We are providing a web site for our cub parents and scouts and scout parents and we find we have say 2 parents and their 2 children as 4 members, but the parents and children share a family address, the younger children do not have their own address nor do mothers or fathers want the children to have gmail addresses or things like that, so allowing multiple members with one email address would be an improvement for us. A username and password of their choosing preferable to one WA generate.

The situation also arrises where parents would like email to go to both the family email address and their personal email address, so our users are saying, our family need the ability to have multiple members with the same email address and individual members need to have multiple email addresses. 

Messy but that is our real world. Less messy than multiple membership records for one real person and fake email addresses.

Hi there Dmitri and other users

The issue that you have with email address beng the primary key in your databases is probably costing you a lot of sales.

Example:
I am trying to work out how to do what I believed would be a "given" for a membership system

Our swimming club has single members as well as members and their families (you know, mum, dad, two kids)

We want to record all members in WA (we have purchased Community level), however I now have an unexpected problem that we can't lodge members using a common email address.

Each family has one or two email addresses i.e. in my family we have one, I have mine and my two sons (aged 11 and 12) do not have any.

IAN MCDONALD                idmcdonald@xtra.co.nz Level = Master $100 Qtr
CONNOR MCDONALD      idmcdonald@xtra.co.nz Level = Junior $200 Qtr
LOUIS MCDONALD           idmcdonald@xtra.co.nz Level = Junior $200 Qtr

I am in at the Masters swim Level, and my sons are in a Juniors swim level.

We pay separate amounts and so we will be set up under different levels (Masters $100 per quarter, Juniors $200 per quarter). All good so far.

Now as administrator I want to enter / import all our club members into WA. Many (30%) like me are families with a single email address.

I also want to have WA send us an invoice either for the whole family, or failing that for each individual (which would actually be fine)

The irony is that I can't do either.

(a) I can't enter myself and the boys in using my email address

(b) if I enter fake email addresses (which aren't real), then WA can't email me an invoice or renewal notice as they don't actually go anywhere

(c) There appears to be no way to invoice or receipt transactions tied to one email address

I would like to know how we can do this one simple thing !

If you have any ideas please advise.

Otherwise how will I use WA as our membersip system ?

Ian McDonald
Membership Manager
The Devonport Swimming Club

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ian mcdonald
DIRECTOR
INTEGER LTD | Ph: +64 9 446 6426 | Fx: +64 9 446 6424 | M: +64 21 760 722
P.O. Box 32-454, Devonport, Auckland

Ian,

I appreciate your detailed comment.

First, there is a workaround (more like a hack) that might work (works with most email providers). use idmcdonald+connor@xtra.co.nz for Connor etc. Our system will consider this to be a unique email but your email provider will ignore stuff after plus sign and deliver to your mailbox. 

Now, we definitely still need to address the situation you have described - in a proper way. Simply removing the requirement for email will not cut it since there would be no way to send invoices etc. I will split your post to a separate thread so that we can get more feedback, thoroughly analyze and properly address the key issue - handling family memberships.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We have more requests for family memberships. I am posting another use case from a client for discussion.

I have just launched your nice tool but have run into a problem:

We are a club with junior members were the parents do the membership registration and register juniors for events. Now, parents that have more than one child in our club, will of course register more memberships which is fine except for that they will need to use additional email addresses to create additional memberships and login names. That's not very nice.

Is there a way that the login does not also have to be the email address that info ets is send to. Or do you have other ways that get me around this problem.

Kind regards,
Karsten

 

I am also the administrator of a family oriented swim club. For the most part we can all we want by creating an account for each family. It would be nice to break down the family account by spouse and children as each family member can be involved in many individual events.

My main wishlist at the moment is a Secondary Email for each account. As with most families each spouse has an email address they would like to recieve notices on. We are currently at 200 families and adding additional accounts for spouses would require us to move to the next level of membership which, unfortunately is not possible for us at this time. Email management is the primary reason we moved to this service recently so that we can communicate with our membership more effectively.

My request is for a Secondary Email address for each account which is used for email blasts. The primary email would continue to be used for billing and primary singular contact as it is currently.

We are also trying to work out how to best handle families in our new WA site, since nearly all of our members are families.  We certainly need each account to have more than one email address for mailings so that we don't have to manage multiple accounts per membership just in order to send notices.

MikeF:

I am also the administrator of a family oriented swim club. For the most part we can all we want by creating an account for each family. It would be nice to break down the family account by spouse and children as each family member can be involved in many individual events.

My main wishlist at the moment is a Secondary Email for each account. As with most families each spouse has an email address they would like to recieve notices on. We are currently at 200 families and adding additional accounts for spouses would require us to move to the next level of membership which, unfortunately is not possible for us at this time. Email management is the primary reason we moved to this service recently so that we can communicate with our membership more effectively.

My request is for a Secondary Email address for each account which is used for email blasts. The primary email would continue to be used for billing and primary singular contact as it is currently.

Comment form another user:

" ...The system is a poor match for our Family Memberships. The database lists the family members separately and does not connect them for mailings and e-mails. Many of our Family Members use shared e-mail addresses. Have to set up 1 member with a false e-mail. I would list them both in the same entry except some want each to get an e-mail. I would prefer a username that did not require an e-mail, with a space in the database for at least 2 e-mail addresses so I could enter the family membership as one entry...."

