One question that we hear often is:

Do we add member data in directly or do I have my members signup?

Most customers love the current implementation where members signup and manage their own information. Others want complete control and even want to add members manually and start communicating. So the question is: Who owns the data?

Can a system be designed that can be both a membership management system and a self-serve member communication tool? We think so. And we’re taking steps now to be the best of both worlds.

Organization administrators can now manually add person records in their organization’s management console. What this means is that you can now accurately reflect all the people in your organization. You can enter the profile information and upload their picture.

The next step will be to merge any offline person records with a real account should that person create a MemberHub profile. We’ll be speaking with existing customers to gather feedback on how this should work.

If you’re an administrator, check out the New Person button and let us know what you think!

When we performed our last customer survey, a couple of trends were immediately spotted. The most common was the suggestion to allow users to send a message to just a select few people in their hubs. Discussions are great for creating dialog between all the members in a hub and you can easily send a one-to-one message to a member (or admin) of your hub. But there wasn’t an easy way to send a message to a few select people in your group. Well we heard ya loud and clear and we’ve made some simple, very intutive changes to allow you to do just that.

Anytime  you’re on the Members listing in your hub, you can click the little mail envelope icon beside the member’s name. This pops up a message dialog where you can provide a Subject and Message to send an email to that person. In the past the message could only be sent to that one person.

Now when you get the New Message popup, there is a To: field where you can add additional names. Simply start typing the name of any person in your hub and the dialog will attempt to auto-complete the name for you. Also notice that there is new checkbox at the bottom. Leave that checked and you will be emailed a copy of your message.

As an alternative to clicking the envelope icon beside a member’s name you can also click the blue New Message button found in the right-hand sidebar on the Members page in your hubs.

Enjoy and don’t hesitate to visit the Support Forum at http://help.memberhub.com if you have any feedback or suggestions.

One of the more pesky navigation issues in MemberHub has been that users were required to go back to their Dashboard to switch into another group’s hub. This is cumbersome and for some of our power users has become rather slow too (we’re going to speed up the load time for the Dashboard). It’s been recommended multiple times to allow a user to simply switch the context of which group they’re in.

So we added a simple drop-down list in the Hub Navigation where you can easily switch between hubs. The hubs are even grouped by Organization like on Your Dashboard.

We hope this saves you some time!

We’ve made some recent enhancements to the hub Home Page and the hub Join Page that will help administrators to further customize their hubs.

Every hub in MemberHub has a corresponding public-facing Join Page. This page is where prospective members can learn about the group and either join right from that page or request to join. These pages are especially useful if you take advantage of putting a Hub Listing widget on your organization’s website. For example, you could list your small groups hubs at your church on your website. Visitors can then click on each group to learn more. The link will take them to the Join Page for that hub where the will see a description of the group, a member count and NOW a personalized group image!

We have a Knowledge Base article you can read to learn how to set up your Join Page(s).

While we were at it, we gave hub administrators the ability to upload an image to their hub’s Home Page too. Hub administrators can simply click the blue Edit Homepage button at the bottom of the Home Page to upload an image. We heard this suggestions quite a bit, so enjoy!

Drop us a comment below and let us know what you think. Do not hesitate to contact us over on the Support Forum if you have any questions at all. We’re here to serve!

The MemberHub team has deployed an enhancement that will save administrators time by empowering their members to create hubs which can easily be moved under their MemberHub organization.

After you click on the New Hub button on Your Dashboard we ask if the hub should be affiliated with an organization. If you are not an administrator of a MemberHub organization, this option will default to “No, this is a stand-alone hub”. Remember, free stand-alone hubs are limited to 25 members and 25 MB of storage. The Click here to lean more link pops up a bubble that gives you a few more details.

Clicking “Yes” to this question reveals a new section that allows you to select an organization. If you are an organization administrator this option will actually default to “Yes”.

As an example, if a member of your nonprofit named Charles needs a hub for his new committee he can create the hub without having to ask an organization administrator to create it for him. The admins of the organization will get an email that allows them to Accept/Reject the new hub.

If accepted, the hub gets pulled under your nonprofit automatically. If rejected the hub is still Charles’s, but it falls outside of the nonprofit’s organization. This means Charles won’t have access to the membership when adding members, your nonprofit logo would not inherit down to his hub and he would be limited on members and storage.

These changes should help organizations better serve their members by empowering them to get organized among themselves. And isn’t this what you want? Ministries, committees and teams that can JUST DO IT.

Please share your thoughts or questions by leaving a comment!

