I represent a small nonprofit (about 100 members, 500 contacts), we only use WA as an online portal and we manually transfer any new data to be managed by a more robust donor management program (GiftWorks) which we purchased for $25/year through Tech Soup.  The biggest problem I have with WA is that anyone can completely wipe their information - either contact info or demographics - and I'll have no way of knowing what was deleted!  For this reason *any* time a contact changes any aspect of their information, I need to have the *old* info as well as the *new* info for that particular field.  It's best if there's an audit trail, because if there's any problem with receiving that email, there won't be a back up. 

We also pay $19/month for the quick books online edition where we manage our finances.  QBOE has an audit trail which is extremely valuable to us. I would like to see the same for WA, otherwise, we'll continue using GW and QBOE, with WA simply as an interface for online donations, but my preference is to transfer to using WA and QBOE exclusively. 

Even for us "little guys", this feature is not negotiable as you can see by our need for a separate (and affordable) donor management system.

Chief - Any update to this?

We just need a simple report to generate and mail to our administrator:

Member Name

Changes made to fields:

1)

2)

3) Etc...

we are still analyzing our options on this.

It's a major undertaking to track all changes to all fields (basically you would need 2 or more special internal fields for each custom field etc.) so we are trying to find a simpler solution which would address the gist of this. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

How much of a problem would it be to set up an email notification summarizing the changed fields?

we are considering various option, including this one - but it's not a simple change either. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Hey Chief!

 Thanks for all the thought that is going in on this - I just recieved a request from one of our members that will be assisting in managing members.  I well understand the "overhead" required to put in a feature such as this.   I do want to point out that each change a member makes, may be important in the cultivating the member's relationship with our organization.  That is such an important feature - especially in the non-profit arena. 

So here's our two cents....... 

Request was " We would like to know if a member changed the "field(S)" we have called address or phone or email, etc.  It was explained if only a 'flag' or 'date' be added to the/each field would be nice."  Though, IMHO, I could see this would be short sighted fix.

Reading this thread - a audit trail would be nice - record could be simple - member name or number; field name,info was; field name; info became; date occured.

Personally, constant emails for each change could get unmanageable and doesn't seem the best solution, possibly a weekly email, and more important, I'd prefer to have the audit trail information be searchable.  In order to have it stay manageable - have the records on an auto delete after some time period - say fourteen months?

 Thanks so much - looking forward to getting this in the pipeline,

Patty

 

 

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Patty

Our organisation is new to Apricot. The feature discussed in this thread is essential for us and I have two questions.

(i) Is there a timeline for implementation of somversion of this feature?

(ii) If there is not, would it be possible for some rudimentary version of it to be implemented in the short term? 

As things stand, we have no option but to ask our members to notify us the old-fashioned way and to disable their ability to update their own details. 

 

Many thanks for any help with this,

 

Hans van de Koot (Linguistics Association of Great Britain)

Sorry, there is no timeline for this feature yet, neither in full nor in short form. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

This topic/request has been open for over 3 years, and appears to be a small, but very important item.   It's critical for a non profit organization to know when a member changes jobs or title.  Our group for instance, publishes these changes on a monthly basis in our newsletter.   Unfortunately, for the past several years, we've missed a lot of changes, only to find out when the member says, "why didn't you publish my job change? I updated my profile!"

Unfortunately it's not a small item - we are recognizing the importance of this and need to figure out a way to address this without slowing down each and every operation in the system and without having to postpone many other features for this one. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We also would really like to know when a member updates their file. For us, daly notices would be good. I see that, for a few on this list, weekly would be better. Perhaps as an initial implementation you could just send out an email notice that X member updated their file, and give users a choice of a daily report or a weekly report.

 

Later you could work on all the fine details: specific fields updated, backups, etc. But for all of us who have replied to this, I think the most important part is just to know something happened, and the day (or week) that it happened. So we can download the member's file or the whole database, depending on how we are doing this, to use the info.

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

Just wanted to add our name to the pile - this is very desirable for us as we maintain a much more complex database of our (alumni) members, entered manually at present.

 

Our current alumni site sends us an email each time a change is submitted with details of the member and the changes they made so that we can record it in our database, and this has worked quite well up to this point.

Bit concerned that Wild Apricot does not allow this function, but I guess we will cope until this feature becomes available - hope it is sooner rather than later, though obviously a thoughtful approach to this is important. It would also be useful to be able to access a time-stamped log of changes to member data so that we can go back and check this at a later stage, though if we are sent emails we can log and archive these ourselves.

Just wanted to add our name to the pile - this is very desirable for us as we maintain a much more complex database of our (alumni) members, entered manually at present.

Our current alumni site sends us an email each time a change is submitted with details of the member and the changes they made so that we can record it in our database, and this has worked quite well up to this point.

Bit concerned that Wild Apricot does not allow this function, but I guess we will cope until this feature becomes available - hope it is sooner rather than later, though obviously a thoughtful approach to this is important. It would also be useful to be able to access a time-stamped log of changes to member data so that we can go back and check this at a later stage, though if we are sent emails we can log and archive these ourselves.