Transcript
Jay: Welcome once again to the Wild Apricot Membership Webinar and for the bulk of the presentation I am going to throw it over to Jim. Jim, take it away.
Jim: Okay thank you very much, Jay. Yes I am Jim, I am known as the Fluid Apricot at Wild Apricot. And as Jay said, today we are going to be concentrating on the Wild Apricot membership aspect.
So for some of you who are not familiar with Wild Apricot, this is an integrated system that combines membership management, events management, donations, online payments and so forth. But today we are only concentrating on the membership management part of it.
Now to understand the Wild Apricot database, let’s start by comparing to something very familiar to most of you, the Excel database. Now the Excel spreadsheet is basically a database that is made up of different types of columns and each column is a field. And for each of your members or your contacts you simply fill in the appropriate information for that member information in the appropriate field. Now Wild Apricot is designed in a very similar fashion. You can add all these types of database fields, there is no limit, you can create as many as you want and just simply fill them in for each of your member contacts.
Now for the differences; with Excel, this is a desktop database, which means it literally lives on your own computer. So if you wanted to share that database, for example, with other people, you would have to make copies and send it to them. Now as you can imagine, once you have all these different types of copies and if someone makes an update to one of them, they’re not synced in any way so you could end up with a lot of inconsistent data.
With Wild Apricot on the other hand, it is only a single online database, which means you can add multiple Administrators. They’re all updating the same database, so the database itself is never out of date. And because it is also integrated with your website, that means your members for example, they could come in, they can apply online, they can pay online, they automatically end up into the same database; the online directory is automatically updated and so forth.
Now Wild Apricot is based on what is called a contact. So what is a contact? Well, in Wild Apricot a contact is every single person you put in the system. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s a member, an event attendee, a donor, a volunteer, a subscriber, it doesn’t matter. If they’re in the system, they’re known as a contact.
So how do we distinguish between the different types of contacts? So what we do is, we have what are called common fields. Now these I made global fields; it is like e-mail, first name, last name for example. So these are fields which are like the minimum information you need, for example, to distinguish a different person, so we call them common fields. And in addition to that, we also have a specific database that applies to specific contacts only.
Take members for example. In addition to common fields, members will also have membership fields. So an example of a membership field is password or Membership Level. If someone is making a donation, obviously you don’t need them to enter any password, so passwords, for example, will be restricted to members only and donors will not see that field.
The same thing if you have an event, let’s say you have a specific event where you need to know what type of food some people are eating or what they want to eat, you can create an event field called Food Choice, which is visible only within the realm of this event. You can also add a different event where you are selling tickets, for example you need to know how many number tickets there are, and that field will only be visible within this event only. So similar to donations, you have common fields and also you can have donation fields and so forth.
So now, before you can start adding members to your system into the Wild Apricot database, you first of all need to decide what sort of information do you want your members to provide, what do you want them to fill in. So build the common fields like first name, last name, e-mail. I don’t know what type of organization you have, but you may, for example, want to obtain things like member certification, maybe you want to ask them about their hobbies and that kind of thing, what type of Membership Level should they fill in.
Now Membership Levels, for example, they define how much each member is going to pay, how often they renew and so forth. So we need to customize our database before we can actually start using the system. And to do that, let us look at the sample website right here, and I’ll show you exactly how you can customize your database.
So I’m going to log in as an Administrator on this sample website right here. And because I’m an Administrator, I also have myself as a member, so I’m given to the option to log in as an Administrator or as a member. But your members, of course, won’t have this option, they’ll simply be logged in as a normal member.
So to begin, let’s start off with the Membership Levels because Membership Levels, this is going to define what type of member it is; so to do that I’m just going to go into settings and then, under Membership Settings, I’ll go to Membership Levels. Now the system automatically comes with some simple Membership Levels, so you’ll find some things there, if this is the first time you’re using it, that you may not necessarily need. For example, there’s a Membership Level called Corporate or Contacts and so forth. You may only need one Membership Level or you may need 20, it doesn’t matter, it is up to you.
