I agree with many of the suggestions that have been raised here, and would like to suggest that a WA account admin be able to ad someone directly to a bundle.

 

As it is currently set up, I have not been able to find a way to add a newly created contact to an existing bundle without first assigning a membership level to them.

 I would love for there to be an option to "add to bundle" before the required being required to assign a membership level.

(if this is already possible, without importing the records, can someone please point me in the right direction.)

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Cheers,

Ben

I would like to revisit a request I made in this thread back in January 2009.  I suspect most people who use bundles have some fields which are common to all members of the bundle.  It makes no sense to ask each new bundle member to populate those fields again.  For example, our bundles are companies.  It doesn't make sense to ask every new member to retype the name of their company.  Invariably, these are not typed in exactly the same way, and you get multiples in your membership directory.  Same story for the bundle-company's logo, industry sector classification, etc.

When fields are defined for membership, there should be a check-box that says "Only show this field for bundle administrators".  And the data in those fields applies automatically to all members.  You already have this concept for the bundle renewal date.  It should be the same for other fields. 

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I'm loving WA. Great service. Simple to use. I love how quickly you are adding new features.

Thanks for your kind words Tim and for your additional input. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I would like to echo Tim's request.

Now that I finally am training our members to use WA and not just show up to event and say I didn't know how to use your system :)   I want to make it easy for them. I am seeing ways that it is not ans this is one....

I find a lot of bundle administraotrs not wanting to enete info for their employees because it's time consuming. So they never get into the system and are not recognized as members leading to loads of questions down the road (Why couldn't i log on to your website, my company is a member? ) The biggest time sink as I see it is that the same manditory fields for the admin are required for each individual of the bundle... this is a pain for the admin.

I can't turn off the manditory fields that we want for the administrator account like company website, phone address, etc..... but it's not important to the people who are part of the bundle as we don' let them have a public profile.... 

At the very least, can you set it up so that required info pertains only to the bundle administraotr and not the members? Then the admin can CHOOSE not to enter the info? Anything to make it easier for a person to upload up to 40 of their employees into the system without having to duplicate infomation for every individual? 

Thanks

These are good ideas. Anything that makes bundle entry quicker & simpler would be welcome.

A related problem we have is non-members signing up (we have a very basic membership level which is free) when their company is already a member. We would like the system to recognise duplicate company names and perhaps direct the new signup over to the bundle entry area....

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce

We also are experiencing this problem.

We need a considerable amount of mandatory information from the company on application but many bundle administrators just don't have the time to fill out company related fields for each employee.

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Michael McConnell

Meagan,

The conceptual direction we are leaning toward is to split the bundle admin/parent record and member records into separate levels - which I think would go long way to address your comment.

Though it is a pretty big change so we are still trying to find a way to juggle all the balls to fit this change into our development. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Just tried (as system admin) to add someone as a bundle member to an existing membership. I can't!!

It seems that first I have to add the new person as a contact then go back to the member and do it there. Would be nice if it could be accomplished in just one step...

Regards,
Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce

This is the same problem that my association is having. We are having to add the contact as a 'other member' then assigning them to the bundle for the company that they are apart of.

 

I would love it if I could just add to bundle at any stage of creating a new contact.

 

cheers.

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Cheers,

Ben

Any news on this feature ?

Hi Meagan,

Yes and no :-)

The biggest issue with this thread that this is still not yet quite well defined as a specific feature/change - rather as a bit abstract 'redesign' which served as a placeholder for a bunch of various improvements. So we are actually making a bunch of small improvements related to this in version 4.2 (May 2011 release) - making it easier to use WA contact records for organizations OR individuals.

However, most improvements are on hold and we are trying to distill this down to more specific scenarios - what are the actual situations people use bundles for and how do we best address those situations. Same thing, different perspective. It is pretty clear that two main cases are dealing with families and with corporate multi-person situations. So we would highly appreciate ongoing feedback along these lines. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I'd like to add to this thread - my club is comprised of families. I am a huge advocate for the bundle functionality (or something similar) and having multiple contacts/members under each "family" bundle. The piece that is still a missing for me is event registration. I would want each family to be able to register multiple people - and potentially at different price points. I am not going to be able to fully "launch" my site until I come up with a way to do this without the multiple email solution. That one is a deal breaker for me.

 

Colleen

Hi Colleen, I would appreciate more details on how the registration process would ideally work in your case, with families - pricing wise, etc. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I think the situation with our client is similar, to this, but if a bundle is setup with the company names filled in, how does a new-member get "linked" to that company?  Does the WA admin do it when they accept the membership?

