Memberships in our yacht club are family memberships, and include husband, wife, and children under 25. We need to be able to allow the other family members to be able to attend events without additional charges.

Do you use membership levels for your programs?

This is exactly what we need, as well. Especially the part where a member can register (I'd actually prefer a simple RSVP) and be given the family members' names to choose from.

I still would like a family login (one email, one password) where the parent is the main member. And then associated with them (under the same email address) I'd like that they be able to have children and/or spouse as additional members, who may or may not have to pay an additional membership fee each - 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, if they have family members, it would then ask via a drop-down list "Which member do you want to register", and when they chose a certain member from themselves 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 registrations the member listed as being registered would be the particular family member, not the mom/dad with the main account. And when it came time to renew memberships, the billing for each family member would be billed together to the main contact. The kids could have email addresses listed, but they would not be for login, they would be for just for email outs for event reminders, etc, the only login to wild apricot would be the main contacts email address. And those email addresses of kids/spouses would be unique in the database, to prevent a duplicate account from being created in a child or spouses name.

Greg

No, not really - decisions tree are not possible. We will consider this point when we will be working on family bundles.

For now the only thing you can use are bundles functionality, but they have their limits and will not be able to achieve all you described.

I'm evaluating Wild Apricot for use at our makerspace. I have two functionality requests I'd like to address.

We're a makerspace in a very family-oriented city. We're developing a monthly family membership category, in which the family membership may be:

Two related adults (same address)

Two related adults + up to four additional children

We would like to be able to do the following:

At time of initial membership application (or during a status change at a later date) when applying or switching to a family group, add additional family members to the bundle at a lower rate (so, base membership + $10/month for each additional family member).

Is it possible to set up the application form so that if an applicant selects the membership bundle, that he/she will be prompted to complete the information fields for additional members under the family plan? Or, if they switch from their initial membership plan to a family bundle, to then prompt them to add the additional family membership information? We also want to ensure that parents registering along with minor children are provided with guidelines for expected behavior within the space (ie - parents must be supervising children at all times and are responsible for their behavior), as opposed to spouses or partners, who would not require these guidelines.

We also have decided that minors, from 16 >> 18 may become individual members in their own right, with parental consent. We need to set up an age filter so that applicants are routed print out a parental consent for signature (which then must be brought in manually) and to hold processing of their payment until this is received.

Is there a way to set up a decision tree within the original membership application so that applicants are routed appropriately depending upon their selections?

Thanks!

This is one of top priority issues in our plans, but it's also hard to analyze and develop. For now we have no progress, but all your comments will help us to create a proper solution after all.

The Bundle feature works well and solves many of the family membership issues. I like how the bundle admin receives invoices, no matter which family (bundle) member registers for an event, for example.

Also, the email alias workaround solves the problem of children who don't have their own email accounts. It's not ideal, but it seems like it will work for us for the time being.

For registration, though, there are still challenges. As mom, I would like to be able to log in and register all of my kids for the same event on the same registration form, without registering myself (I really don't want to go to the teen dance :-)). We need functionality that allows a parent (as the family bundle admin) to see all events family members have registered for under the parent’s (bundle admin) account. From what I have seen thus far, only a WA admin can see a list of events, and when kids are registered without including the parent in the registration, the registrations are listed under the kids’ accounts but not the bundle admin's account.

As far as I can tell, there is currently no way for a bundle admin to see “all the events everyone in my family has registered for” without looking at individual invoices and then clicking the Event Registration link on each invoice. Is this correct?

I think you are planning this functionality, though, according to your roadmap.

Check out this thread - http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825614-allow-secondary-alternate-emails-for-members-3195 While more general family/child memberships issue can take a while to resolve, we've come up with faster and easier workaround for main scenario (emailing to key person).