So to begin, let us just get rid of some of the things we don’t need, like this Corporate Membership Level, let’s say we don’t need it, I’m just going to delete it for the time being. And then I’ve got another one called Other Contacts; well, okay we can leave that for the time being and just use it as an internal Membership Level. As you can see, the public cannot apply into this level, so only the Administrator can use it, so we can leave it for the time being.
There is also this level here called Membership Level. So let’s say in our case we want to rename this to something else, I don’t know, maybe I want it to be a Gold Membership Level. Now for the Gold Membership Level I want it to be $299. This is how much they pay. And I also want the public to apply. And you can say, okay, if someone is in the Gold Membership Level, are they allowed to switch to other types of Membership Levels? So in this case I can say, if you are at the Gold Level, that’s the highest we have so you can’t switch to any place else. So you know what? The members are not allowed to switch their Membership Level, so then I would leave it like that.
Next I need to define how often members will join this level, how often are they going to renew. So for this level I can say, okay, I want my members to renew every two years, for example. And it can be monthly or quarterly, but in this case I want them to renew every two years and that will be on a specific day, so on January 05. So if somebody were to join today, their next renewal will be on the first of 2013, for example.
And after that we need to define at what point should we start sending members some reminders to tell them they are due for renewal. So in this case our membership is two years old, I mean the period is two years, so I can say I want to start sending the members maybe 90 days before their renewal is overdue, and I want that renewal to go to the member. If in fact the Administrator wants, he can also have a copy.
And these e-mails can all be customized. So for example, for this one here I can say, I’m just going to click on it and customize it. So you can put anything you want in these e-mails, you can put images, you can put links and so forth. So the system already comes with default templates so, if this is your first time, you don’t necessarily need to change anything, you can just leave it as it is just to see how it works. So we have what are called macros. Macros are like these special fields that tell the system to replace each of these macros with that specific member information. So there are quite a number of macros that you can pick from.
Just to give you an example, I won’t change anything for now but I will just send a test e-mail so you can see how these macros will be replaced with the actual information. So I’ll send a test e-mail to myself. It will arrive in a few minutes and I’ll show you exactly what it looks like once I get it. And there it is. So as you can see, those macros have now been replaced with the actual information, the actual name, the renewal due date and so forth.
So next you can say okay, this is the first reminder. You can also send a second reminder and also on the renewal due date. So there’s no limit to how many, you don’t have to send all three, you can say you know what, I just want to send only one 30 days before renewal, it is up to you. And you can then say okay, what if someone doesn’t renew, what do you want to do? What should happen? So you can say okay, if someone doesn’t renew within seven days, I want to change their Membership Level. This is the Gold Level, you can change that Gold Level into something else like a regular membership for example; this is up to you.
Or you can say, if they don’t renew within 14 days, I want to change their status to Lapsed. Now lapsed means you’re considered a member but you’re no longer an active member, so you don’t have any access to any member pages, you’re not listed in the Member Directory, so you have lost all membership privileges once you are lapsed.
Another option is to archive the record. Now archiving is almost like deleting your record, it’s basically hidden from everywhere else except, you can still come back and restore that record in the future if you want. So you should only archive a person if you are sure this person, more or less, is never going to come back. And you can always restore the record if you want that, and you can also send a Lapsed e-mail if you want as well. And then there are also these other e-mails, what should happen when someone renews, what auto responders they receive and so forth. And again, you can customize all these different types of e-mails.
So once you are done with that level, just hit Save and then you can proceed with the other levels as well. So in this case, for example at the Volunteer Level, we have made it free in this case. And because it’s a free level, it doesn’t renew; once you join you join for life and so forth. So you can just go ahead and set up the renewal e-mail in a similar way.
