One strategic decision that we made up front when we set out to create MemberHub is to make it family-oriented. We’re all so busy these days and it’s increasingly difficult for families to stay organized with all the activities that each family member is involved. Now this isn’t the place for us to talk about over committing your kids to a million activities and leaving no room for real family time, but suffice it say for those extra involved families, you will be thanking MemberHub when your church, nonprofit and association are all using the same tool. Communications with those groups will be centralized and you will have more time for real community.

What are some of the ways in which tools like MemberHub can help you as a busy individual better manage your time, relationships and communications?

We’d love to hear from you.

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.

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

The first step we took in our redesign of Family Members was to add some detailed help. The built in help pages in the application are a great first resource to check when you have a question. There is a now a new page titled Setting Up Your Family. In this help page we discuss:

• Adding new family members
• Managed records
• Associating family members with hubs
• Sharing calendars with family members

We also tried to reach into the minds of our users to anticipate when they might have a question about the family members section and we therefore put links to the different sections of this help article in the Family Members area.

Next, we turned our attention to adding new family members. What we realized is that while we had made it simple to add a family member, the small popup dialog did not leave us enough room to explain the implications around entering an email address for the new family member or setting them up as a family admin. Now when you click the Add button, you get a dedicated page to this process where we take the opportunity to explain a  few things.

We’ll wait for the next post to explain the details of adding new family members. I know the anticipation hurts, but stay tuned. In the meantime, you might take 3 minutes out of your day to read the Setting Up Your Family help section. You might be surprised at what you have available in MemberHub that you didn’t even know was there.

One of the lesser known features in MemberHub has been the Family Members section. Every user in the system has the ability to add a profile for each member of their family, or household. When set up properly, each member of the family can have their own MemberHub login, but still be grouped under the same family. While this concept isn’t too hard to grasp, we’ve learned that the benefits to adding Family Members has not been obvious.

With the exception of one feature, which we’ll discuss soon, the manifestation and purpose behind being a “family-oriented” online member community tool has not be overtly obvious. In addition to this we’ve had requests coming in (mainly from churches) to create more family-oriented views in the system. So we took a step back and have completely redesigned the way that families get set up, the ways that hubs can work with families and have added an extensive  help section devoted to “Setting Up Your Family”.

We have deployed these changes to MemberHub and we will follow this post with a couple more posts devoted to bringing attention to these new changes and helping our users understand the benefits and details of MemberHub’s family features.

Stay tuned.