I'm adding my vote for the "Family" membership. Our community has a Swim & Tennis association whose membership if family based. We track our members by a primary contact but also have included data fields for their spouse, children and other family members (parents, etc.) that reside with them. We have the need for send email "blasts" to multiple emails because often the spouse (i.e. Wife) makes the plans for the family. Also members want personal, work and other emails copied. Having the flexibility to add email "fields" to the membership record would be great!

This is a huge deal for our organization, whose members are families. So many young children do not have email addresses.

We are evaluating Wild Apricot right now for our organization. It has so many wonderful features, but is really missing something necessary for so many smaller organizations by leaving out family/child membership options.

The workarounds that I have seen so far do not help us in some of our tracking, which is to see the details of who has registered for which events (and who has chosen which options for which events). Without email addresses, it looks like the parents are registering for programs instead of their children.

Even the Guest Registration feature doesn't seem to help us. In the Event Registration Fields Report, the guest's name is not included, just the account holder who signed up (and who, in my case, specifically did not want to register herself, just the child).

I'm not above begging that this be include in the next planned release -- until it does, it's a huge, huge problem for small family-based organizations.

I'm admin of a 'community' wild apricot plan used for a dance association.

We have a similar problem that the member is usually the parent (for legal reasons or whatever....18+ to be a member), but they are registering their children in the events. We have a $35 family membership fee, so could be for example:
- a 19yo dancer with her own membership
- a parent with one dancer
- a parent with two/more dancers

So how we handled it was to have the parent or 18yo+ dancers be the members and add fields such as "participant first name", "participant last name", etc to the event registration forms.

We collect the $35 and other fees that are "per family" on the membership form, and other fees that are "per dancer" on an event registration forms. A member can register twice for the same event so they can register 2 children if they have 2.

Doing it this way has the benefit of not needing as many contacts as we would if each participant was a "member", but the drawbacks are that on all the standard reports in wild apricot for events the "member name" is the parents name, not the participant. I don't like that, but I can live with that, because for everything that I need the dancers name, I can use "Export registrants" and customize a report in excel to get a list of dancers because I've collected all the information I need per-dancer on the event registration form.

I'd like a better way to be able to store the participant information, but the currently available bundle memberships or guest registrations don't work for what I need. Bundle memberships are overcomplicated by requiring different email addresses - that doesn't work for families and it wasn't designed for families, so that's fine. Guest registrations don't work because the member has to register first - in our case (parent/child) the member is usually not participating in events, the child is.

My idea to have a better system for families registering with one email address would be to store "Participant Information" in the database, in addition to member information. So if I signed up for membership I would also be prompted to click on "Add Event Participant" and I'd be able to fill in their name, date of birth, dance association id#, etc - standard fields being just the name, and the rest customizable. And I could add the same such info for a 2nd child. If the member was the participant (eg, 19yo) they would put their own info as a participant. Then, when I went to register for an event it would ask me "What participant do you want to register?" and I'd choose from a dropdown list of my participants. And then on all the standard reports where it shows the "member name" it should instead show the participant name, or maybe "Participant Name (Member Name)" to show that the participant and the member). I think it would be fair to count 2nd, 3rd etc participants as additional contacts. That would be good for you guys, the way I'm doing it now, there is just one "contact" per family.

Greg

I think that this request has to be handled as a part of bigger one about Family/child membership - http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8825986-family-child-memberships-8131

Merging.

Our organization would also like to see more functionality for children but for different reasons. The contact data record only has one field for children. The functionality needs to be enhanced. We need data field for child's name and associated with child DOB, for each child in a family (1-5 children). We need ability to search off these data fields. We have been able to setup events where we create custom fields for DOB within the event, but we cannot search from them. As we enter into our 4th year using events to manage our tennis program, we find we are unable to easily report on our demographics, which leaves us unable to plan for the future or recognize trends, or see if our events/programs are not successful.

We are a sports-related organization, with members who are individual adults, families and businesses.

Children/minors are registered as separate members, because the participate in the sport and are eligible for age-category year-end awards.

