As a place discuss the Idea Box entry for checking the email address as part of new member registration we want to get your input on some of the caveats that we have discussed in-house.

 - Do you have the need to allow new members to use the same email address? If so, can you give us a business case to support allowing this to continue?

 - Will this be something you need for a specific member type?  Maybe you force single member accounts to have a unique email but the member types that have sub-accounts still need the option to allow the same email address.

 - We most likely need to add the email address field to the first page where you define the Username, First Name and Last Name. 

 - We also need to add the "Forgot Password" link to the page as well in the scenario where the member type selected does not allow you to continue with an existing email address. 

 - What about updating your email after you are a member? Should this check also apply to merely updating your email address?

What else should we be aware of while starting the discovery phase of this update?

I can't wait to see what everyone has to say. I know this has been a very hot topic on previous calls I've had before

Thank you Brian and all those who are assisting with this task. As part of our registration, we allow non-members to register as a guest and to create a new profile, since I selected the answer yes to the question - Automatically link registrants to a Member/Non-Member record? I will then have to confirm if a profile already exists and then transfer the event registration and ticket to the exisiting profile and delete the new one. How can this task help with this process of non-members registering to attendwhile not creating a new profile?

Thank so much,
Leisa Sacry - CASE

Hi Leisa, This is a great question and while I do not have a definitive answer I will add it to our discussion list. Tomorrow, I am meeting with my fellow YMers brainstorm and this will be a great conversation starter. We may reach out to you if we have any follow-up questions about the current workflow that you are following.

- Do you have the need to allow new members to use the same email address? If so, can you give us a business case to support allowing this to continue?

We have multiple members for whom we do not have an email address, but for whom we need to keep track of other contact information, therefore, we need to be able to use one email address (noreply@scac.sc) for multiple people.

Having unique emails in our instance would be HUGE. One of the reasons is our LMS/badging process requires a unique email for credit issuance. For marketing, this is huge because we want to be able to tell advertisers/sponsors at a glance how far our reach goes. If 20 people have the same email address, we are only hitting one. Also for even registrations, if several are attending from one company, and they all have the same email address, it's a pain to get them the appropriate information.

Yes, even email updates should be checked.

The only real hangup I can think of is if you have a prospect in the database (and you have a specific member type for prospect like we do) and then that prospect tries to join, but they can't because they have a record already created. So I suppose in this case, having the scan be for specific member types (and their appropriate subs) would work (i.e. we have someone in the DB with Member Type A, and someone tries to register with that same email address as Member Type A, but not if they try to register as Member Type C).

I'm new to YM (we're in the implementation stage) and Unity, but for us the idea of having a username is quite strange, we always use the email address as the unique identifier for a member or contact (OK in the database there is a primary key which we also used as the membership number, but this is quite unfriendly to use as part of the login). A username can become quite difficult to choose particularly if you have a common surname such as Smith.
We have had issues since trying to encourage website registration (on our old system) where we had an email address that had been collected a long time ago and where the individual had then gone and got another personal email address or had moved jobs and wanted to use a new email address. So as part of the validation we asked for membership number and email address, so you know its them because of the membership number but the email address doesn't match, we then had to go offline to make contact.
We had a very few issues where couples were sharing an email address, but it wasn't a big deal to ask them to use separate email addresses. we also had an issue where the email marketing tool we were using didn't like generic email addresses such as info@blahblah.com, but some simple validation sorted that out.
Happy to provide more info but definitely believe email address is the way to go and I'm not really sure of the value of the username at all.
Chris, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (UK)

We are an organisational based membership so we often have a single person who has multiple organisations who are members. In a business context this would be where a single person with a single email address owns 2 or 3 businesses who are all members of our organisation. Stopping multiple registrations could be problematic for us. On a membership of 800-100 companies we may have as many as 30-40 examples of this.

A simple warning at point of registration may be enough with a forgot password link. But will still allow registration to continue.

We like to keep keep each member with a unique address but in the real world this has exceptions. We especially like to have unique email for everyone when we send out voting ballots so each member gets representation vs all the ballots going to one person. But if a member is covering for two or more locations then they would have the same email address. Our biggest wish... when a member registers for the first time that the non-member email data base is cross checked to prevent one person form having a member and a non-member profile. A simple prompt "is this you" would be great.