Posted by Matt Harrell on August 24th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
This is the second post in a series designed to prepare users for MemberHub 2.0 changes.
As mentioned yesterday in the introduction to subdomains post, the driving factors behind the upcoming enhancements have been to make the user experience more about your organization, while also making it easier for administrators to manage membership information. This has resulted in a new approach to user accounts in general. Of course the design had to change just a bit too.
Your Calendar and Dashboard are Scoped by Organization
To get to your combined calendar, dashboard, or profile for the current organization, simply click on the organization name [link] in the upper-left. The Dashboard will not look very different if you’re affiliated with only one organization in MemberHub. Same goes for the Calendar. (NOTE: if you’re currently subscribing to events on your combined calendar, you will need to re-subscribe to your organization Calendar). You’ll notice both of these pages now have the organization’s name and logo in the header instead of MemberHub’s.
Quickly let me explain what we mean by “scoped”. At the time this post is being published, Your Dashboard is a view across all your hubs; across multiple organizations (if you’re part of multiple orgs). In 2.0, you can only be on the Dashboard for the organization you’re currently logged into. Using our example from yesterday, when Gerald logs into Trinity Community Church at tcc.memberhub.com he will land on the Dashboard for that organization. He can switch organizations from the same dropdown.
Your Account, Your Profile; What’s the Difference?
Your Account will consist of your email addresses (yes that’s multiple addresses), your password, time zone, and global notification preferences. Your profile is everything else like your mailing address, phone numbers, gender, birth date, etc. The profile is managed by the organization and you both can make changes. You will have a separate profile for each organization that you’re affiliated with on MemberHub. We’ll talk more about what admins can do in the next post.
Your Family will be Created by Organization Administrators
After doing some real digging into the ways that the family concept was being used in MemberHub we decided to move the responsibility of creating and managing families to organization administrators. Most users were confused about the ability to add family members; especially when joining a hub and didn’t understand the implications of creating those records. Members will be able to edit Family Members but the responsibility of grouping members in to families will be left to the staff at your organization who decide to make use of the family view and new family directory. More on this down the road too.
In the next post we’ll share why we’re making life much better for organization administrators.
Please, leave us a comment below.
Posted by Matt Harrell on August 23rd, 2010 | 27 Comments »
The main objective that drove this round of enhancements was to give more focus to the organization. Essentially we wanted to do a better job of scoping the entire user experience by the organization that actually signed up for the service. Let me explain something that might not be obvious right now.
When you currently log into MemberHub, you land on Your Dashboard. Every user has their own dashboard where they see a combined view of data across all of the hubs AND organizations that they are affiliated with in MemberHub. The header and the MemberHub logo are present. This was a great concept for some users because they are a part of multiple organizations that use MemberHub and the current dashboard provided a one stop view into all the organizations in their life.
However, what we heard in our feedback was that administrators wanted their member’s experience in MemberHub to feel more like their own organization. Many of you suggested that as members interacted with the system it was more about MemberHub and less about Trinity Community Church (example organization name). As soon as a member logs in, it’s not branded with the organization, it’s branded with MemberHub. This is all about to change.

Every organization (subscription) will now have a customizable subdomain. For example, Trinity Community Church could have a subdomain of http://tcc.memberhub.com. You can even use your existing organization’s website address and just tack the .memberhub.com onto the end to get your organization’s branded login page.
Think about this for a minute. Every time someone gets an email from MemberHub and clicks the link to take them into the system, instead of landing on a login page that says nothing about your organization, they’re taken to a branded login page that will immediately bring a level of trust and familiarity that your members are expecting when using a tool that you have provided. In addition to this, Trinity Community Church can now just link to http://tcc.memberhub.com right off of their website. In fact, it should be encouraged that members use your subdomain to login.
Once someone logs into the organization, they are no longer taken to a generic Your Dashboard page. Instead they are taken to the organization’s dashboard. With the exception of the top navigation (which we will explore later this week) the dashboard feels the same, BUT…it’s got the organization’s name and logo in the header…not MemberHub’s.

Having a subdomain for your organization in MemberHub allows the system to be opened up to many enhancements. Here are just a few:
- A more branded experience
- Member profiles that can be edited by both members and admins
- Less confusion on who’s in control of the data and communication
- A page for organizational wide events, directories, hub listings and more
All organizations in the system will have their subdomain defaulted for them. Administrators can customize their subdomain on the Settings tab inside the Admin console.
There are more blog posts coming this week about the upcoming changes, so stay tuned! And please leave a comment below and share your thoughts. Thanks!