Robin Sapiro
My feedback
193 results found
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2 votes
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5 votes
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5 votes
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4 votes
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13 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Run a search over your contacts with the following criteria:
Email preferences none of selected 'Subscribed to emailings' AND Member status is 'Active'
Those with delivery problems will will have a red error message under the email address.
The rest are those who have unsubscribed
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17 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment So while a really desirable idea, it is already about 3 years 8 months old and only has 13 votes. So go figure what the chance of this being implemented is.
From pragmatic perspective, setup an Integromat scenario that will read selected records from the WA DB and populate a row for each into a Google sheet with the desired columns (fields).
You can even schedule this to run automatically on say the first day of each month and then send an email to whomever needs to know that the sheet has been created.
If you have never done any Integromat scenarios with WA - first attempts might be difficult - but really not that hard. Also most likely that the transaction count and data volumes will be low enough to fall inside the capacity of the free Integromat plan.
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59 votes
Dmitry Smirnov
responded
We just launched integration with Integromat platform, which helps to build automated workflows. We also provide several templates for quick start, and one of them allows to send birthday emails.
You can try the integration by this link https://www.integromat.com/en/integration/2274-happy-birthday-to-wild-apricot-members
An error occurred while saving the comment So following on from my previous comments about sending emails on the first day of the month to all my members with birthdays and anniversaries in the month through WA, once the Integromat integration was provided, I actually wrote my own scenarios to process my member records and send an email to each member automatically at 8am on the day of their birthday or anniversary. I preferred this to the sample provided by WA.
As far as cost is concerned - I am running on the Integromat free plan. For my membership this provides me with enough capacity to send all of these emails. Guess a big factor is going to be how many members you need to send these emails to each and every month - but I am well inside the limits. I am sending out about 150 of each per year. Obviously this will present a variation every month.
And just BTW - it is always possible to run more than 1 Integromat free account - all of them referencing the same WA implementation if you have too many members. I think that you will just have to use a different email address for each Integromat account.
When I set up my Integromat birthday/anniversary emails - I just sent myself a sample email from WA of each. Then on my PC - saved the email as HTML and used that HTML for my email body in Integromat. Just substituting member name and date fields from the WA data as required. Interestingly with Integromat you can also calculate the number of years between the date of birth/anniversary as part of the scenario and then wish the member a happy 25th or whatever birthday/anniversary.
Just remember that as much as the folks at WA try - if they build automatic birthday or anniversary emails they are going to have to create some sort of 1 size fits all system. That is NOT going to make more than about 30% of customers happy. With Integromat you get EXACTLY what you want.
If you want a hand with this - I am open to doing some consulting/development work for you ($$$)
An error occurred while saving the comment Following on from last comment. When I extract the birthday month, I also extract the birthday so that in the email which goes out before the start of the month the wording is something like 'Happy Birthday for July 23'. The 'July' and '23' are extracted from the member record.
An error occurred while saving the comment My current solution to this missing ability to search on the month part of a date field was to add in a new field 'Birthday Month'. This field has a drop down list of months: January, February, March ...
I then have a saved search where I select the upcoming month and send all of those members a birthday wish email on the last Sunday of the month.
BTW - do the same for anniversaries.
Want to do a quick load of this new field to all your members?
Export for all members their member ID and date of birth to an Excel spreadsheet.
Use the Excel (or Open Office) functions to derive the month name from the date of birth into a new column.
Upload the resulting spreadsheet back to WA with the import function.
An error occurred while saving the comment Hi Dimitri,
One of the things that I do is send each of my members birthday wishes in the month of their birthday (usually the last Sunday of the previous month). To this end I have a field which is their birthday date this year. This allows me to have a saved search for all birthdays next month or this month as applicable. This means that every year I need to update the birthday date for the current year as well as recalculate the recipients age for the birthday email.
Currently I download the membership list into Excel, add in the calculation columns to calculate the updates and then import back into the member data base.
All very cumbersome, time consuming and error prone.
Ideally we have fields in the DB that are based on the values of other fields in the DB using standard Excel like functions.
This would also be useful for concatenating and substringing character fields
An error occurred while saving the comment We send out birthday wishes emails to our members. In the contact DB we have fields containing date of birth (month, day and year)
Ideally we have a function in the email editor of calculating a value based on any of the contact fields
eg
Dear {Contact_First_Name} {Contact_Last_Name}, all the best as you turn {Current_Year - Contact_DOB_Year} on {Contact_DOB_Month_Full} {Contact_DOB_Day}
Ideally Contact_DOB is the date of birth and the DOB_Year and DOB_Month_Full and DOB_Day are extracted from that so that the above line resolves as
Dear John Smith, all the best as you turn 45 on August 24
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76 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment So with the same issues mentioned by many others in this thread and having tried Survey Monkey, I finally settled on using Google Forms. It is free if you have a GMail (free) or GSuite (paid) account.
