About a year ago we have created functionality which was originally called 'Group membership' and later has been renamed into 'Bundle membership' (See http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Bundle+Membership+Level ). Our goal behind this functionality was to make it easy to deal with multi-person memberships (typically sold as a package, a 'bundle'):

• corporate membership
• sports team
• family/household

In a nutshell, for a given membership level you specify that it is a 'Bundle' (limited to NN members per bundle or unlimited). Person applying for membership becomes administrator and can later add members to his bundle at no additional charge.

It sounds like this feature is not quite addressing the needs of our clients and we actively seeking feedback:

• What is missing?
• What is inconvenient/should be changed in current implementation? 

here are some specific issues already identified by our clients:

• need to have different fields for the parent record (e.g. company-specific fields) and child records (individual persons).
  
• Ability to only show the parent record in a particular member directory and then on its profile page provide links to profiles of linked individuals
• Unlink the concept of 'parent' record and 'bundle admin' - right now they are the same.
  

One possible solution we are considering is to add the ability for these related individual records to be in a different membership level from the parent record. In this way they can be shown/hidden in the member directory as needed - and can use different fields.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Here is comment on this subject received via email from a client:

Just wanted to bring up again the idea of being able to have multiple names associated with a single member record.  Our members are companies, so having the ability to designate a number of people under a single membership would allow each member to have multiple contact points without having the same company listing repeated several times.

 

If we call these additional members ‘associates’ for now, I would anticipate that the site administrator will define the number of associates that can be assigned to each member level.  The associates would:

·         Be added by the Member

·         Have limited information fields (first, last name, email, telephone number)

·         Be presented in the Directory listing (as determined by the Member)

·         Be managed by the Member:

o   Presentation of associate info in Directory, and which fields to show

o   Associate’s access to specific Member functions (for example, we enable members to post on our News blog page.  A Member could designate one or more associates with the same access so they could carry out that responsibility)

o   Associates would receive all emails sent to members (we use WA to send opportunity notices, etc.)

 

Along these lines, it would be useful to be able to designate an Associate as the full administrator for a member.  Some of our members are senior execs/presidents etc. who should have top billing in the Directory listing, but would have nothing to do with administering their own membership, using the tools we are providing etc.  Building more flexibility into this aspect would be very helpful.

 

I would see this as different from the Group function and the Bundle Memberships, both of which are good, but not what I am looking for.
 

END QUOTE

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Along similar lines, I am looking for more out of the multi-person memberships.  I want:

• a separate login for bundle admin/members (that would go to a group page for that bundle)
• the ability to customize the name of "bundle" which is a little confusing -- my organization's bundles are families
  
• to be able to easily track how much bundles I have (and see how many members are in each)--right now it's kind of buried in the dashboard
• most importantly, the ability to see the amount of collective donations for the year by bundle and by individual members
  

Well, we have a "Firm Membership" that allows a company, rather than an individual to sign up for memberhsip.  But there are many rules to the membership since it is at a reduced membership fee per member.  Such as:

There is a MINIMUMof 3 members signed up
It is managed by a firm administrator - one person renews all its firm members and can make changes as employees leave the company

We also have a group membership that we have worked out with a sister association.  Members of their association are allowed one free membership per company (which the sister assoc. pays us for) in our association and additional company employees may sign up for a reduced fee membership.  In Wild Apricot there is no way to bundle these as the pricing structure is different, but I would love it to track when the one "free" membership for each company is used and only allow the reduced membership signups for that company.  Does that make sense?

Posting a recent support exchange related to this:

...
Unfortunately this is not possible, since the bundle admin and member belong to the same membership level - database fields can only be restricted by member level. It is currently not possible to specify the type of member that can be added to a bundle. Besides, the bundle admin has no access to other members outside his bundle anyway (only the account admin has access to all members).

See if the groups functionality can work for you - in this case there is no group admin, but members from different member levels with different database fields can be part of the same group.

Regards,
Jim Sympathy, Fluid Apricot

Hi,

Is it possible for bundle members to not display or require the same fields that the bundle administrator sees? In our situation, the bundle admin has a bunch of fields to populate in the application process to create the bundle, but the individuals in the bundle only need a few fields to define (especially if they are children in a family, and the family is the bundle). For example, I want to add children (bundle members) and have fields for gender and date of birth - so I created a membership level called Child in a Family, with fields specific to that membership level. But I do not want those fields required for the bundle admin!!