And then, next let’s look at the new applications. So the New Application Workflow is what defines what should happen when someone is applying for the very first time. When someone replies you can send what is called an Initiation E-mail. So this the first e-mail each person who applies receives; this is to let them know that “We have received your application, we are going to review it” or whatever. It’s just to let them know that we got the application. So you can also customize that Initiation E-mail. We have got it just saying “Your application is being reviewed, we’ll get back to you” that kind of thing. You can customize it to say anything you want.
Now some people, they actually need to review the membership. So you can say, you know what, “Before you can become a member, I want to review your application” because you don’t what the member is going to fill. So before you can activate the person you can say, “I am going to ask that the application needs to be reviewed before the member can be activated”. So you can just put a check mark if you need to review that application.
And you can also send, let’s say I want to review this application, and you can also send a Member Activation, so the Member Activation is sent once the member is now active. So when they first join here, they are what is called Pending New state, so they are not active members. And then once they are approved they become active and you can send an Activation E-mail at that point.
So once you are done setting up your new member applications and your Renewal Policy for all the different Membership Levels, the next thing now is then to go into the database fields themselves, what sort of information we want our members to fill. So let’s start off with the common fields, like these are our global fields.
Now the first thing is all these are system fields, things like membership ID, first name, last name and so forth. Actually this one normally is called Member ID; I just renamed it to Membership. Usually when you first come in it will be called Member ID. So this field is automatically generated by the system. You won’t fill in this field at all so, for all intents and purposes, you almost never have to use this field so we can just ignore it for the time being. But of course you can rename it, so you can rename it to anything you want, but let’s just leave it as it is.
The same thing with First Name; you can rename it if you want, maybe to just Name if you want, but really for most cases there is no reason to change your First Name. The same thing with e-mail, the first time you see the system it will actually be called E-mail only, that’s it, but you can rename it to anything you want.
Now beyond these three here, these are like the main three fields, the main three common fields, they’re always there. So this means that if someone is registering for an event or whether they’re making a donation, they always see these three fields right here; these are like the three main fields.
Now there is also a field like Organization. Now I don’t know if you use it or don’t use it, maybe instead of Organization you may want to call it something like Company, that’s okay. Or, if you are not using it, you can simply say you know what, I’m going to make it admin only. So if you make a field admin only, that means no one else can see it except the Administrator. So for all intents and purposes, this field doesn’t exist as far as the members are concerned.
So this is very useful. Let’s say for example you have some sensitive information that you want to track your members, but you don’t want them to know you’re doing that. So you can create a field, I don’t if you call it Rank, this is where you’re saying okay, who is a good member, who is a bad member. So you can just leave that field admin only and no one else can see that field.
The same thing with Phone; you can say okay, do I really want everybody who comes to the system to fill in this field called Phone. So maybe you want your members to provide the phone, but you only still having to want your event attendees to provide the phone. So if that’s the case, let us just hide that field, we’ll make it admin only, and then we save. So when you do that, the only three fields right now that other people will see is E-mail, First Name and Last Name, Member ID, they cannot change it.
So once we are done with our common fields, next let’s go to the specific fields now that we want; the membership fields. Now as you can see in the top right here, it tells you that the following common fields are automatically added to all the forms. So if I’m applying for a membership, the common fields will automatically be shown at the top of that form and you’ll then see some member-specific fields. Now these membership fields, they only exist in the membership view only. So if someone was making a donation, you wouldn’t see any of these fields at all because they are specific to members only.
So we have things like password, you can just leave that as it is. And then in Group Participation, if you want to create some groups for example, to group your members together, you can use that as well. There are also some simple fields, for example, I mean if you look at “How did you hear about us” and so forth, the system automatically includes those. So you can just go ahead and delete the things you don’t need, that’s fine, just go and delete it.
And you can also add any new fields that you want. So let us add a new field here. Now when you add a new field, there are all these different types of fields. What type of field is it? So a text field is basically like first name, this is a field that allows you to put in up to 256 characters. So, as many of you know, you don’t expect to have a name that is more than 256 characters so you can make it a text field.
