Hi,

We allow our member businesses to have 2 contacts. We'd like both contacts to receive member emails. Currently, this is not possible because I cannot add any additional email fields.

I would really like to be able to add additional email fields to a member, and have those fields included in any blasts.

Thanks,

Martyn

Thanks, we will consider this based on feedback from other users.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I have members where they have one email as the primary (for log-in and membership management purposes), but have a second email which they want to use only for email communication. I'd like a way to create a field for "secondary email" which doesn't effect membership mgmt (can't log in with it) but will receive any email blasts that go to the primary (blasts would go to both email addresses).  It's like having a home email and work email, and at any given time I'll only have access to one email, so a time-sensitive blast needs to go to both. Withouth this functionality, I have to maintain a whole separate email list (via gmail) so it's double the administration!!  Can you add this to the upcoming release so I ca say goodbye to double email maintenance?   Thanks!

Matthew,

Sorry there is no way for us to add this to upcoming release. First, plan releases a few months in advance since each item requires analysis, design, planning of dev work. Most impoirtantly, there are already a few hundred other items in the pipeline so we are very careful changing the priorities.

We have not yet decided if/when we make this. One important reason we limit price plan by number of contacts is because it affects volume of email sent (and sending email and ensuring its delivery requires infrastructure investments). Thus adding a secondary email potentially increases email volume for each account  - which we are not too keen to rush.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

My memberships typically consist of a husband and wife.  The wife is usually the primary, but often times both would like to receive the emails from the website.  However, since there is only one email address per membership that the system recognizes, only one of them can get the emails and then must forward them on to their spouse which is an inconvenience and unreliable.

Is it possible to have a second email address on a single membership that can optionally choose to receive system emails?  Thanks.

Would be very helpful.

Susan Bush

Our members frequently request this.

Hi, just a suggestion.  Can't you make the husband and wife membership a bundled membership where one pays and the second one is free?  This way you would be able to have both e-mail addresses receive messages, but only have one person pay.  Another reason to do this is if the wife wants to go to one of your events and they are not on your member list they wouldn't be "seen" as a member.  If you set them up as bundled members, either one could go to an event and both would be "seen" by the system as members.

We have two kinds of couples

The first kind, the spouse is insulted they don't receive the emails and that they don't appear on the attendee list.  So we created accounts for all spouses.  The problem is that we now have duplicate contact info (addresses and phone #s).  If spouses don't remember to update both accounts, one of them will be out of date.

The second kind of couple, the spouse doesn't have their own email and would never attend an event without the primary member.  I created accounts with dummy emails for them to be consistent, but it seems kind of pointless.

Would the bundled spouse then count toward our database contact total?  If so, that would double our contacts pushing us beyond what we can afford.  We're a community level now with up to 500 contacts for $50/month.

This would be a great addition.  I echo the original post.

Our challenge is to figure out how to handle this in our pricing.

Adding a second email to each record can effectively double the volume of email sent out  by our system - which is one of the key cost drivers behind pricing linked to number of contacts.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I understand about costs, but I think WA is dismissing customer request without thinking it through.  In our use, we need the second Email option for some of our members, and do significant extra work to set up and maintain (but link as best we can) separate couple accounts to achieve the end.  And still we have the problem then of still sending the other half of a couple reminders when one has replied.  If Email cost is the WA concern, it seems it would be simple to set up WA accounting that the second Email entry counts as a second member.

We are not dismissing it - it is kept in the wishlist pipeline while we are considering this against other requests and I do appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We struggled with this mightily and here's what we came up with.  Three membership levels:

Regular Member, 2nd Member in Household, Couple Shared Email. 

We charge $20 for member, $5 for the 2nd member in household and $25 for Couple Shared Email.  The downside for Couple Shared Email is they have a common profile "Bill and Sandra" as first name or whatever.  But this was the best we could come up with....  The 2nd Member in Household works fine and allows us to keep our dues structure whereby the couple fee is less than the cost of two singles. 

