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)

I have been tasked with adding a special database to our Wild Apricot site.

We need to list details of the boats that our members own and I would dearly
like them to be able to update the info on their boat themselves (it will
save me a lot of work!).

I would like to have quite a large number (around 30) customisable fields,
some with free text entry and some with drop down menu choices.

I need to add at least one photo, preferably more, to each record.

It needs to be searchable on any field.

There would ideally be a link between the boat and its current owner but there must
be provision for transferring a boat to another person : new, existing or non
member. I think this would need to be an administrator only job.

According to WA tech support (Jim Sympathy) this could be achieved by adding 'boat' related fields to a members profile but this would create problems when a boat is sold.

I can't believe that there are not other organisations that use WA that don't have a similar requirement (far too many negatives in that sentence!)

Cheers ... Kevin

Current behavior:
Members can subscribe to receive updates about forum posts by email - by going to the forum and clicking on a subscription link in that forum or topic
However, there is no way for administrator to view their subscription status or change it.
If administrator wants to subscribe them manually, the only way is to log in under member's profile (so he has to know the password) and subscribe to forums as if he is this member - very crude workaround.
Admin can only remove subscriptions from member records.

Desired behavior:
- Allow administrator to subscribe member(s) to one or more forums and edit subscription options in member record (subscribe and unsubscribe)
- Add forum subscription to the membership application page, including default subscription settings

A big selling point for my board in adopting WA is that I promised them that we could accommodate all kinds of payments for new and renewing members. I have found two areas where WA does not currently do what I expected:

• for donations, there is not manual payment option, only online. My most financially capable donors are older and really, really like getting an invoice and mailing in a check On the whole, I love WA! These, and a few other little feature/functions are the only issues I've got. And, user support has been fantastic. I'm in the e-commerce business (when I'm not being the volunteer web meister for my neighborhood association) and I know how hard it is to build and support a product of this complexity. Overall, much applause for you!

Hi, WA folks. I have some suggestions for setting closing registration dates for events.

Right now, these dates:

1) Can only be changed by editing each membership registration type (eg member, guest, etc);

2) Can be expressed only in absolute calendar dates (such as "May 15") – and only for the day itself, not for the time – not for a date relative to the event (such as "2 days before the event").

My organisation has a dinner meeting one Wednesday per month, the booking deadline for which is always at 7:00 pm on the Monday beforehand. Even though I can copy a previous event and just change the specific event blurb each time, in order to fix the booking deadline I have to go into each registration type (we have four) and edit it individually, for each and every event.

Could you change it so that:

1) A single registration deadline can be set for the event itself (but specific types can also be edited to have an individual deadline to override this, eg for early-bird registration types);

2) This deadline can be also be expressed in relative terms (ie "2 days before the event date"), not just absolute calendar dates, and a specific time (relative to the organisation's defined local timezone) can also be indicated (eg "7:00pm [local timezone], 2 days before the event date").

I think this would be incredibly helpful for any organisation that has recurring events. Thanks.

I understand that this most recent software update has introduced a change in the way that lapsed members are handled. Let's assume that we have WA set up so that renewal is once per year and occurs on the member's join date. According to the way I understand the online documentation, if a member is lapsed, then if they renew, a new renewal date is assigned, meaning that they don't owe any back dues. However, if a member is active and they are in arrears, they then do owe the back dues. (It's not clear from the documentation how this gets handled -- does the member have to renew, and then renew again? This is how it was handled in the past, and it is very confusing for members -- it seems to me they should be charged the back dues + dues necessary to be a current member all in one shot).

I'm finding it difficult how to make this work for our situation. Here is how we handle things. We give our members a 48 day grace period after their renewal date. If they haven't paid by then, then their records get archived. Periodically, some of those members will come back and say, hey, I want to be a member again. So, then we de-archive them so that they can renew. We want them to pay their back dues. I hesitate to mark them as "Active" because that is one more thing to have to remember to do (and so it might be forgotten) and because it seems inaccurate to mark them as "Active" when really, they are behind in their dues. So, can you help me figure out how to handle our membership pages given this new change in the software?

> Can you please make it possible to amend the search criteria
> on the drop down box for the search function (in the directory) to
> just show 'contains' rather than all the other options e.g. 'empty'
> etc. See below:
>
> http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Advanced+search+-+Members
> Text / Multi-text fields e.g. "email", "lastname", "organization" -
> can be searched by:
>
> These options can they be limited / removed/ not displayed?
> Contains / Does not contain: will return records that contain / do
> not contain matching string
> Is / Is not: returns records that match / do not exact string
> Empty / Not Empty: returns records that are empty / not empty
> Begins with: returns records that start with the string
> Ends with: returns records that end with the string
> Any: does not filter by this field
>
> Thanks,
> Felix Figuereo
> Founder & Managing Director
> Nicasio Design & Development
> ----------------------------------------------
> p: (912) 441-7011
> e: felix@nicasiodesign.com
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.nicasiodesign.com