Support

About a year ago we have created functionality which was originally called 'Group membership' and later has been renamed into 'Bundle membership' (See http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Bundle+Membership+Level ). Our goal behind this functionality was to make it easy to deal with multi-person memberships (typically sold as a package, a 'bundle'):

• corporate membership
• sports team
• family/household

In a nutshell, for a given membership level you specify that it is a 'Bundle' (limited to NN members per bundle or unlimited). Person applying for membership becomes administrator and can later add members to his bundle at no additional charge.

It sounds like this feature is not quite addressing the needs of our clients and we actively seeking feedback:

• What is missing?
• What is inconvenient/should be changed in current implementation? 

here are some specific issues already identified by our clients:

• need to have different fields for the parent record (e.g. company-specific fields) and child records (individual persons).
  
• Ability to only show the parent record in a particular member directory and then on its profile page provide links to profiles of linked individuals
• Unlink the concept of 'parent' record and 'bundle admin' - right now they are the same.
  

One possible solution we are considering is to add the ability for these related individual records to be in a different membership level from the parent record. In this way they can be shown/hidden in the member directory as needed - and can use different fields.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Here is comment on this subject received via email from a client:

Just wanted to bring up again the idea of being able to have multiple names associated with a single member record.  Our members are companies, so having the ability to designate a number of people under a single membership would allow each member to have multiple contact points without having the same company listing repeated several times.

 

If we call these additional members ‘associates’ for now, I would anticipate that the site administrator will define the number of associates that can be assigned to each member level.  The associates would:

·         Be added by the Member

·         Have limited information fields (first, last name, email, telephone number)

·         Be presented in the Directory listing (as determined by the Member)

·         Be managed by the Member:

o   Presentation of associate info in Directory, and which fields to show

o   Associate’s access to specific Member functions (for example, we enable members to post on our News blog page.  A Member could designate one or more associates with the same access so they could carry out that responsibility)

o   Associates would receive all emails sent to members (we use WA to send opportunity notices, etc.)

 

Along these lines, it would be useful to be able to designate an Associate as the full administrator for a member.  Some of our members are senior execs/presidents etc. who should have top billing in the Directory listing, but would have nothing to do with administering their own membership, using the tools we are providing etc.  Building more flexibility into this aspect would be very helpful.

 

I would see this as different from the Group function and the Bundle Memberships, both of which are good, but not what I am looking for.
 

END QUOTE

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Along similar lines, I am looking for more out of the multi-person memberships.  I want:

• a separate login for bundle admin/members (that would go to a group page for that bundle)
• the ability to customize the name of "bundle" which is a little confusing -- my organization's bundles are families
  
• to be able to easily track how much bundles I have (and see how many members are in each)--right now it's kind of buried in the dashboard
• most importantly, the ability to see the amount of collective donations for the year by bundle and by individual members
  

Well, we have a "Firm Membership" that allows a company, rather than an individual to sign up for memberhsip.  But there are many rules to the membership since it is at a reduced membership fee per member.  Such as:

There is a MINIMUMof 3 members signed up
It is managed by a firm administrator - one person renews all its firm members and can make changes as employees leave the company

We also have a group membership that we have worked out with a sister association.  Members of their association are allowed one free membership per company (which the sister assoc. pays us for) in our association and additional company employees may sign up for a reduced fee membership.  In Wild Apricot there is no way to bundle these as the pricing structure is different, but I would love it to track when the one "free" membership for each company is used and only allow the reduced membership signups for that company.  Does that make sense?

Posting a recent support exchange related to this:

...
Unfortunately this is not possible, since the bundle admin and member belong to the same membership level - database fields can only be restricted by member level. It is currently not possible to specify the type of member that can be added to a bundle. Besides, the bundle admin has no access to other members outside his bundle anyway (only the account admin has access to all members).

See if the groups functionality can work for you - in this case there is no group admin, but members from different member levels with different database fields can be part of the same group.

Regards,
Jim Sympathy, Fluid Apricot

Hi,

Is it possible for bundle members to not display or require the same fields that the bundle administrator sees? In our situation, the bundle admin has a bunch of fields to populate in the application process to create the bundle, but the individuals in the bundle only need a few fields to define (especially if they are children in a family, and the family is the bundle). For example, I want to add children (bundle members) and have fields for gender and date of birth - so I created a membership level called Child in a Family, with fields specific to that membership level. But I do not want those fields required for the bundle admin!!

Relatedly, how can you define what type of individual member can be added to a particular bundle? Can the field for a bundle member be different than fields from a bundle admin?

...
 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I want to echo the comments of others.  For many membership organizations, there can be several individual members representing a single corporate member organization. This is why you created membership bundles, but what you offer is not quite complete.

You already have a concept of certain fields being common across all members within a bundle, such as the renewal date.

It is necessary also to have certain user-managed fields be common across all members of a bundle too, such as the name of the organization. I have created an "organization directly profile text" field, and I would like that field to be common across all members in the organization. Same with the organization's logo picture, website address, industry classification, etc. Alternatively, certain fields might only be exposed to the member who is the bundle administrator. Without one of these approaches, there is no way to figure out which bundle member should fill out these common fields when they join, and it is extra work for each of them to ask each of them to, say, hunt around for their corporate logo graphic image.

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