What I really like about Google forms are the following:
1. No sign on required
2. Questions can be conditional based on answers to previous questions
3. You can have the responses automatically go to a Google sheet and once that sheet is defined, you can add any of the usual formulas to that sheet to keep track of various column data
4. You can optionally configure if you want to be notified by email whenever anyone responds to the poll.
5. Because the results are already in a sheet - you can copy these to an Excel or Open Office sheet on your PC at any time
6. (And this is the best) if you are sending your members/contacts a link to the form, you can actually build that link in an email (for your members and contacts anyway) to prefill selected fields in the form with their personal data from the WA database, so no need for them to type in their name or email address etc (if these are required) when responding to the poll.You can always of course send links with no prefilled data for people not on your WA database.
I have also switched to using these forms for event registration (most of our events are free to members) and really all that I need to know is how many are attending and if there are any dietary preferences.
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21 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Another possible solution is to use Integromat.
Do your original email in WA and only send it to yourself.
When you receive the email - save as HTML from your email client.Now in Integromat (assuming that you have already integrated with WA) set up to read through your contact/membership by whatever criteria you want.
Send everyone an email from a GMail account. For the email body, paste in the HTML previously saved and then Integromat will allow you to add in conditional text base on your criteria (could be content of any field in the WA contact/member DB).
So rather clunky again for 1 off emails - but works great for recurring emails. I send all my members wishes on the day of their birthday and anniversary (if married) like this. Runs automatically every day at 8:30am
An error occurred while saving the comment So this wish item is only just over 3 years old and only has 17 votes - so don't hold your breath waiting for this.
In the interim you can achieve this by creating a field in all profiles that is used just for special text in an email.
Then export all contacts and members with Contact ID, membership level and this field to an Excel spreadsheet.
Edit that sheet to insert the required text for the different membership levels and import back into WA.
Now use that field as a macro in your email.
Yes - really clunky but it does work. But also my experience is that if you import a spreadsheet into WA and any cells are empty and the corresponding WA filed already has text - this text will remain.
Also if you do embed an empty field into an email you will either get a double space somewhere or an extra blank line.
One way around this is for the blank fields - import a space into them, for the fields with content include both the leading and trailing space and then in the email don't put any spaces before or after the macro.
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43 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment While talking about Excel like function for the fields - we should also have the ability to add in Excel like formulas so that 1 field can be derived from the values of another. Example - if you have a date of birth field, the members current age can be calculated by subtracting the date of birth from the current date.
An error occurred while saving the comment Instead of having a single (or a few) formatting options - what we really need is formatting such as found in Excel (or the freeware equivalents) which besides providing a list of standard formats also allow for the implementation of custom formats.
Any field of any type should be formatable.
Now that being said and not to say that this sort of formatting does not need to be available, consider from time to time exporting your full membership or contact list to Excel or freeware equivalent - use the spreadsheet functions to format the data and then upload back to WA
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239 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment So we had our Wild Apricot site integrated with PayPal. We also received membership payments by cheque, cash, Interac (Canadian electronic funds transfer system) and Square (cards swiped or numbers provided by phone). Other than the WA/PayPal integration, all methods allowed for partial payments. They also required our treasurer to manually record such payments.
When Wild Apricot introduced that 20% membership surcharge gouge last year for online payments other than their own system for US and Canadian customers, we looked very closely at our payment method mix over the last few years. We observed that only about 20% of our membership were paying through PayPal as opposed to the other methods. So the decision to just drop the WA/PayPal integration was really a no brainer. We also preferred to stay with PayPal rather than being forced to make the change that WA was pushing.
So in order to allow our members to still pay through PayPal, we simply created a PayPal button and posted the link to that on our invoices and also on a page on the website. Seen as that we were doing that anyway, we also decided to create a few additional PayPal buttons for recurring payments. Example: 2 recurring payments of 50% of the membership fee, 3 recurring payments of 33.3% of the membership fee and so on.
We felt that the added effort for the treasurer to record these PayPal payments manually (as was being done for other payment methods) was worth the saving of the 20% gouge, and at the same time we got partial payments with online payments.
An error occurred while saving the comment Would suggest that a relatively simple solution would be to invoice the full amount, but when member makes a payment through PayPal, first present a panel with the full amount owing, but allow the member to edit that amount and make a partial payment.
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112 votes
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13 votes
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43 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment This is really only 1 of several limitations with the menu system and page access.
What I have done for many of my pages now is within the WA menu structure to NOT place them in any menu.
Then I build my own initial pages (either public or restricted) and on those pages manually add the links to whatever pages I want to make available.
This has a few advantages.
It gives you a totally open hirachy in respect of what is accessible from where.
Your links to these pages are always visible if the member or public have access to the parent page, but if they do not have access to the target page it will give them a message if they try to access that page.Also have a look at the system pages - it may be possible to customize those errors when someone tries to access a member only page as public and/or a member page that their membership level is not authorised to
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158 votes
Evgeny Zaritovskiy
responded
No progress
An error occurred while saving the comment Roger,
Why not then just make your Box or Google Docs etc folder shareable to anyone with the link to that folder and then add that link to a page on your WA website (presumably on a WA page that has restricted access).
We have been using this approach for a long time now to provide member access to our photo galleries which we host on SmugMug.
