Thanks for sharing, but I have no suggestions for you to workaround that.

We have a somewhat similar business requirement but in our case the "contact" is a family unit. We are a Chapter of a much larger organization in which each member is a family unit with a unique ID assigned by the parent organization. The family unit is comprised of a primary member and a secondary member, each sharing a common mailing address (and other data elements unique to the organization) but both members have their own cell phone numbers and email addresses. With today's mobile devices we find it is an inconvenience for them to share (i.e., forward emails) they prefer to have them sent directly to the specified personal email account.

We know that the bundle was designed so that we could use that approach and have the primary contact be the bundle administrator but that opens the door to having both primary and secondary provide all of the same common data elements, leaving open the door for unanticipated data integrity problems (e.g., if the secondary contact address is different which one do you use, or if one of the shared organizational data elements differs, etc.) -- you see the problem. It would be nice if the data model would allow for primary and secondary entities associated with one membership account and allowing for phone number and email address data elements only. All other data elements would be associated with the membership account.

There are many other chapters (over 600) to our national organization but this limitation makes Wild Apricot unattractive to them for this reason. From a recent member survey we learned this weakness is critical to the demographic that offers our greatest strategic growth opportunity.

Any suggestions?

Our Club uses the membership list to disseminate event and strategic partnership announcements, as well as our newsletter. We have had a number of complaints from members and their S.O.s that we only send to one e-mail address per membership.

Generally, those complaining are our younger members but, as time goes on, those members will become the bulk of our members, and we would like to attract even more, so this is an issue.

We looked into "bundles," so we could have multiple e-mail addresses for "families," but we have no control of the information supplied by the bundle administrator when creating a bundle member - information that, with the exception of first and last name and e-mail address, *should* be identical but which, in fact, will almost never be identical. We asked about an alternate membership form for bundle members and were told that there's only one for both the bundle administrator and the bundle member. Ours has a number of fields that are required for the bundle administrator, but are, at best, redundant for a bundle member, and will more likely be ambiguous.

So, we'd *really* like the ability to define at least two e-mail addresses for a member. If necessary, we'd be OK with specifying, when doing bulk e-mailings, which e-mail address to use.

Thanks for your help on this matter.

Alison,

Can you elaborate - why would you need to keep your members' PayPal email addresses in the system? If this is just for reference/reconciliation purposes, then you can just create a custom text field and keep it there for each member.

The actual payment process (assuming you are using Wild Apricot integrated online payments) doesn't require you to have their paypal email addresses.

This is an ESSENTIAL feature, probably number 1 on our wishlist; we nearly chose another solution because you didn't offer it. Here's why.

In addition to the problems others have described, many of our members use one email address for newsletters and a different one for PayPal. So I assume we are going to have to manually combine the records for those contacts EVERY SINGLE TIME they give us money--for some contacts that will be half a dozen times a year.

Most of my members also have at least 2 email addresses. We encourage them to register with us (on the WA site) using their home email address, but honestly, most check their work email 2-3 times more often. Some prefer to get email from us at work, some at home. I have added a field "Alternate email address" in the one they register with gets bounce backs, but that does not help if they want email going to both or the alternate instead.

I would love to have an option where the member could choose Primary, Secondary email address--and choose which to have emails sent to.

Yes, exactly.

Ah - I didn't realize the Contact ID was the primary checker - does it supercede checking the e-mail address?

In this case I would suggest making sure you maintain the ContactID field - in this way WA will know its the same person even when email is changed

A feature to alert to similar names is something we are considering - though there is no specific timeline for this yet.

We recently discovered another issue with this, which has forced us to deactivate what we thought was an incredibly helpful feature of Wild Apricot.

We download and "sync" rosters with our National organization twice a month. The way I understand it is if I do a member import, and e-mails match, the spreadsheet I'm importing will override any changed information. For example:
* WILD APRICOT: Mr. Cool Fish CoolFish@gmail.com w/ physical address: 123 Main Street
* IMPORT SPREADHSEET: Mr. Cool Fish CoolFish@gmail.com w/ physical address: 678 Stoney Street (in my example: Mr. Cool Fish has updated his address with our national society)
* WILD APRICOT AFTER IMPORT: Mr. Cool Fish CoolFish@gmail.com w/ physical address: 678 Stoney Street

Great feature! But what happens when Mr. Cool Fish updates his e-mail with our national society, for example, because he changed companies?

