Scot McConnachie
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51 votesScot McConnachie
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6 votesScot McConnachie
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19 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
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104 votesScot McConnachie
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3 votesScot McConnachie
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8 votesScot McConnachie
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74 votesScot McConnachie
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An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
commented
As you are collecting information on this concept here is another scenario for your consideration.
Our organization has two divisions:
a) An annual conference that meets in a hotel.
b) A club that provides year round services to those of our members who want more intensive services.
Registering in the conference confers membership in the organization. Registering for a monthly or greater membership in the club confers membership in the organization. While we do offer memberships separately from these activities very few people take advantage of this as they view the organization primarily through the lens of the conference or the club. While we could separate out our annual organization’s membership fees from either the conference or the club we have observed that doing so puts a constraint on our ability to market either activities: in our earlier years we noted that it was a resistance point to either state the membership charge separately or to have to explain why the membership fee was even necessary so we now currently incorporate membership into our user fees. The way that we can justify incorporating the membership fees into usage fees is that we make it clear to our members that we are taking this fee out of their usage fees and we track internally the transfer of funds to the parent organization, which is a budgeting exercise to cover the corporate expenses common to both divisions and to the membership as a whole. Furthermore our larger organization does function as a membership organization with regard to meetings, membership voting, etc.
In effect our two divisions are sort of “chapters” of the larger organization. The larger organization has an annual membership fee, the conference charges differing event admission fees, and the club charges differing monthly usage fees. In our case our divisions are part of the same corporate entity. I would also add that it is conceivable that we could add additional conventions to our list of divisions.
We are currently using Wild Apricot for the club only. We can do this by employing the fiction of treating our monthly usage fees in the club as “membership” fees in the club when in fact they are usage fees to the members of our larger organization who choose to use the club. Since Wild Apricot does not support auto generated billing for anything other than memberships this was the only way that the club could take advantage of auto generated billing on a timed basis.
We do not use Wild Apricot for the conference division mostly because we have detailed workflow requirements for literally hundreds of sessions at the conference that are not handled currently by Wild Apricot. My comments below assume that we would eventually switch to Wild Apricot for the conference division.
Unfortunately all of the above means that we have to manually combine our membership roster from both divisions and perform occasional accounting reconciliations between our divisions. Given the above, admittedly jury-rigged, setup features that could be useful to us would be the following:
1) Certain event registration types in a “chapter” confer membership in the larger organization which shows up in that organization’s membership roster, along with the corresponding bookkeeping entries. General organization membership fees could be either be listed separately and automatically added to the event bill or the organization could simply incorporate them (as we have done) into the event fee; this choice would be an administrative setting. Internal accounting data on membership fees would follow these settings.
2) Certain membership types in a “chapter” confer membership in the larger organization which shows up in the larger organization’s membership roster, along with corresponding bookkeeping entries. General organization membership fees could be either be listed separately and automatically added to the division’s membership bill or the organization could simply incorporate them (as we have done) into the division’s membership fee; this choice would be an administrative setting. Internal accounting data on membership fees would follow these settings.
If you have read this far, I thank you for your attention.
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39 votes
Evgeny Zaritovskiy
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See also related suggestion – http://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8827180
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32 votesScot McConnachie
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6 votesScot McConnachie
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176 votesScot McConnachie
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30 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
commented
This proposal is to allow a member or an administrator to set multiples of a membership level’s standard term of renewal as a part of peforming a single renewal, while updating the renewal date and the renewal date on the membership account and the price on the generated invoice accordingly. For example if the membership term for given level is one month, the administrator or the member could “dial in” a selected multiple of that term with the price, renewal date, and generated invoice reflecting the extended term.
The “dial” could be a UI device that shows a pop-up of integer terms ahead that also accepts and validates text entered integers >=1; an alternate indicator would be a calendar UI object that shows the new renewal date. This option could be added to the definition of any membership level that has any predefined term (month, year, etc.). As possible additional features administrators could set a maximum limit on the number of membership terms added (to prevent abuse), a notification flag could go to administrators if a large number is selected (a warning of a major commitment or potential abuse of the system), or one or more discounts could be applied to memberships renewed above a specified number of terms.