To keep these rather ugly looking links more usable - just bury them behind some text or a graphic.
An error occurred while saving the comment As an interim workaround for the missing 'Library Gadget' - I have created a forum for meeting minutes. Currently you can add up to 20 documents to a forum topic, so I create a topic in the forum for each calendar year. I only allow select users to create topics and from the Public View - only the owner of the topic can edit (add more documents). Any admin with sufficient authority can edit from the Admin View.
Take care when adding documents as they are displayed in a sequence of first added to last added
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255 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Agree to some extent with last post, however the default for all these system emails should remain the same as at the moment so as not to push any changes to existing setups.
Also consider that a template beyond the header and footer includes a lot of other stuff that would essentially be different for all the different documents.
What is really required is that we could define headers and footers separately from the actual templates. That we can define multiple headers and footers. Then in any email template we should have the ability to select from any of the defined headers and footers.
With this approach we then just change our 'global or default' footer as and when required and this gets populated across all templates that use that footer.
Of interest, it should also be noted that any images included anywhere in an email are resolved at email read time rather than at email send time. That is when you send an email where you have included an image as your header, what is included in the outbound email is actually the URL of the image rather then the actual image.
Recently, I changed my website banner on my page templates. I use the same banner as a header image in all my email templates. I made this change by dropping in a new image into my system files structure with the same name as the previous.
When composing a new email, the original image still shows (strange), but once email is sent and opened in email client, the new image displays. What is really interesting however is that when reading emails sent long before the header change, these now also the new header
An error occurred while saving the comment Ability to send an email from directory search results on a Public page.
This ability would need to be enabled by the web page administrator when setting up the directory search gadget (default would be OFF).
If turned on - it would need to specify the template to be used.
During the processing of the email workflow - user sending the email would only have ability to edit text and then send (no ability to edit the recipient list).
Would also suggest that while the template may include macros and links that ability for user edit/add macros and links not be available.
An error occurred while saving the comment As well as Save without quitting - add Quit without saving
Add ability within the email flow to specify additional email field(s) to apply only to the current send of the email
Add ability within the template definition to specify additional email field(s) to be always used for that template. Of course with the ability when actually sending the email to edit that.
We have the ability to send a specific email at a future date and time. How about the ability within the template to on a recurring schedule - say first Sunday of every month, or every Monday and so on - essentially the typical functions that you have in a calendar for scheduling recurring events.
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13 votes
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122 votes
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12 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Agreed that it would be useful - but absolutely MUST by default be turned off. Also when enabled - this must be in such a way that it is restricted to being used only from a specific page in the 'Public (signed on members view of the site)'
Here it should be an option within a specific member search.
This would mean that you would be able to control which members are able to do mail blasts and to whom they can do mail blasts.
I can say from previous experience prior to using Wild Apricot, when we handled our emails by just adding in a list of recipients in an Outlook (or whatever) email that we had way too many inappropriate emails going to our complete membership as some recipients collected these email addresses (when an approved sender sent as To: or CC: instead of BCC:)
Yes - only allowing your Admins to send email blasts can be a pain - but it does manage far better the quality and volumes of emails going to members. And believe me - 'Too many' emails to members from the organization is a very common complaint.
If/when such email blast capability is added to a directory search results, it also needs to be a much simpler workflow that the current email blast process - otherwise we will have way too many disasters.
I also think that the forums should be enhanced to operate in a listserv mode.
Bulk emails and Listserv/forum are really 2 totally different things
An error occurred while saving the comment Agreed that it would be useful - but absolutely MUST by default be turned off. Also when enabled - this must be in such a way that it is restricted to being used only from a specific page in the 'Public (signed on members view of the site)'
Here it should be an option within a specific member search.
This would mean that you would be able to control which members are able to do mail blasts and to whom they can do mail blasts.
I can say from previous experience prior to using Wild Apricot, when we handled our emails by just adding in a list of recipients in an Outlook (or whatever) email that we had way too many inappropriate emails going to our complete membership as some recipients collected these email addresses (when an approved sender sent as To: or CC: instead of BCC:)
Yes - only allowing your Admins to send email blasts can be a pain - but it does manage far better the quality and volumes of emails going to members. And believe me - 'Too many' emails to members from the organization is a very common complaint.
If/when such email blast capability is added to a directory search results, it also needs to be a much simpler workflow that the current email blast process - otherwise we will have way too many disasters.
I also think that the forums should be enhanced to operate in a listserv mode.
Bulk emails and Listserv/forum are really 2 totally different things
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5 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment So tried this piece of code as shown and it works just fine.
However some questions:
1. Can it be used in any other way to display any other fields from the logged in user? Example: First name only, email address, phone number and any other fields that have been defined for that membership level by the system administrator. If so what would the revised code look like?
2. Can it be used to display any fields from a specified contact (member) that is hard coded (not derived from the current logged in member)?
Just like an administrator with web page editing capability can be restricted to only be able to edit certain site pages, same restrictions should be available for membership and newsletter administrators to only be able to access selected membership levels