And then Multi-line is where you expect someone to put more information, like the biography for example, you want them to write some paragraphs. So you can have up to 3 thousand characters, so you can make it a multi-line text. Multiple Choice, this is where you have different options. You can have fields like “What’s your hobby?” you can ask them what is listed, so someone can send it to more than one. And then with your button is where there are some different choices but you want them to select only one of the choices. Drop Down could be a list of countries, so you have a drop down of countries and then they can just select the one that they like.
Now Extra Charges, this is if you want to sell some stuff. Let’s say on the member application they decide to join the Gold Level, which is $199, and in addition to that you also may want to sell certain things like a T-shirt or a Hat or some swag like that. So you can create a field called Extra Charges Multiple Choice. So what we have in this case is, let me call this Swag for example. Actually, I do have a field already right now; okay I will just show right now what this one looks like.
Let me just save our changes for now. Let me delete this. Okay, there you go. So I just deleted the Swag field, now I can add it. By the way, you can’t have two fields with the same name, which is why I got that error. So now I can add a new field. If I make it Extra Charges Multiple Choice, now I can call it Swag and I can enter the different choices. Let’s say they can buy a hat for $5 and they can also buy a T-shirt for, I don’t know, $10 and you can even add something else like a sock for $2. Just move this.
So what will happen now is, on the Member Application, they’ll see this field and then they can just select that “In addition to my Member Application I also want to buy a T-shirt, a hat and sock”. You’ll see it on the Member Application and I’ll show exactly what a Member Application form looks like. And then after that you can say okay, do I want this field to be shown only on the Member Application, or do I also want to be shown during renewals so when a member is renewing they can also buy a T-shirt again, another one. So you can say I want to include it in both the application and the renewal. But in this case let’s just leave it in the application; and this is a Read Only file, that’s fine.
And you can also say, okay this field here, I want it to be available only to specific Membership Levels. Let’s say for example I don’t want volunteers to be able to pay anything, like to buy a hat and a T-shirt, only members can do that. So I can say this field here should be available only to regular members and old members, that’s it, no one else can see this field. So once you are done we can just save our changes.
Once you’re done with your membership fields, next you can just go ahead and do the same thing for the donation fields, so these are the fields that are specific to donations. And for your events as well, if you want to create some specific fields for events, just go to that event and under Registration Form, this is where you can create – now these fields will be available to this specific event only, in addition to those common fields.
So now that we have set up our database, we have our Membership Levels done, we have our database fields done, the next thing is to add members into the system. So there are two ways to do this. The Administrator can add people one at a time. You can simply go to Contacts and add Contacts or add Member.
Let’s assume you want to add another Administrator, in this case we can simply add a new contact. So all you have to do is just fill in the common fields. I want to add new, I’m going to provide an e-mail so that this person can log in, this new Administrator, and then I’m just going to hit Save. This is like the minimum information I need to add this person into the system. And to make him Administrator I’m just going to click on Edit Log In Details, so this is where I specify what type of Administrator that you want him to be.
You can make someone a Full Account Administrator, which means they can pretty much do anything on the site, or sometimes you have some Board members where they want to see what’s going on but you don’t really trust them to make any changes, so you can make those people an Administrator with read only access. So they can read everything but they can’t change anything.
Or you can even limit access to say, you know what, I want to make this person only a Membership Manager, which means that they can only make updates to the member database but they cannot make any changes to events or donations and so forth. You can even make someone a Work Site Editor and say okay, I want this person to be able to edit only one specific page, that’s it. And then you can just select which page it is that you want them to edit, so I could say okay, you just edit this page here called About Us, that’s it, nothing else. So this is how you give administrative access.
So let’s make this John, let’s make him a Membership Manager. And password, we just put a temporary password, but John will be able to change the password himself any time he wants. I’ll also show you how to do that later on. So let us hit Save. So this is how we add a new person. We just added a new Administrator.