Our club uses monthly membership terms. The current system of renewing a membership for multiple terms is very awkward. Either an administrator shoves cyclical renewals into the membership account, generating multiple email warnings, or he/she manually adjusts the term of the membership and manually creates an invoice, or the member has to try to perform the first approach with even less flexibility. We have had several members put in donations to cover multiple session memberships because doing so under the membership process is either too cumbersome or impossible; the administrator inevitably has had to issue an internal refund to the membership account and then issue a manual invoice. The only other alternative is to create additional levels for longer terms but this becomes impractical to manage as there can be too many permutations when multiple standard levels of membership already exist.
Please note the significance of forcing administrators to issue a manual invoice for a membership: once a membership invoice is created manually it does not show up as a membership invoice in the financial reports. Manual invoices are a separate category from membership invoices, thus eliminating the effectiveness of simply uploading those reports into an accounting package.
Members make their own decisions about how far ahead they want to pay their dues. This proposal is to acknowledge that fact.
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An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
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Our organization has about 9 levels of monthly memberships. We have some members who ask for x months or annual renewals of these memberships.
There are too many possible permutations to create separate memberships so our admins naturally try to extend monthly memberships using custom invoices and adjustments of membership terms. Unfortunately in the some of the reports custom invoices are counted separately from memberships so that becomes an added complication.
It would be very useful if any level of membership would allow the option of granting both the member or admins the ability to set arbitrary multiple of period renewal.
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97 votesScot McConnachie
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18 votesScot McConnachie
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107 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
commented
The proposed workaround below is not suitable for us. We have literally hundreds of sessions at our conference so listing those sessions alone takes multiple web pages. Vital conferences and associations grow organically. In our case sessions are added by the membership all of the time. In short treating sessions as something radically different from events is self-defeating in too many ways.
Events are confluences of people over a span of time at a particular location. Events tie up people and other resources, they require publicity (web page, exportable data for programs, brochures etc.), registration capability with limits and controls, and check-in capabilities.
Whether one calls an event a conference or a session at a conference is almost meaningless: the needs are mostly the same.
The primary logical difference between a conference and a session is that latter has a relationship with the former. This suggests to me that super/sub relationship between events could be built by adding features around the existing event data type.
Let's ignore the coding architecture problem for a moment. From the standpoint of an organization the difference between a conference and a session is even greater. Sessions are the content of conferences. They are why conferences exist. The best way to sell a conference is to sell the session within that conference. In other words from the standpoint of promoting the organization sessions are more important than the conference itself. This may throw a gasket in someone's architecture but it is the truth: sessions deserve to be treated as full-fledged events.
As an aside, I think that part of the problem here has been that organizations have differing semantics for what is being discussed, including WA. For example, our organization grew around a convention that hosted events, which others would refer to as a conference hosting sessions. Some organizations have learned to adapt to WA treating sessions as less than events possibly because they have a manageable number of sessions. That is not a option for our organization's larger division. Nor is it an option for any organization that is growing its conferences in an organic, dynamic fashion.
Scot McConnachie
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An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
commented
Specifying limits per field will not solve the problem, particularly as a conference grows. Our three day conference has 400 sessions (we call them events) that are submitted to us by our attendees generally beforehand: try putting those onto a form.
What is needed is a true mega event / sub event relationship where there is no practical limit on the number of sub events that can be associated with the mega event. Registration in the mega event enables one to see the sub-events: just as membership levels currently have settable visibility of events using the calendar/event list gadget, registration in the mega event would be another visibility setting for the calendar/event list gadget. Certain registration types in the mega event might include automatic registration in specific sub-events.
