We just added our first non-imported member. He was automatically sent an email that started:

==========

Dear Sean X,

You have been registered as a Bundle Administrator of Tiburon Yacht Club.

Email: seanx@gmail.com
Name: Sean X
Organization:
Membership status : Active
==============================

So this brand new member has just been notified that he's some kind of administrator of our club! My Membership Chair's reaction: "Yikes!"

Yes, I know we can change that message template, and we will. But we can't take "Bundle" entirely out of the end user's interface.

"Bundle Administrator" is not a user-friendly term for our organization, and dare I say, for most others. If we could call a Bundle a Membership, and call the Bundle Administrator the Primary Member, then the poor schnook would understand.

Please, can we get this terminology configurable?

Ed T - thanks, good comment. We totally missed that.

This actually works quite well for us and is the main reason we chose WA. The only thing that I think can be confusing is that sometimes we switch who is the bundle administrator but the account information of previous invoices and payments stays with the member not the new bundle administrator - so you can be in a situation whereby clicking on the bundle administrator account doesn't always tell the whole story financially

Tina - thanks for the comment, noted.

We are thinking about redesigning bundles so will consider this when we start the work. Unfortunately with all the stuff already in our pipeline, this wouldn't start at least until 2014.

Our Association wants to offer a group discount with a per-person charge. With the way the current bundles are designed, we have to set up multiple bundles to do this because the bundle only offers a bundle price, not a per-person price. This is very cumbersome and confusing to our customers. We want to be able to set up a single "Corporate Membership" that bills per person being added.

Any chance this functionality could be added soon?

Thanks! Tina Shaw, ASTD Sacramento

Thanks for comments, we will consider this for future updates.

Yes, yes, yes! This is so confusing for people - being able to price per person would save loads of trouble and hours of explaining!

I agree with having options for different names for the term "bundled" in bundled memberships and bundle administrators.

Additionally, with a member level that has bundled memberships, there is no option for an automated "member activation email", as there is with non-bundled memberships.

I have set up a "family" membership level that has a bundle of 2, so that we have contact information for both spouses when only one membership is set up. When a new "family" membership is set up, I must send a manual Member Activation Email, which is easy to overlook.

This is what we don't have in a bundled membership level:
Member activation emailSent when new membership is activated or application invoice is fully settledSend to memberSend copy to account administrator

Two needed changes became clear when I introduced WA to our Membership Committee today.

1. Member fields should be able to be designated as Bundle Administrator only. It's going to be confusing to our bundle members to see fields in their profile to enter names of children, address, whether to mail our print newsletter, etc. etc., when the primary member has already done that.

2. Although the term "bundle" is fine for us admins, it's confusing for users (not to mention new applicants who see it on the first page of the membership form). I've mentioned this in a separate request http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8828305-customizing-the-term-bundle but it really belongs in this discussion.

There are excellent terms for the bundle concept, but they differ from organization to organization. So far in this thread, a bundle has been used as a:
Ideally, we should be able to specify a term for "bundle" that suits our organization. End users would immediately recognize what it means. And we wouldn't have to explain it to them.

If that's too much work, then at least call it a "multiple membership" or "group membership". Then "Add member to multiple membership" or "Group membership administrator" will make some sense to the end user, even if it's not exactly right.

I'd like this too.

It's on the wishlist under " http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8827555-required-custom-field-for-bundle-admins-only Required custom field for Bundle Admins only," http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8827555-required-custom-field-for-bundle-admins-only in case anyone wants to add to that request.

[quote user="Bill Tidball"][quote user="KatieFritz"]

[quote user="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.

[/quote]

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?

[/quote]

I would hardly agree with this suggested improvement. Allowing control over the unique fields that are tracked at the bundle administrator vs the bundle members should be moved up on the list. We help support several organizations on WA and when member "bundles" are required, it is always challenging to attempt to store company and employee information in the same fields without causing a great deal of confusion.

I suggest WA is a very good solutions and I thank you for your efforts. Please consider this kind of enhancement in one the next available release.[/quote]

Another scenario to consider - received from one of our clients via surveys:

CMBA membership is based on the company, but they can have as many employees as they like who use the benefits of membership: attend meetings, events, committee participation etc. One contact from the organization is used for invoicing dues; mailings and faxes (our go to person for answers). So we created the database with individual members and give one of them a paying membership and all others a membership called additional member, no cost of membership but they get all broadcast emails and can be part of a group management item. When a member changes address or is archived, we have missed including all of the employees “additional members’. I don’t completely understand bundles because I have not used them, but from the beginning individual memberships seemed to be what fit our members best.

We have several needs that prevent us from using bundles as designed. I agree with many post about have a bundle name instead of the bundle administrators name. Please add the functionality.

We also have the need to charge fee per bundle member, not fee per bundle. our organization has members from many different companies, yet each member is an individual member. The bundle option would be great as many companies have a central person who would like to do the payments, membership renewals, and event registrations, so they can have a combined invoice to pay for all their actions.