So now John is just an Administrator, he doesn’t have any membership privileges. So he cannot log in as a member, he can only log in as Administrator. If he wants to be able to log in both as an Administrator and as a member, we actually have to assign a membership to John’s record. But let’s not do that for the time being.
So we’re adding one contact at a time, or you can actually import your contacts from an Excel file. Let us suppose you already have another database or you were using Excel database, for example, and you already have your members in this Excel file; now you want to import them into Wild Apricot. So let’s just go ahead and see what happens. I’m just going to import this. As you can see, it is some different fields and whatnot, but anyway I’m just going to try to upload this database and see what happens.
Now to do that I’m going to go to Contacts and click on Import, and I’m going to browse to find the file, which is this one here, and I will say Upload. So at this point I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, I’m just going to try it out. Okay so now the first thing the system says is the first row in the Excel file, is there a header? So in our Excel file, yes the first column is a header, so I will say yes, then I go Next.
So at this point the system then will say okay, it will try to do what is called field mapping, because remember I created all those fields in Wild Apricot, the common fields and the membership field. But those fields may not necessarily match up with my fields in the Excel file, so the system needs to match those two fields. So for example, I have a field here called Phone; does it match up to the field called Wild Apricot Phone? The field called Member Type here, should it be mapped to another field in Wild Apricot or what do you want to do? At this point we don’t know exactly what you want to do, so this is what you do under mapping.
So for example, the field here called First Name in my Excel file is going to mapped to a field called First Name in Wild Apricot, that’s fine, they all match okay. So the same thing with Last Name will match to Last Name, E-mail to E-mail, Phone to Phone, okay that’s fine. Now I have a field called Member Type. Now the system doesn’t know what member type is because I haven’t created a field called Member Type in Wild Apricot. So the system doesn’t know what to do with this field in my Excel called Member Type.
So at this point I have an option; I can say okay just don’t import it, leave everything the way it is, or I can say import this field. Then it says do you want to map it to something else? I can say okay, maybe Member Type is my Membership Level, I can say I want to map it to Membership Level for example. Then the system is going to ask, okay what do you want to do with this Member Type?
For example, I have this Member Type called Board One, but this does not exist in Wild Apricot, I have never created a membership called Board Type. I have one called Gold, another one called Volunteer and another one called Regular Membership, but nothing is called Board. So you can say, you know what, ignore all values that are not in my list in Wild Apricot, or I can create new Membership Levels at this point. So in this case I’m going to choose to say I need to create new Membership Levels, so something with a city and so forth, then I can go Next.
So now that my fields are mapped, then I can just go ahead and start to import. So now what happens when the system is creating an import, it will actually create a log to let you know exactly what happened; so it tells me that there are six records that we created or that we updated. The reason this is saying updated, by the way, when you look at your Excel file, Wild Apricot uses e-mail as your primary key. So if this e-mail does not exist in Wild Apricot, if there’s no member with this e-mail, Wild Apricot will create a brand new contact.
On the other hand, if this e-mail already exists in my database, Wild Apricot will not create a duplicate; it will simply update that record. So the system is basically telling me there were six records here that were either created or updated. So you can do this import as many times as you want, the system will simply update that same record if the e-mail is exactly the same in this case.
So as you can see, right now there were three new members, this means three of these e-mails were already in the system. So the system didn’t create a new one, it simply updated that record. And you can even go ahead and see those contacts that I’ve added into the system, those six. Now if I go back to my Membership Levels, I can now see that I’ve created all these new Membership Levels called [U-Banks 29:04], Regular and all that stuff. So I can create levels on the fly as well.
So now let’s assume I was going to do the same import but this time what I’m going to do is I don’t want to specify a Membership Level. So I’m just going to proceed; so it’s mapping the fields. As you can see, now we’ve got this field called Member Type, I don’t want to import this field. So if you don’t import this field, what the system then says is, okay this is not a member because membership field or membership type is what defines who is a member and who is not a member. So if I didn’t map this field here called Member Type, if I didn’t map it to Membership Level, the system fields created this contact, but they would have been created it as a normal contact but not as a member in this case. That’s what would have happened.