An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
commented
We run conferences of 700+ attendees that have up to 400 sub events that are mostly submitted to us by our members. Due to the complexity of the conference we have to categorize our events into Event Areas (departments, if you will) and schedule all events on a conference wide time block system. The time blocks and custom data information about the event allows our staff and attendees to schedule their participation at the conference. While I put some of my comments in the proposal to allow members to submit events I will repeat my basic ideas in this topic.
1) Allow sub-events, where registration in the super-event allows one access to the list of sub-events for registration purposes. At the database level super-events could hold common information used by sub-events.
2) Similar to what you allow for contacts and members, allow administrators to create extra event data fields (including images and files) where the designing administrator can determine the visibility and UI of the data field.
3) Similar to item 2) allow administrators to create a UI for members and administrators to add administrator designed meta tags to the event.
4) I agree with the other comment in this proposal that there needs to be a better way to construct the display of events. I would add that eventually you may want to have a datagrid for events that can be customized by administrators.
5) Controlled release of registration slots to attendees. At our conferences we don't always open all of the registration slots at one time. This is to allow late registrants some chance to attend some events. We generally do this by making a fixed percentage available at one time. While the release of slots could be set to be timed by schedule we would also want to able to adjust manually on multiple event basis.
6) Going off the last part of item 5) above there is also a need for administrators to able to display, report, and edit characteristics of multiple events at the same time based on some kind of advanced search of events.
7) Allocated resource database. Certain resources at a conference can only be in one place at one time. Allow administrators to self-define resources for each conference; these could be chairs, tables, rooms, overhead projectors, booth spaces, etc. The resource database records could be attached to individual event sessions, thereby denying the use of the resource in another event session happening at the same time. A schedule of resource use could be produced from all of these records.
I am happy to see that you are paying more attention to conferences. Many organizations are centered around them.
An error occurred while saving the comment Scot McConnachie
commented
Hello,
One of our divisions hosts a convention that runs 150-200 events (sub-events in your parlance?) during a three day period of time. Many of these events are organized into event categories (we call them "event areas") and within each category there may be more than one event happening at the same time. To complicate matters the convention's activities are organized into fixed time blocks which serve to rationalize how attendees and staff allocate their time and facilities. Right now we don't see a very good way of displaying these events by time and event category using the existing views of the event calendar. In general your system could benefit from having a better way of displaying a lot of events that take place in the space of a day.
In our case we have need for a basic grid view that is available for events where the one axis of a grid would be Dates/Times (such as start and end times) and other axis would be event categories. As our attendees and staff need to plan their activities during the convention having such a grid view would be very useful.
Given that it is possible to apply tags to events I am thinking that would be possible to use those tags, in addition to start and end date/times, as the means of defining the axes of such a grid display. The tag could be used to denote an event category, activity track, or a location such as a table or conference room. It also might be possible have nested groupings of axes, such sorting the grid first by event category and then by location. Another issue is how to display events that have the same categorizations so that they will end being displayed within the same grid cell: they could be displayed horizontally or vertically and sorted by some field value or another event tag value. As a final option I could see having the each event itself having a graphical display, such as rectangle that is longer (or wider) because it spans more categories or times; this would provide a user a visual cue as to how to scope out the underlying event.
It would be even better if we could export such a view as a spreadsheet file or into a program like Outlook, so that we could print it out or include it in our convention program.
P.S. I started this topic several days ago but accidentally posted it before I was finished and subsequently tried to delete it. This message is a massively re-edited version of my original post. It would be useful if the delete button on this forum actually worked.
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24 votesScot McConnachie
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8 votesScot McConnachie
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247 votesScot McConnachie
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93 votesScot McConnachie
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9 votesScot McConnachie
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Many membership organizations have initiation fees associated with the first time a members joins. The fee could be either one term of a membership or a set fee. There should be an option to waive the fee.
Our organization does not have such fees but we have been considering using them as a means of testing prospective members of their commitment to the organization. We do know that a similar organization to ours does use initiation fees.