records
2) Considering overwriting the non-member record and saving the old field values in admin notes.
3) system should probably not let them reset password
4) It is planned to allow donors to login to view their donations - and event registrants to view their registrations.
 

I don't understand this request - unless the non-member contacts would be removed from the total database count?

If part of the count either way, it seems like just setting up a "free" category for "prospective members" and barring it from the members areas solves the problem, assuming that anyone trying to join can move from the free level to a paid level through self-registration.

If the purpose of a "contacts" category would be to allow people to keep info for trying to increase the membership without impacting the size of the current database, then yes, I think it would be a great tool for the membership committee.

This would be useful, as it enables us to use WA for Bulk e-mailing to members and non-members.

We have worked around this by uploading people into WA uder the Member Level "Guest". This is a free membership, non-renewing, and does not get access to member restricted areas. People can recover their password though and login and update any of their details, which is importatant.

 Thanks

The ability to send blast emails to non-members to announce events, etc would be very valuable. 

To keep it simple, these non-members would have no log in privileges and if they decide to join they would come in as brand new members. 

I have seriously though about opening up a second Wild Apricot account which i would use for the sole purpose of blast emails.

I definitely see a use for a "prospecting database" separate from the membership database.  And it would be nice if that database didn't eat into the number of entries in the existing database.  It would be really nice to be able to list prospective members that people run across via magazines, etc - track data about them like contact info - include them in appropriate group emails - and more importantly, the membership committee could record any drive efforts directed to them, so efforts to inform them of the organization do not cross the line into "spam" - that there is some field that lets people know that they have already been contacted and don't keep doing it - or set a frequency that they don't get contacted again before a certain date, etc.

And of course, it would be nice to have the record auto move from the prospecting file to the member file if they join.

I'm really not selling this - although I've mentioned it a couple times today, but if you need an option now, our discussion forum does let us do email blasts to bb members . . . this is what it say -

"Our system currently supports sending an email to a maximum of 60 recipients for free. For a mailing list with greater than 60 recipients, you can either copy the email addresses listed below and send the email using your own email system or you can use our system to send the email for a fee of $0.02 per recipient after the 60 free recipients.

Your mailing list has a total of 389 recipients. Sumitting this form will cause a $6.58 pending charge to be added to your Website Toolbox account. "

This is an important feature to enable use of WA as a complete solution for nfp's.  At present, we use an external email service for our larger mailing list because WA requires even the most basic user to complete forms and agree to lengthy Terms, when all we need them to do is sign up to get our email notices.

Good idea!

There are a couple of differing requirements here that are being addressed under the same umbrella.  

One of the topics seems to be prospective members who have an abbreviated set of privileges. My requirements are much simpler.   I just want to be able to send a blast email to several thousand prior event registrants to tell them about an upcoming event.  These people are not members and are not expected to become members. 

At present I can load them into the system and send them a blast email but then I have no way to get rid of them.   Moving them to the archive and then deleting the archive does not work because that implies that delete and archive are the same thing - which they are not, I still want to keep my archive.

 The only change I need to accomplish all of this is to have a bulk delete tool.  All of my needs would be met if you could give us the ability to upload a set of email addresses with "delete" in the archive column. 

The only other solutions are to open an second WA account for the sole purpose of sending a single blast email, or using a their party blast email provider.

Great idea!  We are just in the process of setting up our WA site for our organization, and very quickly we realized that there were these two groups of people to keep track of and communicate with:

 1) Members

 2) People who visit our site or our related sites and have given us an email but have not "joined".  These are our prospective members.

 
Thanks for any acceleration of this feature.