Members

A key capability of NeatClubs.COM is the ability to manage membership.  We use the term “member” to refer to all types of individuals who may have login access to your web-site.

Member records are securely maintained on your web-site in such a way that only an administrator have access or the member themselves.  The membership database controls who is able to login to the site.

The membership database is a different than class or event registration records. There may be multiple class or event registrations records per member record. For example, a parent may hold the login account to the web-site (considered the “member”) whereas there may more than one program participant (children in this case) for each member record. Also, some registration types (referred to as anonymous registrations) do not require a member record to exist at all. This is a key concept that is important to understand when implementing on-line registration.

There are multiple ways to build your membership database described below.

Users may request their own accounts: This approach has the advantage that it makes your members responsible for keeping their own data current and up to date. A “Request Login Account” can be made to appear on the footer of the web-page.

Through Event or Program Registration: Another way to populate your on-line membership database is by having membership records created “on the fly” when customers or members of the public register for particular activities on your web-site. For many registration types a membership profile on the system us required and this is a useful way to populate your site membership list.  To learn more about accepting registrations on-line, review the material covering about managing registration events.

Importing Members from an External System or a Spreadsheet: Another way to populate your member database is to import data from a spreadsheet or external database. NeatClubs.COM provides facilities to import comma delimited data files (CSV) files and “map” field to corresponding fields in the member database. (See System Setup / Utility Functions for an explanation of how this is done)

Administrator Created Entries: Finally, another way to get membership records into the database is for the site administrator to create those records themselves on behalf of the member or web-site user. Using this approach the administrator can control things like member privileges on the system, usernames and passwords, and whether that member has the right to login.

The system supports two different policies in terms of how it allows member records to be created. An “open policy” is a policy where anybody who requests an account on the web-site is able to activate an account and login immediately. An “administrator review” policy means that anybody can request an account, but the actual activation of the account awaits explicit administrator approval.  These policies are setup in the “Permissions and Authorizations” section of the System Setup menus . You can specify whether explicit administrator permission is required for a membership record to become active.

You can learn more about Managing your Member Community below