Revising bundle membership functionality
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/Membership+bundles ). 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.
This suggestion has accumulated many votes over a year and is on of top 3 in “Members” category, so this year we started the analysis of it.
During analysis, we’ve processed all the comments here. And we concluded that while all of them are related to bundle membership problem, there are different cases. We know that we cannot address all the cases at once, we need to prioritize.
So, we have classified the comments and found either existing topics in the Wishlist or created new ones. Here is the full list of the topics that cover in full all the comments provided here:
- Family membership
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825986-family-child-memberships-8131 - Registering families / bundles for events
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8826118 - Allow secondary/alternate emails for members
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8825614 - Support both Organizations & Individual contacts
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/9666714 - Bundle membership pricing
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8826337 - Customizing the Term “Bundle”
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8828305 - Keep financial information about bundle after switching bundle administrator
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/19707610 - Members, Summary – reporting on bundles
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8828140 - Simplify adding new members into a bundle by removing extra steps to do
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8827390 - Allow Bundle Administrator to add other members during application
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8828320 - Simplified Membership Fields for Adding Members to Bundles
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8827555 - Make it easier for a new member to sign up as part of existing bundle / organization
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/19623097 - Changing bundle members to nonmember or changing their level
https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/15278841
We’re closing this particular thread and will be focusing on addressing topics above. To properly reflect your feedback in the listed topics, we’ve copied all your comments into related threads and added your vote there as well.
We appreciate your participation, your time and feedback. We will keep you updated on the particular topics – when we have some progress.
Katya, Astra crew
Membership management features @ Wild Apricot
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Leslie G commented
We need to be able to apply credits from one bundle member to another's -
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Mike T commented
The concept of a corporate membership might be a bit different from a family membership or other group memberships. I envision a Corporate membership to be structured in a way where there is a separate Corporate member record, the corporation is the member and people (employees) are linked to the corporate record. The people attached to the corporate membership, have member privileges, and people register for meetings and events, while the corporate entity pays the dues. The current system does not quite do this. For instance when tracking renewals, the summary report counts the number of people renewing not the number of companies renewing. Right now the directory is person based not corporate based, unless you only want to show the bundle administrator.
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Bashar Jabban commented
CRM capabilities need to be introduced to Wild Apricot to manage entities relationships...
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tlcorr03 commented
Having individual records be in a different membership level from parent record would work for me - as long as the individual memberships don't require a unique email address.
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calum mcgonigle commented
The bundle or bundle admin needs its own fields i.e. bundle name, bundle address etc.. When you look at a bundle member record or card it should clearly show the name of the bundle that the bundle member belongs to (not the name of the bundle admin). The bundle admin record or card should show the custom fields specific to the bundle i.e. bundle name, bundle address etc.
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Edward commented
Most useful to me would be the ability to have an administrator for the bundle who will not be one of the members. We do a lot of work with academic institutions, and often we'll want six faculty members in a bundled membership (for a conference), but have the membership managed and administered by a university department admin staff, rather than one of the faculty.
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Theresa, thanks for details.
As I understand, the issue is that members can't sing-up themselves as part of the firm. The system should recognize them somehow that they are part of the firm or they can select the firm manually. Now they can sign up only as individual members or admin adds them to the firm. Am I right?Katya,
Membership management at Wild Apricot. -
Michelle Hopson commented
We would like to be able to show when the firm joined and the past history / dates of membership as at time we have firms that do not renew one year, but return another year, but since membership records stay with the individual, if that individual leaves / changes firms (member or nonmember) their past company membership stays tied too their name and not the company name.
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Michelle Hopson commented
We would like the membership to belong to the company and anyone with an email address with that company would be considered a member. Now if they are not already assigned to a bundle they only have the option to attend a program at the nonmember rate. They're busy, sign up and pay and then ask us for a refund for the difference creating a lot of extra administrative time and hard feelings on the part of our members.
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Dee commented
We would like to use this feature for a company to pay for their employees to attend one of our trainings. The bundle admin may or may not be a member of our organization. The way we would like to manage this feature (I apologize if this is repeated anywhere):
Current members can still sign up for the event on their own.
Bundle Admin can choose his/her members from member list to add to bundle.
Bundle Admin can choose to create a member and have it added to group invoice.
Bundle admin can choose different membership or non member options (our training prices are different according to whether they are members but non members can attend at a higher cost).
Bundle Admin representative has access to payment options. (Sometimes the manager isn't making the payment, their payroll department will be handed the invoice).
Group invoicing.I think that's it :)
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Bill Brenner commented
Perhaps this has been discussed already however in my opinion the bundle administrator does not work using a single price for a bundle. I cannot imagine that the are a lot of NFP's that would use this. We have many members that have a staff member that pays for their membership and register them for events etc. I would think that it would be very easy to allow a contact to manage any member that assigns the contact as their account administrator. The account administrator would be able to renew memberships, manage events etc for those people in their group and pay all invoices for the members they manage. It is simply to time consuming and cumbersome for our association staff to try and manage the people in a group and adjust membership for the group dependant on the number of members in the group
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Walt Bilofsky commented
JimF, I think you can do what you want by adding extra cost items as membership fields. These will appear on dues renewal invoices.
See this thread: https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/14748090-multiple-lines-on-renewal-invoices and this help page: https://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Extra+membership+costs#Extramembershipcosts-Extramembershipcosts)
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JimF commented
We would need to be able to set pricing for family members ("bundle members"). Child members don't pay the same amount as parents do, in fact due to the frequent coaching that the HS children receive their membership costs are greater than that of the parents. Also, some families ("bundles") have more members than others, so how does it make sense to have a single Bundle price regardless of the number of members! Otherwise we're setting up a Bundle for every possible combination of adults & children that might occur. Ouch.
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Christopher Bert commented
Have the option to name the bundle rather than have them be represented by the name of the bundle admin
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Sandra commented
Have it as an option as not all members have the same site location as the Bundle Admin.
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TomS commented
Allow custom fields for bundle administrator to be carried to all bundle members. E.G. We bundle by the custom field Program name. We would like to be able to have Bundle Administrator Program name be automatically added to each bundle member.
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Jane Severn commented
Our members are bundled under the same household (same address, phone, membership level). I'd like the option to revert profile fields (address, phone) to the bundle admin, but customize others (email, photo, cell) to the member.
I'd also like member summary dashboard, reporting, etc. to toggle between bundles and individual members.
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Katrina OQuinn commented
Yes! This would be incredibly helpful not only to us, but especially for our members who are really frustrated at having to manually enter all the information, which, when you're adding 11 new people for one company, takes a lot of time. The sooner the better :)
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Gail Walker commented
In our case, the bundle membership is used for household memberships, meaning that all members of a bundle typically share the same contact information except for email address and cell phone number. So I would like to be able to add the option, when adding a member to a bundle, to be able to check a box that says "Same contact information as Bundle Administrator" and then have that information auto fill for the new bundle member.
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Melanie King commented
Balance due needs to be able to be paid by more than just the bundle Admin or person who acquired the cost. For example, I have companies who pass invoices along to a financial department who is not a bundle admin. As an added bundle member they cannot view / pay invoices.
The option to select what each bundled member can view would be BEAUTIFUL! For example, 5 bundled members total, Selections on... listed in directory, financial access, renewal ability, events etc.Hope that's clear as mud or better. Thanks!