So following on from my previous comments about sending emails on the first day of the month to all my members with birthdays and anniversaries in the month through WA, once the Integromat integration was provided, I actually wrote my own scenarios to process my member records and send an email to each member automatically at 8am on the day of their birthday or anniversary. I preferred this to the sample provided by WA.

As far as cost is concerned - I am running on the Integromat free plan. For my membership this provides me with enough capacity to send all of these emails. Guess a big factor is going to be how many members you need to send these emails to each and every month - but I am well inside the limits. I am sending out about 150 of each per year. Obviously this will present a variation every month.

And just BTW - it is always possible to run more than 1 Integromat free account - all of them referencing the same WA implementation if you have too many members. I think that you will just have to use a different email address for each Integromat account.

When I set up my Integromat birthday/anniversary emails - I just sent myself a sample email from WA of each. Then on my PC - saved the email as HTML and used that HTML for my email body in Integromat. Just substituting member name and date fields from the WA data as required. Interestingly with Integromat you can also calculate the number of years between the date of birth/anniversary as part of the scenario and then wish the member a happy 25th or whatever birthday/anniversary.

Just remember that as much as the folks at WA try - if they build automatic birthday or anniversary emails they are going to have to create some sort of 1 size fits all system. That is NOT going to make more than about 30% of customers happy. With Integromat you get EXACTLY what you want.

If you want a hand with this - I am open to doing some consulting/development work for you ($$$)

Why is a third-party (paid) service required to do something as simple as sending automated birthday emails to WA members? There is a birthday field in WA and there is a robust-ish email platform with templates, so why can this feature not easily be built directly into WA?

We are new users to Wild Apricot and setting up our system now. I inquired about being able to send birthday and anniversary greetings, but discovered that having a single field for month day and year did not work with an advanced search for just the month or moreover, the month and day. It would be great to be able to automatically send such greetings on the month and day of the birthday/anniversary. As such, looks like we are going to need to ask for month, day, and year in separate fields (quite lame, and subject to error). Regardless, an advanced search will be used to isolate the individuals, but automating sending out the emails on the birthday or anniversary date is another challenge. Looks like it has to be done manually. Guess we will manually send out at the beginning of every month until something better is developed in Wild Apricot.

my work around: manually double check each new membership that birthday is written as a Month (October instead of 10 -- doubly important since we have North American and Europeans using different date systems) and then do a search for "April" and export and include list in monthly newsletter. People tend to email us when we miss them, so it catches the mistakes.

Following on from last comment. When I extract the birthday month, I also extract the birthday so that in the email which goes out before the start of the month the wording is something like 'Happy Birthday for July 23'. The 'July' and '23' are extracted from the member record.

My current solution to this missing ability to search on the month part of a date field was to add in a new field 'Birthday Month'. This field has a drop down list of months: January, February, March ...

I then have a saved search where I select the upcoming month and send all of those members a birthday wish email on the last Sunday of the month.

BTW - do the same for anniversaries.

Want to do a quick load of this new field to all your members?

Export for all members their member ID and date of birth to an Excel spreadsheet.

Use the Excel (or Open Office) functions to derive the month name from the date of birth into a new column.

Upload the resulting spreadsheet back to WA with the import function.

I need to know who in my membership has a birthday next month (regardless of year they were born) to add to our newsletter. Please make this happen! Current birthday searches allow for current and previous months (not next month) and are year dependent. Please update! Searching for a specific date in history for a birthday is next to useless. We need a report to query month and day only.

This is a critical requirement for our non-profit. We are considering moving platforms to get this functionality.

Send a birthday greeting automatically from our organization via WA based on birthday information in the database.

Automated birthday messages to individual members would be great!

I want to be able to generate a list of all the April birthdays, for instance. I don't see any realistic way of doing this, where it was incredibly simple to do it in open office or even excel!

An absolute requirement for my organisation - please consider implementing! We share birthdays across our full membership base and afford all members the opportunity to wish each other a happy birthday. Thanks.

Birthday emails are a great way to show appreciation to members and let them know we care. As we know, members want to know they are appreciated which equals happy and growing membership numbers. Please make this an option in the future! I don't think making members feel appreciated should be considered " too far from our current product plans"

I'm not sure if this has been decided, but it's fairly ridiculous that one cannot produce a report of birthdays of membership by month. Am I missing something?

I get that automated e-mails may be a bridge-too-far... But a simple report of birthdays by month would probably solve most use-cases.

Unless I'm missing something, 1) this seems like a no-brainer and 2) it seems like it's fairly effortless -- we can already create a report of all birthdays in, for example, August 2015 (for all of our members who are about to celebrate turning three months old).

Allow automatic birthday emails to be sent.

I got a happy birthday from my dentist and thought it was very cool; clearly generated by his practice software but even though i know that still was a nice "personal" touch Invested some time and figured out how to make mailchimp do it and send a happy birthday message with a free coupon. Keep getting "thank you" emails from people who think that somehow I personally did this for them - well I did - kind of. The stumbling block now is I have yet another database (mailchimp) that I need to track and keep updated. Have WA do this would be soooo much easier - it really encourages customer loyalty!

Moved to Wishlist and joined with another thread

For my organization I want to assign a region membership flag (NY, NJ, PA) based on the state or zip code.

Hi Dimitri,

One of the things that I do is send each of my members birthday wishes in the month of their birthday (usually the last Sunday of the previous month). To this end I have a field which is their birthday date this year. This allows me to have a saved search for all birthdays next month or this month as applicable. This means that every year I need to update the birthday date for the current year as well as recalculate the recipients age for the birthday email.

Currently I download the membership list into Excel, add in the calculation columns to calculate the updates and then import back into the member data base.

All very cumbersome, time consuming and error prone.

Ideally we have fields in the DB that are based on the values of other fields in the DB using standard Excel like functions.

This would also be useful for concatenating and substringing character fields

No, no built-in way to do this.