Guidelines for WildApricot websites

Your club may have couples who share an email account. While it is preferable that every member uses an email account of their own, it is possible to configure a WildApricot (WA) site to accommodate shared addresses and still offer full functionality. The following guidelines are for a one-time configuration to make this possible.

Like many other websites, WA uses a person’s email address for 2 distinctive functions:

1. To send messages to, e.g. an event announcement

2. As username when logging in

The username function only requires that it looks like an email address, but it is not necessary that it actually works as such. We will take advantage of this fact in our solution for shared email addresses.

Wild Apricot has a feature called CC emails, which is explained in detail in this support article. This is the other ingredient we will be using for our shared addresses. In essence, if either the Email field or the Shared email field contains a valid email address, then the member will receive their personalized messages and no email errors will be logged.

Here are the steps to implement the solution

1. Create a custom membership field called Shared email

2. Turn on CC emails using this newly created field

3. Load or update data pertaining to couples sharing an email address

   1. The first person will have the valid, shared email address in their Email field, while the Shared email field will be blank.

   2. The second person will have a pseudo-email address in their Email field, while the Shared email field contains the actual shared address. For ease of identification, it is suggested to construct the pseudo-email address by simply appending ‘.shared’ to the actual address. For example, us@here.com would become us@here.com.shared

4. Change privacy settings to hide or display the respective fields. This step is not needed for functionality but prevents confusion when others try to use a non-functioning email address that may be displayed in the online directory.

1. Create custom field Shared email

WA offers 2 types of custom fields, one for contacts (Common fields) and another for members (Membership fields). If your club uses a membership level for couples, then create the Shared email field as a membership field. This allows you to limit this field to just this level. Otherwise, you can create this field as a contact custom field.

We don’t want this custom field to be editable by our members, so here are the recommended settings for a Membership field:

2. Turn on CC emails for Shared email

Follow the instructions provided in the above support article. The end result should look like this:

3. Update contact information

Use a roundtrip of export/import to update existing contacts. Here is a schematic of the changes to make prior to importing the data again.

4. Adjust privacy settings

Changes to privacy settings can either be made by the members themselves, or by an administrator. Since members sharing an email address typically are technology-challenged, it is probably better to make these one-time changes as an administrator.

If the Shared email field was set up as suggested above (Others access: members) then the only change to make on the account with the pseudo-email address is to set the Email field to No access.

Once these changes are made, directory searches will always return a valid email address for either the first or the second person.