Relatedly, how can you define what type of individual member can be added to a particular bundle? Can the field for a bundle member be different than fields from a bundle admin?

...
 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I want to echo the comments of others.  For many membership organizations, there can be several individual members representing a single corporate member organization. This is why you created membership bundles, but what you offer is not quite complete.

You already have a concept of certain fields being common across all members within a bundle, such as the renewal date.

It is necessary also to have certain user-managed fields be common across all members of a bundle too, such as the name of the organization. I have created an "organization directly profile text" field, and I would like that field to be common across all members in the organization. Same with the organization's logo picture, website address, industry classification, etc. Alternatively, certain fields might only be exposed to the member who is the bundle administrator. Without one of these approaches, there is no way to figure out which bundle member should fill out these common fields when they join, and it is extra work for each of them to ask each of them to, say, hunt around for their corporate logo graphic image.

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

Thank you for your votes and suggestions. We are analyzing this along with our other issues, and so are moving this to the Roadmap forum.

I would like to see the ability added for a Bundle Administrator to be able to edit a Bundle Members membership level.  Currently, a bundle administrator can add, edit or archive a bundle member record.  I would really like them to be able to suspend and to change a bundle members membership level setting as well.  For our organization, our bundle groups are composed of employees of a business.  The members of the bundle constantly change as employees move in and out of the field and/or get a new job.  So we have to constantly maintain their bundle for them because they can't suspend an existing member and replace them with a new member on their own and like wise, they can't edit a bundle member to switch their membership level to a non-bundled membership level in order to free up a bundled member spot.  It would just be nice to have the bundle adminstrator handle these kinds of changes.

Thanks for the suggestion. We are working on redesigning bundles and this is quite helpful.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

It would really help to be able to give bundles names other than the names of their administrators. I mean, bundles are meant for schools, organizations, teams etc., right? We should be able to name them that way.

At the moment, if I want to add a teacher to his school's account, I click 'Add to bundle' on his profile, and am faced with a list of school administrators' names, which mean nothing to me. So then I go back or open another browser tab, do a keyword search by school name to find out the administrators name, then go back and look for that name in the list -- a list which is not in alphabetical, or any other, order!

Can anything be done to improve this situation?

Thank you,

Paul

Paul,

Yes, this is one of the things with bundles we are working to redesign. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

A suggestion that I would like to make now is to make it easier for a new member to sign up and be part of an existing bundle.  Here is my current workflow, and the problem.

 My organization has individual members, and corporate memberships, which are bundles with 10 possible places, one being the admin.

As it stand now, when  new member signs up, and chooses corporate membership, they are assigned as a new bundle administrator and asked to pay the full corporate membership fee.  There is no mechanism to have them be assigned to an existing bundle when they fill out the new member form.

Ideally, what I would see is the following workflow:

 1.  New Member signs up

2.  Chooses Corporate Membership

3.  Bundle is based on Company Name:  Next screen shows pulldown of Company names that are part of a Corporate Bundle, as not all have corporate memberships.

4.  New member chooses Company Name from pull-down.

5.  If Bundle still has open spaces, the new member completes application.  If not, go to 6

5a.  Email is generated to bundle administrator who may approve new member being added to bundle.

5b.  If bundle administrator does not approve, then new member is sent email to log in and either choose the same company and pay for new corporate membership, or choose different membership level.

 6.  If Bundle has no open spaces, set up new member as new bundle administrator and charge them for corporate membership.

 Hopefully this makes sense, please contact me for clarification.  My organization website is socalurisa.camp9.org if you want to see the current setup.

Another problem that I have with the bundle administration is changing someones bundle status.  When a new member signs up, they are assigned to a new bundle as an administrator.  In order to make them a part of an existing bundle, the process is extremely unclear.  You actually have to change them from a corporate member, which is the bundle membership, to an individual member, and then choose to add them to a bundle.  The only choices you are given there is a list of the bundle administrators, which doesn't help you know which company they are a part of.  This part really, really needs some help.

 Thanks,

Russell Mercer

 

Russell,

Thanks for a detailed description, makes good sense.