And similarly, I can also create new fields. For example, there’s this field called Tool that is in my Excel. So if I say import, I can say you know what, I want to create a new field and I can easily select the type right here, maybe I want actually to use a field called Text in this case, and I can just go next. So at this point the system can also create new fields and it can also create new Membership Levels during import [inaudible 30:48].
So now as you can see, I didn’t specify any Membership Levels so the system then says, okay what do you want to do? Do you want to import new records as contacts without membership? Or do you want to select a new Membership Level? But in this case, if I just want to create non-member contacts, I can just say okay go ahead and start import. Now remember I imported these people before, right, so this time there should be no new records at all. As you can see, zero new records because the records already exist in the system, the system simply updated the same records that were in the system.
So now that we have added the records in our system, the next stage is we want to be able to search for specific types of contacts. We want a field, okay sometimes we want to e-mail active members, or ask members “Why haven’t you renewed?” that kind of thing. So you want to be able to search for your fields.
So from the Contacts tab here you can simply quickly field out a specific member. You can say can you bring me all the contacts that have membership assigned. Right now you see there are 10 of them. Or, you can say I want to find to find all people who have registered for an event, right now there’s absolutely nobody, interesting. Or, you can say I want to find all the contacts that have made at least one donation, or those who are archived and so forth.
In addition, you can also simply do a keyword search. Let’s say for example I want to find a specific member, I can simply type in the e-mail of that person, if I know it. If I just type John, [it’s near 32:33], you can see that person with that matching e-mail has filled that out. And I can also do some more complicated searches, like do an advanced search. Let me just remove this field right here, that was a previous search I did. So if you want to do some more complicated searches, you can say, for example, I want to find – let’s say you want to find all active members or that you want to find all records that were created on a specific date and they also made at least one donation, and maybe they also registered for some event.
So you can create those specific very complicated searches. You can say okay, creation date was, they must have been created after – well let’s say this year, I want to find all records that we added this year and they have at least one event registration which is paid, and they also have at least one donation which is completed. So if I do a search for that, nobody matches. Okay, let me remove this search criteria and try that one; okay no searches. Oops, it looks like I picked up the long search criteria.
But anyway, as you can see, so I can say okay, I want all people we added this year, I can do a search for that and I can see there’s 14 people. Now if this is a search that I keep running over and over again, I can even save it and call it Created This Year. So I can save this search so that at any time I can always come back to this saved search and say, can you bring me all the people that were created this year and I can just run it again at any time.
And once you search for these people you can also e-mail these people. So the e-mail will only e-mail the search records that you found, so in this case we have 14 people that met our criteria. So if I send an e-mail, it will only e-mail these 14 people. So I can create a new e-mail and let’s call it Welcome New Members, for example. And then you can just enter your e-mail in here or, if you want, you can even save it as a draft so we can always come back later. And to access the saved e-mails, if you go to Settings, the Saved Draft and you go to E-mail Drafts, you can find all the drafts that were created. And then you can simply continue and resend it in the future, whenever you want.
So now, if you look at something here, we filled with 14 recipients, but now this is only saying there’s only 13. Now if you go back again, let me just show you exactly, if we go back to our search criteria where we were, I want this search here, this saved search. So I have 14 members and yet in the final recipient list there is only 13 people. So what this means is that there is somebody who has their e-mail disabled, that’s why there’s only 13 recipients that are listed.
So now I can go back to the contacts list, this is the 13, I’m going to go back to the contacts list and I’m going to find all these people who have their e-mails disabled, because somebody must have their e-mail disabled, that’s why they’re not receiving any e-mails at all. So if you want to find those people, I can actually do an advanced search on e-mail subscriptions and say, okay I want to find e-mail preferences. I’m going to say okay. Now I’m going to select – I want to see who didn’t select Subscribe to E-mails; then I hit Search.