 

Our current client on WA is a legal organization. The members are Lawyers, but many of them work for the same Firm. The Firm pays their membership dues for their lawyers. So, the organization wants all the invoices to go to a designated contact in addition to the Member, not just to the Member.  I setup a custom field in their membership app for "billing email address" but there's no way for me to choose that address to be included in the auto-renew/invoice section.

 

I'm sure that this feature will never meet everyone's needs, but I appreciate that you're working on it.  I guess for now we'll use Bundles for the company, and wing-it. Thanks WA

 

I agree with Colleen that it would be useful for a bundle administrator to be able to add Bundle Members to events.  We use the bundle system for our Joint Membership, so one bundle limited to two people. 

In reality what happens is that most Joint Members attend events together, so they want to be able to register both names for the event, and then one person makes the payment for both.

As a workaround we use the guest function, which works well at a basic level, but has the following issues:

• you cannot limit the number of guests, so members can sign up several people,
• there is no way to chose a registration type for the guest, so if their fee is different to the main registrant this is a problem,
• it skews our data, as we have many members who appear to have never attended events when in reality they have, because they were joint members registered as guests, so the registration does not appear on their own record,
• due to the above point, it makes it difficult to answer queries from the second Joint Member about past events and payments as there is no record under their name,
• it makes it difficult to run any sort of loyalty points scheme, or do any anaylsis of how active different members in the bundle are because the event attendances are not recorded on the second Joint Member's record.  I expect this is more important for large bundles.
  

In the short term, I think that the first two points could be dealt with by adding the ability to limit guests registrations and choose registration type, which I have seen on other threads and which would be fantastic.  In the longer term it would be great if the bundle administrator could add the bundle member to events (like Add Guest but Add Bundle Member), choose the appropriate registration type and pay the fee for both, whilst having a record of the registration on both member records, although I realise this is probably very complicated to do. 

Gill

RoweTim:

When fields are defined for membership, there should be a check-box that says "Only show this field for bundle administrators".  And the data in those fields applies automatically to all members.  You already have this concept for the bundle renewal date.  It should be the same for other fields. 

I second this. Our bundles are companies whose individual employees access our online resources. Organization name, website, member since, and several other fields are usually standard for all employees of the company. I would like to be able to automatically populate fields for bundle members based on the bundle administrator profiles.

It would be great to have the option to "only show this field for bundle administrators" as RoweTim suggested. Even better if those fields would be filled in automatically for bundle members but could be overridden as needed.

 

Is this a specific enough feature to be considered in the next release? 

I would like to add a request to add to the 'change membership level' option to include non-member (contact in WA terms).  Our bundles are corporate members who are allowed x numbers of members for one rate.  If someone leaves the company and we want to add a replacement to the bundle, we need to be able to 'unregister' the original bundle member, not change them to a different membership level.

This is what we need also. Our primary bundles are companies which exhibit in our annual meeting. We often have 2 or 3 contacts:

one who is in charge of the exhibit booth
one who is in charge of advertising (in our Journal and/or in our meetin program)
and sometimes one who is the head of the company

 

And they are usually just contacts, not really members. We do not let them log on. They are not in forums. We do not send them our Journal unless they subscribe to it. Applying to exhibit at our meeting is totally different than applying to attend an event.

So fields for the company itself that automatically populate for all contacts, would be ideal.

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Nancy Scanlan, DVM, CVA, MSFP
Executive Director, AHVMA

Sorry - didn't see this request until now. Here are some scenarios - I'm 100% fine with registration confirmation email going to a single email address.

#1 My family is a member of the club - we are a single membership record - no bundles currently setup. There are two adults and 4 children - 2 of those children being under the age of 3. Club has a 4th of July event. Pricing for the event is $10 per adult, $5 per child over 3, free for children 3 and under. I would want to allow for event registration at the membership record level and set up the registration form to allow for different types of registrations and different price points. In this example, I would have 2x adult registration, 2x child-paid registration and 2x child-free registration. Allows for me to know exactly how many people will be there and how much food to order/prepare and also calcs the true dollar amount due.

 #2 Event is held where there is both a sports event and a dinner afterwards. Members can register for either or both - for multiple people in their household. Registration form should have type for Dinner only - total #, Tennis only - total #, and Dinner & Tennis - total #. Each type at a different price point.

And again, the big win here for both scenarios is the event registration would total up fee for each type of registration x total # entered and give me an all-encompassing bill due. I don't believe that is possible now (without re-registration for each person - which my users won't do). Ideally, if the sub-member idea from the email threads were possible (where I could have sub-names/members on my account), I'd like to be able to choose as the event owner during setup whether I wanted just total #s by type, or the allow the user to select the sub-members from a drop down or multiple choice.

 Does that help? I hope so.

Thanks for comments, they are always welcome. I do not have a quick answer for your suggestions but we will take your scenarios in account when we are ready to design this change.  

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Evgeny
Product Design Team