* WILD APRICOT: Mr. Cool Fish CoolFish@gmail.com w/ physical address: 123 Main Street
* IMPORT SPREADHSEET: Mr. Cool Fish C.fish@mail.com w/ physical address: 678 Stoney Street

* WILD APRICOT AFTER IMPORT: Now I have two contacts:

* Mr. Cool Fish CoolFish@gmail.com w/ physical address: 123 Main Street
* Mr. Cool Fish C.fish@mail.com w/ physical address: 678 Stoney Street

Now: because we have membership e-mails set up, e-mails that get sent when membership is overdue, CoolFish@gmail.com is getting "you're membership is past due" e-mails when in reality, he's all paid up; he just changed his e-mail address. Due to this, we have completely disabled the auto-membership e-mails and gone back to doing this manually.

Maybe eventually, we'd stumble on the two contacts and merge them. But we have so many contacts that it's probably 3 full days of busy work to sort through it all. Maybe a new feature would be a "similar contact" alert, or search, that shows people with identical first & last names?

The password itself we can't send because we do not know it - we only store it in encrypted form, this is a very important security best practice.

Also, this could be solved if there was a simple macro created for Username and Password. I know someone mentioned the next version of WA will have an auto sign-in link. I think that's great but I would also like to have these macros so I can put something like this in an e-mail:

I could also have the option of putitng in the forgot password link:

This is a good topic, thanks for bringing it up.

I would appreciate comments from other users who are coming across this issue.

@winnietennis - can you elaborate what exactly seems to be a recent phenomena? I can't think of any changes in version 4.0 that would affect this.

In order for someone to register for 95% of our events, they must login. What is causing us frustration is that there are folks are logging in, then entering a different email than the one they logged in with. Occasionally, they go to change their email on their profile and cannot b/c the new email address has been added as a contact. This is causing me (as membership director) a huge headache in terms of clean-up.

We dump our data out into another system every month in order to generate reports and check for duplicates, as well as some other functionality. We simply do not want multiple versions of people as contacts. We want to understand each individual's history with us. We are currently doing the tedious work of removing and recreating events and combining records. (Glad the functionality is coming to do that without the manual effort!)

I want to force them to use the login version of their email address (or have the ability to choose this as an option as the account administrator) OR provide directions for them to change their login email on their profile. I don't want or need multiple email addresses. If other groups do want this as an option, the ability to control this per account would be stellar.

Also, this seems to be a recent phenomena for us. Is this a result of the recent upgrade?

Kyle,

Re email - we do plan to allow admins to add records without email (manually or via import) in the next couple of releases.

I agree, this would be phenomenal to be able to have a "member" have multiple email addresses linked to their account. I can this being useful for family accounts or couples or just those people who illogically seem to maintain 4 or 5 different email addresses.

BUT, I still would like to see email being a non-mandatory field and if not available use the MemberID as the unique identifier.

> What if we allow to add multiple emails and recognize any of them at login?

Fantastic! Require one of them to be their "primary" email address - that one could be their unique identifier and the address used for email blasts.

I have more to say about this, but want to wait for others' comments.

David,

Thanks for bringing this up.

From my experience the issue with member IDs/usernames is that people frequently forget them and it might create more problem than it solves...

Here is an idea form top of my head (no idea of feasibility, just brainstorming): What if we allow to add multiple emails and recognize any of them at login?

Also, I guess a useful function would be is merging those duplicate records. This is on our roadmap.

Would love to hear other people comments on this.

I've read through the discussions about WA's using email address as the unique identifier, but I haven't seen anyone mention our problem in this area.

Our members sign up with one of their email addresses, then revisit (or register for an event) with another of their email addresses. This causes the following problems: 1) members are not offered member rates because they're working with their alternate email address, 2) duplicate member records with each of the person's email addresses, often with duplicate membership payments, 3) general confusion and uncertainty at sign-in time.

What we need are email aliases in the member record. I'm hoping that when the unique identifier is changed to record ID, this will be possible. If so, member should be able to sign in, or register for events, using any of their email addresses on file.