Okay, nobody; that’s not one wrong search. Okay all are selected, subscribe to e-mails; let’s search here. So I’ve got 13 people who have subscribed, so somebody’s going to receive an e-mail; so who is this person? None have subscribed; I hit search. Hmm interesting, I can’t find this person. Okay, let me try this again. Somebody’s not subscribed to e-mails and I can’t find out who it is. Anyway, I’ll come back to it.
So I’m just going to show you for example, that if I have this contact here, I can go in, I can update their membership, for example, I can add an event, I can record donations. And under E-mail Subscriptions, this where each person can say I want to receive e-mails or I don’t want to receive e-mails. So for example, if this person doesn’t want to receive e-mails, you can see they disabled their e-mails, and then I hit Save. That’s fine.
The same thing with privacy; now privacy is where you say I want people to be able to see this field or I don’t want people to be able to see this field. So for example, we are looking at Johnny’s record right now. So if I edit this record I can say okay, for Johnny I want other people, let’s say when they are looking at the Member Directory, I want other people to be able to see Johnny’s photo albums, anybody, I want other people to be able to send him a message, but I don’t want them to see his Membership Level. So I can set it to No Access.
The same thing with First Name; you can see their first name but last name only members can see. So you can change the privacy settings of each person like that. So what will happen now is, if I were going to look in the Member Directory, for example, let me just show you the public view of the website. So this is the public view.
Now I have a directory here called Volunteers Directory, which lists only the volunteers. And in this directory here, if I go back to my website under Volunteers Directory, this directory was customized. If I say okay, I’m going to hit Edit Settings and show you exactly how I customize this directory. So for the volunteers I said I only want to show the volunteers, not any other members. So this directory will only show the volunteers, that’s it, no one else.
So now if look again at my public directory, this is what other people are going to see. They’re going to see the volunteers. And if I click on one of these members, the information I will see is the information that the public is allowed to see. So in this case, this member here is allowing people to see their Membership Level, first name, personal phone in directory listing, that’s it; but you cannot see any of the other fields. So this is what the privacy settings will do for you.
Now let us create a new member directory for our members only. So for this Private Member Directory what we want to do, we want to list everybody. Remember how on the Volunteer Directory we are listing only volunteers, but for the Private Member Directory we can say I want the private directory to show everybody. So I will say okay, for this directory include all the members and you can also specify what type of information you want the directory to show.
So in this case we are showing your first name, last name in the first column, we are showing the address in the second column, third column and fourth column. And in order to see this directory you have to be logged in as a member, that’s why you can see this directory. All members of the public, for example, they cannot see any of these member only pages, so this will be completely hidden from the public.
So now what I’ll do is I’ll go to the public section of the site and I will go into log in as one of the members. Let me log in as this guy right here. Now I don’t remember this guy’s e-mail, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to reset his e-mail. I’m just going to edit log in details and change his e-mail so I can log in as him. Save. And now if I go to my public I can log in as that person; and test and I want to log in. This only happens the very first time you log in to the site, you have to review the Terms of Use, but after that you don’t have to.
So now I logged in as this member, as you can see. Now I can see the member only sections. So if I go to the Volunteer Directory I can still see those three people. And if I go to the Private Member Directory, now I can see the 10 people that are listed in the Private Directory. And as a logged in member I can also go to my own profile and edit my own profile, so I can change all these things, like I can edit profile to change my first name, last name, e-mail and so forth. And I have to agree to the Terms of Use, yes, okay and then hit Save.
And I can also view at any time, I can view until the next year, and I can even change the Membership Level. Right now I’m in the Regular Membership Level; I can even change it to the Gold Membership Level for example. So this is how members can actually update their own profile and they can also renew at the same time.
So this is all I wanted to cover for today. Jay?
