Just added my vote to this. We are anxiously waiting for this feature, as all our "members" are kids so there are families with several kids who currently have to use distinct emails for each kids. Thanks!

I like this - I think this does all we need for family memberships. But there's one problem I think hasn't been considered. Currently we have a family membership fee that is $40 and have the parent of the family as the member, and as one contact. If there are 2 kids registering for an event, the parent registers for the same event twice and we have 'participant name' as a custom field in the event registration. Works for us, but I'd rather do it properly and have the member name be the participant in events.

With this solution am I correct that each member under the same email address has their own membership level? So we will have to come up with a price per member rather than per family? Like maybe the parent will be $40 and each child $0....

But see the problem already....I don't think I could do it that way because nothing would stop someone from registering just a child membership for $0.

I think we will need a way select if certain membership levels will be available to register only as a second or third/fourth membership under the same email address. So for example a "Child Membership level" can only be registered if there is also a "Parent membership level" under the same email address.

Can you add that to the design of this feature?

Oleg's solution allowing a single email address for a senior household where both members of the household are members should work for us.

We do want each member to be able to register for events individually as they might not always attend events together.

Oleg, that is reasonable. Solve the problem first and polish the solution after you get feedback.

It differs from person to person how irritating they find getting duplicate emails. But I think the people it bothers most will be those who get a lot of email, and they will be least likely to share an email address. So the duplicate emails issue can wait.

If and when you do deal with it, the simplest fix is just to send the email to the bundle admin and block the email to the bundle member(s). Don't worry about the personalization. They are already used to receiving emails addressed to only one of them.

Walt, Not exactly. We will send both newsletters, both event announcements, etc.
The problem is in macros - most of emails are personalized, and for now we haven't come to any solution how to deal with this.
So for initial release we decided to go on with most simple variant - just send both emails and don't deal with macros at all. We will likely return to this later, after implementation, when we have some feedback for the problem.

I just ran into this situation while importing members, so am glad it's being (partially) addressed. Sharing an email address will work OK for us.

If both contacts are configured to receive a particular email (notification, newsletter, forum post, etc.), I hope you will only send one to the shared address.

If the contacts are configured differently - e.g., one receives newsletters, the other doesn't - then I trust you will send one.

Thanks for the quick reply. This will help for the use case that I was describing.

Two parts of an answer:

1. To correctly select which password to reset user will have to select distinct link in reset password email - we plan to provide special link for every user with the same email.

2. We will perfectly handle using same password for two or more users with same email - they will have to select contact to authorize with from a list after entering email/password pair.

I also would like one email/password pair. We have Senior couples and trying to 'teach' them to use two passwords is almost impossible. In fact, our senior users now reset their password almost every time they log in because they forget. How will WA know which user's password to reset under your proposed scenario?

Greg, to some degree workflows you mentioned will be addressed in this issue. E.g. registering for event by choosing member from the list and prefilling registration form.

But as I said before, complete family membership management is addressed in other thread. Thanks for copying your reply there as well.

This doesn't help me.

I still would like a family login (one email, one password) where the parent is the member. And then associated with them (under the same email address) I'd like that they be able to have children and spouse as additional members - no separate password, people don't want to log in and out and back in again to register two kids for an event. When the member logs in and registers for an event, it would then ask via a drop-down list "Which member do you want to register", and when they chose a certain member from themself or their family members, their common fields would all be auto-filled from their membership info saved. And then when you looked at the event registration the member listed as being registered would be the particular family member, not the mom/dad with the main account.

Right now the workaround I use is that we get one member per family to register (mom or dad) and the children's info is not saved, we ask for their childrens info just on the event registration forms, but that isn't ideal, as none of that info is saved and auto-filled, and then the event attendee list just shows the mom/dads, not the kids registered....I have to get all that by exporting the event info.

Greg

We have finished analysis and design of this feature and want to verify with you our assumptions.

While investigating this thread, support requests, survey responses, we have found following life scenarios when unique email or even email itself is unsuitable:

- Senior couple share email and both spouses are members of organization

- Multiple workers of the same company all share company’s email

- Sports/hiking clubs often have multiple children from single family as members (all sharing parent’s email).

- Single member with multiple memberships. E.g. one person has several businesses and all businesses are members of single association.

- People just don’t have an email - e.g. senior members.

Current Wild Apricot design considers email as public identifier (besides just sending emails) – internally we identify contacts by UserID, not email. So Wild Apricot does not allow any self-service for people without email or having duplicate emails.

Important note is that administrators already can create contacts w/o email and manage them all manually.