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I have a very similar problem to that explained by Ian MacDonald. In fact, it is, for all intents and purposes identical.

 

I am setting up a database for club membershup for an Ice Skating club in the UK. We have several levels of membership "Skating", "Non Skating" and "Family". The Family membership fits the group (bundle) membership type exactly.

 

We have, however, the difficulty that many parents set themselves up as a "Non Skating" member and also their child as a "Skating" member (Family membership is only really meant for those with two or more children). In the case of our club, many of the children simply do not have their own email address - several are under the age of 6 for example - and it is not possible for a parent to register their child with the same email address as they have.

 

Neither, as far as I can tell, is it possible for a Family bundle membership to use the same email address for all members as it appears that it is necessary for each member to register individually.

 

We have experimented with the "a+b@example.com" email address format (which should arrive at "a@example.com"), however there are too many email providers that do not support this format to make it a viable option.

 

This is extremely unfortunate, as we now find ourselves paying for something (WA) that does not fit our needs.

 

Is there any progress with regards to any potential fixes for this problem? I have searched the forums and it has come up as an issue many times since at least 2008.

 

My own suggestion would be:

(1) During registration, permit the user to enter a "username" field which defaults to the users email address if not specified and is to be used for login, or

 

(2) Allow the user to use anything in the e-Mail field (so that it does not have to be an email address) and modify the WA system so that a site administrator can specify the field in the DB that is used to send emails to (which would default to the e-Mail field). This would mean no change to the backend logon system (which would still have to validate the entered login name against the e-Mail field), and permit individual members to select whatever email address they require for emails to be sent to - these, can therefore be the same for different members. The only downside I can think of to this is that the name of the "e-Mail" field is not strictly an e-Mail address any more.

 

Gordon Read

Isle of Wight Ice Dance And Figure Skating Club

UK

 

 

Hi Gordon,

 

Thanks for posting these details. Unfortunately we have not been able to look into this area - so we are still collecting feedback to  figure out the key issues and design changes/enhancements. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Dmitry,

+1 for this problem.  

we manage a club that has several husband and wife members that in the past have shared a common email address in our offline db.  When we imported it into WA, we lost a significant portion of our member records due to doubled up email addresses.  The hack you suggested does not seem certain enough for us to depend on, without an awkward membership email test to those members in this situation.

 

If usernames can be split from email addresses in the db, then we would have 95% of our problems solved.  We can handle the invoicing through a bit of extra paperwork, so no big deal on that end.  

Matt Beck,

Futuriva, Inc. 

There is another piece I would like to see added to family memberships. 

 

I am working on a preschool web site.  We have set up bundles for families and made each child a bundle member.  We put the address and other information in the membership fields and left the contact fields (sort of) alone, with the exception of delineating parent, teacher, and then the classes that the kids could be enrolled in.  

 

For one family with two kids, it is set up as follows:

Parent--bundle administrator, with contact information including their email and primary phone number.  Their membership information includes address, emergency info, other parent's contact information, and a few other details.

Student--just the mandatory contact info, with the addition of which class.  For this example, one is Junior AM and a separate one is Senior AM. 

 

When I go to make class directories, I want to list the junior AM students on one page.  With a saved search, no problem to get the list.

 

Unfortunately, limitations right now present me with one of two options:

1) A class list with just names.  To get to the parent's contact info, a user has to click on the kid's name to get to their profile, then click on the parent's name to get the contact information.  Not user-friendly or intuitive for some.

2) All the information present.  However, this is achieved by doing repeat data entry, either for the user or for an administrator.  Since any time a change needs to be made in the address, it would need to be made at least twice, it also opens up for more room for error.

 

My idea of a solution would be to have the following options for bundle memberships when the membership level is set up:

1) All bundle administrator membership information is used as information for the bundle members (ie, one login, and all information changed on membership applies immediately to all contacts part of that bundle).  Any changes to the bundle administrator would adjust all bundle members.

2) All bundle administrator membership information is used as *default* information for the bundle members.  This would be helpful for setting up new members when only 1-2 things need to be "tweaked" instead of multiple items.  

3) No bundle administrator membership information is used for bundle members (current).

 

If these three "options" were included in the membership level setup, it would increase some user-friendliness for our users and decrease administrative work and errors.

 

Thank you!

Heather 

As a church, the need for family memberships is huge.  The email issue is less a problem than the inability to link them for family context and keep them separate for membership context.  We tried bundles but that was a disaster.  For one thing, as soon as you bundle them, it changes all membership levels to the bundle administrator which is definitely NOT what we wanted.  the bundle concept would work with a few modifications, including allowing all family members to be added from a single screen which automatically inserts family address and home phone, then leaves room for individual selections such as email and cell phone.  Also we'd need a main heading line such as Mr. and Mrs. Leon Frank and Family, or however they want the Christmas Card addressed.

do you mean that each bundle member in your case has a different membership? 

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Evgeny
Product Design Team

We are new and kind of have the same issues. We are an Archery Club. We have two main membership levels; Individual and Family (bundle). These work well. But we also have a club within our club that consists of High Performance youth. They pay a separate re-occuring monthly fee to belong to this "club". But they have to be a full club member before they can sign-up for the High Performance Part. We want to be able have all the things we have with a regular membership for this group. I think if they were able to use a different username, it might solve the problem.