Officer Designations
I would love to have some sort of "officer" designation capability. I use WA for three(!) nonprofits I'm involved with, each of which has volunteer officers. I've adjusted a few things and made all kinds of workarounds, but if there was a way to assign an officer position to a member, it would simplify many of our processes. Things this could help:
An "officer" directory that is automatic (even if it had to be created through a saved search). My current workaround is to either 1) do a plain web page and list members, updating their info as it changes, and updating officers as that changes or 2) make them a separate membership level, and add their "position" and "rank" that I want them to appear in the directory, then sort by rank and list the officers.
ANYWHERE in the web site, being able to link back to the officer and/or their job description. For example, one of the organizations has a member library. The contact information for our librarian must be updated on the officer directory page, the benefits page, the library page, our resources page, and other places. Likewise for our other officers. Even with a manual "cheat sheet" that I keep for those updates, if I could just list "Librarian" with a link to the officer, it would save having to go to each place each time an officer changes (one of my organizations only elects officers every two years and only has a few, but another has 20 officers that change annually, with occasional shifting during the year--which creates a massive update load). Ideally this linking capability would take it to that officer's profile page, since the member would be tied to that office.
I don't know if it would be easier to have Officers be something with wide customization capabilities or a few select items. Here's what would be helpful to me:
1) Office (President, Secretary, etc)
2) Rank/Sort (sort order on the page--be able to list which office comes first instead of a sort by last name)
3) Job description/qualifications
4) Office term start/end dates
5) (while I'm dreaming) ability to vote for the chosen officer at election time--with some assurance that members could only log in once, yet their vote would be confidential. (we're still totally on paper for this and expect that to continue for awhile)
saharantea
shared this idea
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Robin Barker
commented
The ability to use a macro for the officer's name in emails.
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SWEAtlanta
commented
The only reason I don't like the solution of creating a Membership Level for Board Members is that our regular meetings and events have different pricing depending on what Membership Level you are. Not all of our Board Members are the same membership level, so I couldn't just select "applies to board members" for each registrant type.
On the other hand, we should probably be giving our volunteers the cheapest price for events, but we're trying to keep it fair :)
So, I'll stick with the group participation. I'll have to look into organizing the positions the way I want. It would be nice if we didn't have to do all these workarounds!!
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Rick Kerner
commented
I like Atlanta's solution, but I might have one that's even simpler, AND you can easily alphabetize.
1) Add a new level of Membership called Board Member (or Officers)
2) Set fee to $0; set Renew to never
3) Uncheck public can apply
4) Each year, you can type in the first/last names of whoever holds those positions
5) Note the labeling of Job Titles to alphabetize: Chapter President, Chapter Vice-President Membership, Chapter Vice-President Volunteers, Director Volunteers, etc.
6) Create a new Directory page, and select Board Member (or Officers) as the source, and you've got a Board Directory!
Sample:
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Dmitry Buterin commented
very cool collaboration to come up with a useful and functional way to handle officers!
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Alex Yaroslavsky
commented
Thanks for that! I've also added a custom drop-down field under Customize member database fields called Current Board Title Sort where I listed our positions in the order I want to see them on our functional page. Then I assigned a drop-down value to each officer and director so that the page displays properly. Check it out: http://www.acrgny.org/Default.aspx?pageId=464189
-Alex
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Evgeny Zaritovskiy
commented
Wow! Very nice, thanks for posting - I believe this will be very useful for others.
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SWEAtlanta
commented
Here is the workaround I use for this (you can see it on this page http://ashraeatlanta.org/OfficerDirectory ) :
- In Settings > Group Management : Create a Group (in Group Participation) called "Officers" or something else. Add each of your officers to the group.
- In Settings > Membership Fields : Add a new field called "Officer Position". Set it up so that it is "View-Only" (Only an admin can change officer position) and then set visibility to "Anybody".
- Go to each member's profile and type in their position. Note: I like that this gives me flexibility to type in whatever position I want since there aren't standard ones out there.
- Make sure that the "officer" field is not a field that people fill out in the membership application, if you have one on your site.
- In Members, create a saved search of "Officers" by searching for those with group participation of "Officers".
- Then create a new functional page: a membership directory- and have it search ONLY your saved search of officers. Customize the page as you want.
The only thing this work around doesn't do is rank/organize officers like you mention (i.e. putting President first)... but people can at least search for the right officer or name if they know it.
Really the only thing I could see different or changed would be completely different from your suggestion: and that would be the ability to set up fixed "roles" on the site like President, VP, Treasurer, and other custom roles, and then define those specific roles to have specific admin abilities, and then be able to assign contacts into the role. So for example, if I moved from Treasurer to President, the admin wouldn't have to go in and change all of my specific administrative abilities; they would just have to change my "role" from Treasurer to President and the admin abilities would be inherent to that role. Likewise, the Officer Directory would automatically populate from these roles (so you wouldn't have to do a group, saved search, member field, etc) and if there's an open position, it would show that.
I would also like the ability to do online voting for officer roles, but right now I have that problem solved by using google forms/documents and putting the HTML in a members-only page. Still doesn't prevent someone from voting twice.... but there are workarounds and I like to think people are more honest than you think! :)
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Alex Yaroslavsky
commented
This would be helpful to us, for sure.
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Thanks for posting - appreciate the detailed wrap up. This definitely sounds like something we should be considering - I know many clubs can use this - though I could not find prior posts on our wishlist. So we will now collect comments/votes and put this into our enhancements queue for future versions.