After some consideration, we have decided to focus on sharing the same email for single family (senior couple) or members from same organization sharing the same email.

Why did we exclude other scenarios?

- We excluded people w/o email at all because we already support this scenario for manual admin management.
- We don’t find any practical use for self-service on public site for such contacts, since we cannot communicate them using our system automatically.

- We didn’t pay special attention to the family/children scenario. It has many more issues to analyse - e.g. common finances, bulk event registration, account administrator, etc. All of this is discussed separately http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825986-family-child-memberships-8131 and is currently out of scope here.

After narrowing the scope of the issue to self-service of contacts with shared email, we have come to very simple solution - allow contacts to share the same email and identify them by email/password pair.

See presentation https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YrawA0168sxqdb_FZFUNKMW7GbHwgZ2UBjoFEcN3Yfg/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000 for more details, including visuals.

Now feature is transferred to development queue and you can track it’s progress in our Roadmap http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Product+roadmap . If you have any comments, suggestions - please reply directly to this post, we will appreciate it much

We also have a similar situation, we use bundles as the Credit Union is the member and their board members (volunteers that change annually) receive member benefits. However, many of these volunteers don't want to provide their personal email addresses or the credit union has an admin on staff who manages the association member benefits for their board members. This person's email is the one that needs to be used to ensure dues are paid, registrations are made and information is distributed to the right people in a timely manner.

I also have 2 other associations I manage that have situations where an individual can belong to multiple membership levels. In one association, an individual belongs to the club personally but can also belong as a business sponsor. The individual only has 1 email address. Since we can't have duplicate emails, one of the accounts has to have a fake email address which prevents us from including this person in any email campaigns specific to the second membership level.

I ran into the problem where we have several members that do not have email addresses. In the forums, I found a post that recommended using fake email addresses for people that want to log into Wild Apricot but don't have an email address. In the posting, they recommended using an email address like "johndoe1@noemail.com"

I thought that Wild Apricot might detect the hostname "noemail.com" domain name in an email address and filtering any emails sent by Wild Apricot that have this domain name. Unfortunately they don't. They actually send email to this fake email address and let it fail. I asked support about this and they confirmed it. This is a faulty design because what if the fake email address becomes a real address in the future?

Suggesting that people use a fake email address isn’t a very good design or fallback method for members that don’t have an email address but want to login. I highly recommend that WA change the design to provide a username to login and make email addresses optional. That would solve this problem.

Currently email address is the unique identifier for contacts. Whilst this is OK for social media sites where everyone has an email address, this is not the case with club membership. Many members do not have email addresses and many families use a single email address and therefore email address will ever be a unique identifier. I have seen several suggestions for workarounds but none of them are satisfactory and most of them don't work (i.e. are ISP specific).

An alternative unique identifier would solve this problem, i.e. a userid (which most on-line systems other than social media use).

I was directed at this thread by support.

For the Chief Apricot, here are some comments on the requirement.

The problem for my club is that all our members are children (it's a junior sports club), but the contact email address is invariably that of a parent.

Being able to register children individually is crucial for us, as we wish to segment the membership database by team, sending emails out to particular teams or the entire club. In all cases, the email should go to the parent.

So for our use-case, the requirement is that emails be shared between members. If this was done via the bundle functionality, it could work particularly well, although beware of the likely hood of members joining over time. I.e. It's not until the second child joins that a bundle is required (with the first child added to it).

Hope this helps,

Mark

We have a similar scenario except our case is accounts for multiple siblings. It's a huge hassle to require the family toggle between multiple email accounts.

Singling out members who have no email would also be very helpful for us. We have a number of corporate members with no email address and several older members who do not use email.

We still need to reach them, and the only way we seem to have is to manually add them to a group - which is not efficient and also only as accurate as someone's memory to do so.

What would be helpful is to add to the search criteria "email is null" so we can identify those members and allow us to make a telephone or snail mail contact.

any news on this?

or a work-around to allow the same email address?

Additional input via a client survey:

"...Frustrated with limitations on Membership side when it comes to the e-mail address. I have corporations as members; some of which pay for and hold four different Corporate memberships (one for each subsidiary) but use the same person on their end to manage the multiple memberships. I cannot get around the "email address already in use" function of Wild Apricot when I enter additional subsidiaries which hold separate Membership. I understand why you chose email address as the qualifier, but I really wish I could over-ride that aspect so all my corporate member entities are able to be listed on my membership page when I set it to update automatically. (This is not related to the bundle feature which I understand and use for both client sites.) ..."