Currently, a bundle administrator can add new members, but cannot add existing non-bundle members to their bundle.

The bundle administrator also cannot register (easily and intuitively) register their bundle members for events without knowing each and every email address and adding them one by one using their email addresses.

the biggest hurdle for us is the membership cost per member vs membership cost per bundle. It is not feasible to have a 2-person, 3-person,4-person,5-person, etc bundles with pricing as we would spend more time moving bundles around when members are added/deleted to get around this problem.

I hope I adequately expressed our needs/wants...Thank you,

Mike

Hello,

The bundle option is great, but there are two key features that are currently missing from it and would be really nice to have:
* For our Corporate bundle members, memberships are often purchased by an admin assistant to a senior executive approving/sponsoring the order. The person placing the order is then designated as a de facto bundle administrator, yet she or he is not usually listed among the members assigned to the bundle. Therefore, it would be really nice to have an option to exclude ("un-ckeck") the bundle administrator from counting toward the allotted bundle membership count.
* On several occasions in the past and more frequently in the future, we have seen/expect the dedicated bundle admins purchase and manage multiple bundles (e.g. to reflect growth of the membership requirements within a large organization). In addition, these bundles can have different prices (e.g. a 10-Member Corporate bundle followed by a 50-Member one) and should be managed as separate entities by the same designated individual.

Thank you very much for your support!

Best regards,
Aleksandr

Wild Apricot's terminology is very frustrating for those of us who have memberships that are NOT individuals. Our members are companies: our "bundles" are the members, not the individuals within the bundles.

When I signed up for Wild Apricot, I was under the impression that it supported corporate memberships, but it doesn't really - it only supports grouping individual memberships together.

We also have that issue and would love to have bundle information populate down into the members of that bundle.

As for your problem Martha, we are very simular (servicing schools) to you. We get around the issue you mentioned by changing the company field to school name and not filling in the name category for the bundle admin record. We have customised fiends for the contact name at that school so we can still use macros.

Given your organisation sounds very simular to ours I'd love to have a chat. Please get in touch.

We have had similar requests from our members/users. In addition to that we find that having the bundle name tied to an individual causes problems.Our members are schools and we allow up to 3 employees/member school to access our site and resources. This works for us with a bundle administrator. so far so good. But, the set up has the individual as the member not the school, so if that individual leaves it's a problem. I'd like the Bundle Name to be the school with the administrator as one of the 3 contacts. Is this possible? Also, when the original member leaves their position and I add their replacement, there is no notification email since it's not a new member per se. All this would work if I could just have the name of the membership account bundle be the school.. suggestions.

We have similar scenarios.

Scenario 1:

One of our bundle members just moved offices. There are 6 individuals in the bundle. I have their new address and phone number, but I need to open each member record individually and update the contact information. Instead, it would be great if I could update the bundle administrator and push the change to the rest of the bundle.

Scenario 2:

An executive director wants to sign her staff up for e-newsletters. It's tedious for her to complete full contact info for each new bundle member. She should be able to apply her contact and company information to them.

Scenario 3:

I receive a business card for a new employee at a member organization. I enter them into the database. Then I have to go to their bundle administrator's record, search for them and add them to the bundle from there. I also have to check company information (how the name is abbreviated, year joined, etc.) from the bundle administrator and manually edit the new member's record. I would like to be able to add a new contact to a bundle from that specific record, and apply bundle administrator company fields to the new contact. If they have some differences (for example, they work in a different office), then I would like to be able to overwrite those fields in the bundle member record.

The fields that we would apply to bundle members are Organization, Phone, Address/City/State/ZIP, plus some custom fields like "year joined," "annual operating budget" and "region."

For me, the biggest missing component is that as you add new bundle members it should auto-populate key fields, like company, address, phone, website, etc. (or at least give the option to do this). Having to reenter all this information for a firm membership is a waste of time and tedious. Many members hate doing it and complain.

I chimed in on this almost a year ago. There are several issues here, but it seems like one could be implemented fairly quickly; have fields of the parent (organization, family, company) have the basic information, with that information applicable to all the members of that organization/family/company. That is a relational database basic.

They would all be linked by the main company/family name, and the records in their table would be the rest of their own personal info. In our case, the company would be the main name. Each member could have his/her position as their id within the company (president, advertising, accounting, etc). For a family, you can have son1, son2, daugher, cousin, etc.If you need email addresses, presiden.companyt@company.com, son.family@family.com, whatever, to identify them. In the case of a company there is generally a catchall box that goes to the person in charge of email if there is no such person at thata address.

[quote user="KatieFritz"]

[quote user="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.

[/quote]

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?

[/quote]

I would hardly agree with this suggested improvement. Allowing control over the unique fields that are tracked at the bundle administrator vs the bundle members should be moved up on the list. We help support several organizations on WA and when member "bundles" are required, it is always challenging to attempt to store company and employee information in the same fields without causing a great deal of confusion.

I suggest WA is a very good solutions and I thank you for your efforts. Please consider this kind of enhancement in one the next available release.