Jay: Great. Thanks, Jim; that was a lot of good information. And we will now take questions. Now as I mentioned before, there are two ways you can ask questions; you can either type a question in and then I’ll read it out to Jim and we’ll do our best to answer that. The other way that you can do it is, if you would like to ask the question yourself using your own microphone or the telephone, you can do that; and the way that you indicate that you’d like to do that is by clicking on the little hand in your interface, which allows you to raise hand, just like back in your school days.
So if you have questions, please type them in now or raise your hand, and I think we have one person who’s got a hand up. So I’m going to unmute [Leah 44:05], are you there? Not sure she’s there. Okay she’s typing instead. So the question is, once services have been purchased, do you offer technical support and what are your hours?
Jim: Okay so we are open 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern time Monday to Friday, so you are free to call us any time. Support is free of charge. You can also e-mail us to support@wildapricot.com, again it’s free of charge, and we’ll respond to all e-mails within 24 hours. So yes, you can contact us any time at all free of charge.
Jay: Yes and just to add to that, support is also included during the trial period and we do encourage you that, if you have questions while you’re on your trial, to contact Support and to get in touch to ask any questions you can. And [Leah’s] having some problems connecting and hearing us.
Something I should say also, just as a follow up to that, if there’s anything today that Jim has covered or if you think of any questions after the fact today, you can contact Support with any of those questions as well. So if you’re having trouble hearing us now or if you have any questions as a follow up during your trial period, please free to get in touch with us.
Okay a question with regard to the terms of use; how do you create the I Agree to Terms of Use link?
Jim: Okay so what I did is I just went to the Web Pages tab and I added a new page. And let’s maybe just do it again. I’m going to add a new page, let me call it Terms for example. I’m going to make it visible and I’ll create it. So on this page, there it is, I’m going to edit the page and I’m going to add my Terms of Use. You must do this and that and that and that, and then I’m going to save the page.
So now I’m going to Manage This Page. I want to add a custom URL to this page because right now, in order to see this page called Terms, let me show you what it looks like. Let me just refresh this. So right now this page here, the link to this page is like this weird thing right here. That’s what the link looks like when you first create the page. But you can create a custom URL and say I want this page to be called Terms of Use.
So now what would happen is, all you have to do is just go to here and, if I simply – oh I need to save this, sorry. Save all changes, yes. So the link now suddenly becomes a website address plus the custom URL that you added, which is that; so if I click that I can see that new page that I created.
And you can also see the other thing is that other Terms of Use, you can’t see it in the menu; I also hid this page, this link called Terms of Use, I hid it from the website, from the menu. And why I hid it is, if I take this page here and I make it a sub page of a hidden page, like I have a page called Hidden, which is admin only, so no people can see this page, and I made Terms of Use a sub page of Hidden because as a sub page, that means it’s no longer shown in the link.
So if I do that, now if I go here, let me just refresh, you can see it’s no longer showing in the menu. But if you note the link, you can just access the page directly. That’s what I did.
Jay: Great. So it doesn’t look like we have any more questions at this time so, if anyone has any questions and they want to type them in the next few seconds that would be great. Otherwise, as I mentioned, if you do have additional questions after the fact, you can contact Support. As Jim described, we’re open 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern time, regular business hours, and you can also contact us any time by e-mail. So please feel free to get in touch with Support, as we said, during the trial and at any time if you have any questions.
So thanks a lot for attending today. Jim, thank you very much.
Jim: No problem, thanks Jay, and thanks to everybody.
Jay: Thanks. And for those of you who haven’t yet signed up for your free trial, you can go to wildapricot.com and you can sign up for your 30-day free trial. So make sure to do that if you haven’t had a chance to do that.
Thanks very much. And we will try and post this probably sometime mid next week. So for those of you who want to review this or share this with colleagues, go to the Webinar link on the Wild Apricot site and we will post this here, along with some of the other webinars we have.
Thanks a lot.