Online discussions are a great way to enhance communications and help members stay organized. With so many tools available, it’s hard to tell the difference between a mailing list, a discussion forum and general online messaging. With MemberHub, every single hub (online group) has a mailing list. It’s not a forum or place to blog; perhaps those features will come later. I’m not going to spend time explaining how mailing lists work, but I am going to explain an enhancement to our hub mailing lists that have opinions on both sides.

There is a new checkbox labeled “Send me a copy of this message” that you can now click whenever you are logged into MemberHub and you create a new discussion or reply to existing discussion. In addition to this, whenever you send an email to the hub mailing list, the list will automatically send you a copy of the message. This is what we mean by “echo” emails.

For example, if you wish you to start a new discussion in one of your hubs by sending an email to “my-hub-example@discuss.memberhub.com” you will now receive an email from the list just as others in the hub receive an email.

The main advantage of these new features is the assurance that your message was delivered successfully and the ability to review your message as recipients will view it.

So, try it out and let us know what you think? What are you used to when it comes to mailing lists? What are your preferences? Drop us a comment and/or a suggestion? Thanks!

This is the final installment in our short series on Family Members in MemberHub. I hope that you’ve found these posts informative and I hope that you’ll consider bringing your entire church or organization on board to take advantage of the family-oriented hubs feature! Start here for a recap of this series. Nuff said already, how do we set up a family hub?

I kid you not when I say that it takes less than 10 seconds to convert your hub into a family oriented hub. If you are an administrator, click on the Hub Settings button and you will land on the General tab. Scroll to the bottom and find the new Members Listing section. Select “Group by family” and don’t forget to click Save Changes.

One thing to keep in mind is the experience your members will have when joining your hub. We’ve made it pretty easy for you to handle this. There is a new option on the Joins tab underneath the Hub Settings button that will change the way members join your hubs. It’s imperative that you “Allow” or “Encourage” users to join family members (see above screen shot). Okay you’re done! End of post. Kidding. But that’s all it takes. Let’s continue to look at options surrounding this new feature and what happens when you turn it on.

The Members page in the hub will now show the family picture. The adults are listed and then underneath will be children. Members can then click on the family name and see an expanded view of the family. A larger version of the the family picture and a link to each family member profile will allow hub members to view the picture, contact information and bio for each person in that family. The first image in this post is screenshot of what that looks like.

You may be asking what happens if you have an existing hub for which you want to turn on the family grouping and what happens as families change? In other words, how do members control which of their family members are in the hub? Family administrators can then easily add and remove their family members from a hub on the Personal Settings tab underneath the Hub Settings button.

Create a living, breathing, online, private member community where families can come together and connect. Your members can learn about each other, communicate and collaborate. Did I mention it’s online and in a private environment? In the very near future we believe that all churches will have some version of an online member community and it needs to represent real life. It will be crucial to have the concept of a family in these communities. Your printed family directory is already out of date so what are you waiting for?

That is about it. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any specific questions. We always deliver an implementation plan and sample instructions to help new customers get comfortable with and successfully deploy an online community with their members. In addition to this we can make available sample instructions that you can provide your members to ensure that they set up their family correctly and join your new family hubs.

This is the grand finale in our fireworks display of blog posts dedicated to outlining MemberHub’s family-oriented features.

Over the last two weeks we’ve talked about Setting Up Your Family and the new built-in help sections thoughout the application. We’ve also discussed how to add family members and the advantages to correctly setting up your family in MemberHub.

Just like the old testament points to the gospel in the new testament, those previous posts point to a new feature in MemberHub that really make use of all this family stuff. Simply stated, you can now group the members in your hubs into families. Said another way, you can create a hub and encourage members to join themselves and other family members into the hub and then, on the Members page in that hub, you can view information about the family. There is a family picture and members can drill down into each person of that family to read each respective profile. So what’s that good for? Here are just a few examples:

• Online church directory
• Preschool programs
• Elementary school classes
• Cub scouts, girl scouts
• Any family-oriented group that needs a private place to collaborate

Perhaps the best use of this new feature would be the online church directory. In my 8 years at our current church we’ve done one printed directory. This directory contains the single worst picture ever taken of me (my wife looks beautiful as always) and it’s so outdated it’s not funny…well maybe it is funny. You get my point here. These days it really is possible and it makes sense to have your directory online where your members can update their pictures, bio, and correspondence information in a timely fashion.

At the risk of creating a super long post, I’m not going to put the details of how to configure this new feature in MemberHub into this post. You’ll just have to wait till the next post. The anticipation will be tough ;-).

This is the fourth post in a series explaining the features and benefits around MemberHub’s Family Members functionality. If you’re wondering why we’re doing this, read this.

