Organization Vs individual Memberships

Overview

The Wild Apricot database can store both individual member records and memberships records for Organizations/Companies.

For the latter, there are two possibilities:

1. The organization/company needs just one member record (similar to an individual membership, except that different fields might be filled out)
2. The organization/company is a group of people linked together, membership is payable as group fee and renewal is processed for the whole group. We call these bundles and each bundle is represented / administered by a bundle administrator, see Bundle Membership Level Overview. In this case, the individual members within the bundle have their own separate profiles (and can log in / receive emails separately etc.)

Both Individual and Organization members are considered "contacts" in Wild Apricot, and each contact is represented with a number of fields, including these system fields:

• User ID - This is system generated and every contact is automatically assigned a unique ID (Organizations and Members in a bundle will each have a separate User ID)
• First name and Last name - Generally applies to individual members only; For organizations / company members you can leave empty (and only use it for members within a bundle)
• Organization - Organization name. Can be hidden if not needed.
• Email - Should be unique for each contact, and cannot be hidden. Can be left empty when records are added manually by administrators - but is mandatory on all self-service online forms (member application, event registration, etc.) and is required to login and use any self-service functions. See Online self-service.

You can add an unlimited number of custom fields, see Customizing your contact database fields

Organization vs Individual setup

At least one of the fields "First Name", "Last Name", "Organization" and  "Email" is required when adding new contacts, the rest of the fields can be left empty.

Thus you can enter your member records as follows:

• Individual members - with First and/or Last names filled out
• Organization members - leave First/Last name fields empty, and only fill out the Organization field

Here is an example of a Contact list showing both Individual and Organization records:

In above example "Anderson Research" is an organization (but not a bundle), "Banks LLC" an organization bundle, "Danny Boyd" a bundle member, and "Sara Coerner" an individual member.

How to search for Organization members

Let's say you have both individual and organization members and you want to find just the organizational memberships.

In this case you can use Member Advanced Search, and if you want to further control which fields to display and/sort by you can use Custom reports layouts.

Here is a search for bundle organizations that is used in combination with a custom report layout:

Example

For this example we have a member directory page that lists corporate members and each organization also has a number of individual contacts associated with it.

In order to create this hierarchy, we will need to create a bundle membership level first (we will call it Corporate level).

Next, add an organization record and set it as a bundle administrator.
After that, setup an organization record you can add individual records to it to form a 'bundle'. 
You can also import your records as bundles, see Import of Bundles

And finally, let's set up a member directory page to show only a specific level - Corporate membership (see Member directory).

To see the child records from the directory, click on any row. It will open an organization record with linked individual records. You can click on each of them to see the details.

See also

• Contact Vs Member records
• Customizing your contact database fields
• Customizing your member database