Echoing my post from 6+ months ago - and agree with all these users here. The bundle feature is not a viable option.

To start (and make your WA admins happy again), could you allow for multiple emails per and charge a small exchange-type fee for actual email infrastructure usage? I would be happy to add a couple dollars a month (but not double and without adding a "contact" card) to be able to offer email communications to all my users.

Then you can rethink the concept of the membership account (one per family with a primary name and email) and members of that account (with emails, demographic stats, etc) and allow for event registration to register one or many members and also guests.

Seems to me this is a pretty common issue and should be a 1st-level priority for WA. Either that or create a 'sub-member' level that is tied to a membership and does not require, but has the option of, a unique email address.

What kind of information tied to primary contact are you talking about specifically? Could you give some examples of contacts with some example data (emails, etc.) that you're trying to keep? I cannot understand your contact's connection map you're trying to implement.

But in general I can comment that current contact database model basically consider each contacts a separate record with its own set of data and when you use use search, it uses data specifically from this contact data. Bundles are the only exception and allows to group contacts and show all related contacts when looking into details of specific ones. Probably, some of your problems can be resolved using bundles, but I'm not sure - need to get examples of contact details as I asked in the beginning.

For our association, member companies join based on the size of their organization. To make communication possible, there are one primary and one alternate contact idenifitfied per organization, even if they have (for example) 50 employees. In this case, all 50 employees are entitled to benefits of membership (like discounted registrations), and are considered members.

When we signed up for Wild Apricot, we were under the understanding that all of our contacts would be migrated to function how we currently use them. We had one email distribution list for our primary members, one for our alternate members, and one for general contacts or "friends" who receive promotion specific, non-member-priveleged information. We also have many contacts for members who are not designated as primary or alternate, but who we have contact information for. We also had other contacts, such as government contacts, etc.

Keeping these lists and contacts up to date between multiple staff members was a time consuming process that we were excited to have resolved by joining WA, where it was understood we could have all our members, alternates, and other contacts in our system. We were under the understanding that we could filter and send emails to those we wanted (i.e. members and non-members only), or search and export information based on these and other criteria, such as board members, committee members, etc (all of whom are members: some of whom have not been identified as "primary" or "alternates", but all of whom are members nonetheless.)

Upon moving our information to WA, it appears that we can only have one email tied to an organization/company name in our member contacts. An alternate contact can be added, but that information seems to be tied into the primary contact's profile information, which through the primary contact's email address, operates as the company's profiile.

Therefore this alternate contact information becomes a mere detail on the primary contact's profile, and the alternate contact is not searchable in the contact database, nor is an individual contact created for them.

This creates several problems that render WA ineffective:

1. We cannot communicate with our alternate contacts through WA because they do not have a contact "card" through WA. Rather their email becomes information tied to the primary contact, whose profile hosts the company's profile. The alternate contact information can be looked up, but not broadcasted to, which is a major setback.

2. For event registration, only the primary member (and perhaps the alternate, but probably only the primary) member will be able to access the membership discount, even though everyone who works for the organization is entitled to the discount.

3. We cannot search all contacts by organization name through WA if we import their contact information into the general contacts pool. We were under the impression we could have all of our contacts imported, which would include organization name. Although you can enter this field, it does not make a connection with a matching name in the member contact database.

Please let me know if there is a workaround that we simply don't understand (we are relatively new to WA). If not, the functionality we thought we were purchasing doesn't exist.

I appreciate any feedback, and apologize for the long description. However this is an important and complex problem we will need to work out as soon as possible.

Thanks

Sorry, this has not been scheduled yet so it is not known yet when this might be released.

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!

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://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825677-revising-bundle-membership-functionality-2492
http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825986-family-child-memberships-8131

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

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...

[quote user="Chief_Apricot"]Hi David, can you elaborate further on your example, I am not quite sure what are you talking about?[/quote]

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.

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.

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

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)

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 - http://www.cmacskiracing.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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