* Login/email: We'd like a more transparent option for a login than an email for the minors. Most of the minors registered are *not* registering with their own email address. The parent wants email contact to come directly to themselves. But as they are also participants in their own age category, they've already used their own email on their membership. This also makes it hard to send emails just to minor members & their parents. Many of the children don't have an email address anyway. We are using dummy emails for children, but parents are finding it confusing to manage the child's membership.

* Event registration: Minors/children are often charged LESS than adults. But there is no way to add them as a "guest" at a lower rate, not a higher one. Parents don't like having to register again for their children, but currently that is the only option to offer them a lower cost (create another registration type.

* DOB / Age calculation: It would be very helpful to have a field that provides the age of the member based on their date of birth. We can download the member data and calculate this in Excel, but the goal of converting to Wild Apricot was to free ourselves of member management in Excel. :)

As I come up with more things that make it easier to manage minor members, I'll add them to this thread.

Thanks for this consideration!

Agreed. I'm evaluating this for our church website, and this issue (along with no recurring events) I think is going to prevent me from recommending this service.

Also, for example, we want to be able to have a mom register 2 kids for summer camp event. The kids don't have accounts. And then maybe there's a teen who wants their own login to the site, but they don't have their own email.

Being able to have family memberships + multiple emails per family would be really nice... I know this is hard to implement but the current implementation doesn't really work for us.

We are new and kind of have the same issues. We are an Archery Club. We have two main membership levels; Individual and Family (bundle). These work well. But we also have a club within our club that consists of High Performance youth. They pay a separate re-occuring monthly fee to belong to this "club". But they have to be a full club member before they can sign-up for the High Performance Part. We want to be able have all the things we have with a regular membership for this group. I think if they were able to use a different username, it might solve the problem.

do you mean that each bundle member in your case has a different membership?

As a church, the need for family memberships is huge. The email issue is less a problem than the inability to link them for family context and keep them separate for membership context. We tried bundles but that was a disaster. For one thing, as soon as you bundle them, it changes all membership levels to the bundle administrator which is definitely NOT what we wanted. the bundle concept would work with a few modifications, including allowing all family members to be added from a single screen which automatically inserts family address and home phone, then leaves room for individual selections such as email and cell phone. Also we'd need a main heading line such as Mr. and Mrs. Leon Frank and Family, or however they want the Christmas Card addressed.

There is another piece I would like to see added to family memberships.

I am working on a preschool web site. We have set up bundles for families and made each child a bundle member. We put the address and other information in the membership fields and left the contact fields (sort of) alone, with the exception of delineating parent, teacher, and then the classes that the kids could be enrolled in.

For one family with two kids, it is set up as follows:

Parent--bundle administrator, with contact information including their email and primary phone number. Their membership information includes address, emergency info, other parent's contact information, and a few other details.

Student--just the mandatory contact info, with the addition of which class. For this example, one is Junior AM and a separate one is Senior AM.

When I go to make class directories, I want to list the junior AM students on one page. With a saved search, no problem to get the list.

Unfortunately, limitations right now present me with one of two options:

1) A class list with just names. To get to the parent's contact info, a user has to click on the kid's name to get to their profile, then click on the parent's name to get the contact information. Not user-friendly or intuitive for some.

2) All the information present. However, this is achieved by doing repeat data entry, either for the user or for an administrator. Since any time a change needs to be made in the address, it would need to be made at least twice, it also opens up for more room for error.

My idea of a solution would be to have the following options for bundle memberships when the membership level is set up:

1) All bundle administrator membership information is used as information for the bundle members (ie, one login, and all information changed on membership applies immediately to all contacts part of that bundle). Any changes to the bundle administrator would adjust all bundle members.

2) All bundle administrator membership information is used as *default* information for the bundle members. This would be helpful for setting up new members when only 1-2 things need to be "tweaked" instead of multiple items.

3) No bundle administrator membership information is used for bundle members (current).

If these three "options" were included in the membership level setup, it would increase some user-friendliness for our users and decrease administrative work and errors.

Thank you!

Heather