And I agree about that process comment. We have designed some improvements - now wiating its turn in the development queue...

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We have some ideas for the revision, some small steps are being implemented in version 3.3 If you have a concrete suggestion for some specific aspects, feel free to create new threads on the Wishlist for each one (this would help us to focus on most important things).

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Great idea! We would love to see this feature added as well!!

We've marked this as one of the Top 50 items for 2010. Our goal is to develop this feature during the next 12 months.

We'll continue getting ideas and feedback from this forum, and let you know when we have designed the solution and set a release date for it.

Hi

 

I'm a newbie here and am really excited about what Wild Apricot can do for my new business venture.  I am a little confused about bundles.  Here's what I need to do;

I run a trade directory and have plumbers, electricians, roofers, builders etc. as members.  These are business members but each one may employ more than one person.  So, I need to hold the Business as the Member and then the people in the business as Contacts... the Business can edit member details but not  the contacts, but I want the contacts to be able to have access to 'members only' areas of the website.

 Can I do this with the system now?  Or, when will this sort of functionality be available - I am planning on launching this business in April and this is critical functionality for me.

Many thanks

 Matt 

You can do this now.
Business will be 'bundle administrator'. 'Contacts' will be bundle members (NOT contacts in WA terms).

See http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Bundle+Membership+Level+Overview 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Thanks for a great product that is constantly improving!

We would find it extremely helpful if bundles could have e-mail domain names associated with them, so that new members (people who are not yet set up as contacts) could register for an event using their company e-mail address and automatically be added to the bundle.  Currently, we waste a lot of time telling members who can't register to contact their admins, who don't know how to add them, etc.

I hope this is part of the next release!

Thanks again.
Daniel (aimWest)

Dmitry,

I used the bundle feature (with some help from yall) for a 3 month survey we did.  At the end of the survey (now) I wanted to convert the survey members from full member level to associate member.  I thought I could do that with a single stroke however, that was not the case.  See my support ticket 14F-1301491C-CA37

 Therefore, I think a feature should be the ability convert all the members, or selected members to another level of membership if so desired.

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There is never a bad day when you are surfing, in the ocean that is...

Interesting all those additional characters that appeared right before the ticket number (I did a copy on the the email message that I got back) in the message when I just sent it.

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There is never a bad day when you are surfing, in the ocean that is...

It sounds to me like this would should be a separate request thread, this is not really about bundle functionality per se. I would appreciate if you would create a separate thread for changing membership level.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Daniel's idea for subscription by domain name is excellent. Would solve a lot of our bundle-related problems too.

I disagree. A 'stranger' shouldn't be able to automatically claim membership. Realizing there are multiple uses for Wild Apricot, there may be membership groups aimed at executives or officers, and allowing anyone in the company to sign themselves up for access to areas otherwise restricted to the public is not prudent. I prefer Russell's suggestion on 10/7/09.

I want to echo that the suggestions Russell posted below are spot-on for getting bundle functionality to where it should be.  In particular, the most needed functionality change is to allow new members to apply into an existing bundle (selected from a drop-down).

For my organization, I want to use bundles to deal with volunteer management.  Perhaps this is not what most would want, but I think the functionality needs are similar.

• I will create a new bundle called "Volunteers" and assign our volunteer coordinator to be the bundle admin for it
  
• I will then design a customized volunteer registration form that the public can apply to (thus it is important for the public to be able to apply into the already created bundle called Volunteers - I do not want them to become a new bundle admin)
  
• The bundle admin (volunteer coordinator) will then be notified of any new volunteer applications from the bundle members and review/approve it.
  
• The bundle admin/volunteer coordinator will need functionality to internally manage the list of volunteers (removing old volunteers, assigning groups) AND manage a bundle-only webpage (volunteer opportunity page for example)
  

Those are the must-have features I would think. 

Not to dwell too much on my scenario...but in a perfect solution I would allow the bundle-member to apply to be volunteers free of charge and then if approved by the bundle-admin ask them to pay the membership fee BUT still stay in the current volunteer bundle.  The thought is if you ask volunteers to pay up-front, you will get significantly less applications but once approved they are usually willing to pay.

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Kyle Mitchell | www.spec.bc.ca