I would like to be able to see the whole membership in the Admin side without the 3 groups being segregated but that's a minor detail.

Hope this is helpful.

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-michellebw

We handle multiple individuals within a family exactly as other posters have suggested, by creating a "Household" bundle that we limit to 6 members - and I like this approach. It makes the principal member responsible for a membership package and payment, whilst allowing all bundle members to receive communications.

Having said that it does count against our overall contacts database allowance which is clearly a downside for our organisation cost wise.

As Chief_Apricot has said this is really an issue for WA in their pricing and structure of levels, rather than an additonal feature request.

Could you simply review the database limits for each level of WA service - perhaps 500 / 1000 level change between group & community rather than the 250 / 500.

You could also make a simple offer such as, "Every 'bundle' membership can have one secondary member at no cost to your WA limit"

A more complex alternative idea: perhaps WA could consider the possibility of effectively discounting "bundle members" to some extent. You could do this by keeping your existing levels limits the same but treating bundle members as being less "valuable" or a fraction (in terms of how they count against our allowance) of an ordinary entry.

I like the technical solution as it stands, so these are just some of my thoughts on how to get to the same end result at less cost for us WA users.

Adding to the thread.

We use Wild Appricot for membership management of an alpine ski racing club.  We currently have each racer provide us with a racer email(used for login) and parent emails(usually 2 or more additional emails.)

Our club communications are targeted to racers, parents and all.  So ,we need a way to better manage all the emails for our membership.

 Right now we have emails in 2 fields in the db - but because we cannot select which email field to send mail to we cannot use the website email solution.

 Kari Hensien
Site admin - www.cmacskiracing.com

 

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cmacmom@live.com

I would like to see a section where we can use multiple email addresses.  I have sections that I would like to send mail using 1 email address and other sections where I would like to use another address to send out.  Currently we can only use one address (the master)

Hi David, can you elaborate further on your example, I am not quite sure what are you talking about?

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Adding to the thread:

 We are just getting our site up and running - it's for a summer bath and tennis club where each 'member' is a family. We would need to identify multiple email addresses and the spouse (and children). The email issue is a concern for me - though I see some threads about bundling that I'll check out.

The other main issue for me is event registration. I need to be able to register adults and kids separately - at different price points (i.e. Memorial Day party - $10/adult and $5/child.). I cannot find a way to do this - and am forced (I think) to set all events to free for now and manage all finances on the backend. I will also have to use text fields on the registration form to note # of adults, kids.

 Any other thoughts on how to do this are welcomed and appreciated. 

Chief_Apricot:

Hi David, can you elaborate further on your example, I am not quite sure what are you talking about?

 

I have a similar need for sending to multiple email addresses. Our non-profit services teachers that use their school email as well as a home email for summer and/or vacation use. Several have asked that they receive email blasts for both addresses.

This would be great!  I know that users can add a new bundle member to put in a second email address, but that takes up a whole member slot -- we are limited to 500, and we are currently at 425, and so I'd love members to be able to add email addresses without wasting another member slot...

Sorry - no progress yet here. I'm not expecting any change here in 2011

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Evgeny
Product Design Team

Our current inclination is to have something like a single "backup" email for each contact - not multiple emails. This makes email blast scenario simpler to implement - like admin can select if he wants to force a copy to "backup" email or use only primary email. Contact could also select if he wants always to receive a copy to his backup email or use it only in special cases (like forgot password, etc). 

We think that bundle scenarios (like families) should be considered in terms of bundles in general, not just emails. This means that we need to rethink and change whole bundle management and this is a different aspect of discussion - see 
http://community.wildapricot.com/14584/ShowThread.aspx 
http://community.wildapricot.com/18147/ShowThread.aspx 

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Evgeny
Product Design Team

Any idea on a release date for this? Our organization is in a position where we will need to leave Wild Apricot for a more comprehensive solution if we aren't able to use back up emails for our many, many multiple-email families. As another poster has indicated, creating duplicates or bundles in the system just to solve an email issue makes the rest of the fantastic features unusable. Thanks!