In the last post we talked about Adding Family Members and explored how to properly set up your family in MemberHub. Now that you’ve got a background on how to build your family in the system, let’s talk about some of the immediate advantages to having your family or household set up correctly.

This first advantage to explore is calendar sharing. While you may not want to give your spouse access to your ladies ministry hub, for example, you may still want to share that calendar with him so he can keep track of your events with that group. For each and every hub that you are affiliated with, you can access your own Personal Settings tab that can be found under the Hub Settings button. On this tab is a checkbox:

By default, your hub calendars will be shared with other members of your family. This means that they can see your calendar events from your hubs on their combined calendar (and 5-day calendar).

One of the ultimate goals with MemberHub is to give you, as a busy member of multiple organizations, a combined calendar of all your family’s events in one place. So for example if your church, nonprofit and local YMCA are all using MemberHub then you would have one place to go to see the calendar events across all the groups and activities that each of your family members particpate in. You’ll see your small group activities from your church, your spouse’s meetings from your local nonprofit and your child’s practice schedule from the local youth sports leagues. All your events across all the third-party organizations in your entire family life!

Another advantage to having your family set up correctly is family administrative capabilites for adults. MemberHub offers the ability to not only manage the hubs in which their family members are placed, but also be included in all correspondence that takes place in that hub.

One great example of this would be a youth ministry at a church. Or perhaps you need to create a hub and put children in the hub to accurately represent the membership in that hub. Either way, if children are placed in the hub, family administrators can receive all notifications that come through that hub. They will also be given access to that hub so that they can monitor that child’s interactions online.

I hope you’re beginning to see how far-reaching the implications of the Family Members section is in MemberHub. Next post we will discuss the newest feature available…hub membership, grouped by family. This is a big one for churches!

This is the third post in a series explaining the features and benefits around MemberHub’s Family Members functionality. If you’re wondering why we’re doing this, read this.

In the last post we talked about the new Setting Up Your Family help section and the helpful tips throughout the application that bring more clarity to these features. After writing the detailed help section, we reconsidered the experience around adding a new family member. Our goal was to more clearly explain the implications of inviting them to be in your family versus just adding a family member and creating a “managed record”.

After clicking the Add button on the Family Members listing you will see the basic fields for a profile, first name, last name, gender and age. However, now there is a checkbox that requires you to make  decision; namely, does this family member have an email address and should they have their own unique MemberHub login. Checking this box will slide down another few fields. You can read the instructions in the screen shot below.

As you can see, providing an email address and message will send the family member an email inviting them to join your family MemberHub. There is also a checkbox at the bottom that prompts you to consider whether this person should be a family administrator. This will likely be reserved for parents. Suffice it say that family administrators can do just that…administer their family in MemberHub. You can read more about family administrators in the help, but generally speaking this is a way for parents to monitor their child’s correspondence for any hubs that they are placed in or join themselves.

NOTE for family members under the age of 13:

One huge point of distinction here. If you enter a date of birth for this family member that calculates the age to be 13 or under the text changes and recognizes that this person cannot be invited to become a family administrator. This is currently the only way a child that is 13 or younger can honestly be given a MemberHub login. Children under the age of 13 cannot sign up and register themselves at MemberHub.

The only way for a 13 year-old or younger to get a login is to have their  parent or guardian personally add them to their family and send them an invitation in the manner described here. This is in accordance with the MemberHub Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. This is also 100% COPPA compliant.

Backtracking a bit, if you do NOT check the “Invite this person to join your MemberHub family” checkbox then you essentially create a “Managed” record. In short a managed record represents a person in the system without their own login information. This is useful for adding younger children and for families who share an email address. The important thing to keep in mind here is that an email address in the system has to be tied to a profile; a user with some identity. So if a husband and wife share an email address, one of them can sign up and own the MemberHub account yet the other person can be added with their own profile, picture and information and be placed in that person’s respective hubs. This will accurately represent Mrs. Smith in her bridge club hub for example…even though it’s Mr. Smith’s profile information that’s linked to the actual MemberHub account. If Mrs. Smith gets an email address down the road and wants to manage her account with that email address, Mr. Smith can send her invitation from her profile which will send her an email instructing her to sign up at MemberHub and replace the managed record with the new MemberHub user  profile. In this way, the family is kept intact, even though they have separate accounts and logins.

The real benefit to this part of the redesign is to bring clarity around building families in MemberHub, what a family admin is, and then begin to realize the benefits of having their family properly configured.

There are various benefits to having your family or household set up properly. We will explore those in the next post. And following that, we will explore some administration features that allow organizations to create an online family directory.