Admin Manual

As of November 1, 2009, we have introduced a new feature into iGrOOps that can allow iGrOOp administrators to use iGrOOps in completely new ways: The "membership types".

As you already know, memberships can have three different levels, L1, L2, and L3.  These levels allow you to offer your members choices based on options, access, and cost.  Now, each membership level is also assigned what is called a membership type. 

Membership types can be defined as either "personal" or "business" and only effect how profiles are displayed in the search.  In general, a personal membership is private with select info available to other members, and a business membership can be publicly displayed to non members, with full information being displayed like a phone book ad.

Here is an example of what a personal profile looks like when searched:

Notice the photo, name, level, custom title, and bio. Now here is an example of a business listing:

Notice that a logo was used in place of a personal photo. The title of the listing uses the organization name instead of the member's name. And full contact information is shown including categories (more on this later).

Business listings that are open to non members will display an e-mail address, BUT we use javascript code to hide the e-mail address from spambots and other spiders.

What's the Point?

Having two membership types allow iGrOOps membership sites to not only have private members, but also business members whose information can be publicly searchable, and of course, searchable by members.  Take for example a Chamber of Commerce.  These members do want to promote themselves as much as possible, not only to other members, but also to the world.  The "business" membership type makes this possible.

Features

Here are just some of what you can do with these membership types:

• create a "sponsor" membership level, business type, and charge a premium
• allow members to search all members, just business, just personal, or no members
• allow non members to search business members (never personal members)
• allow to search by category using graphical buttons
• give your personal and business membership types custom names
• display certain membership types and/or levels by default
• and more

Differences Between Personal and Business Membership Types

With the new membership type we have modified what information the business members can update.  Here are some of the fields that are different with the different membership types:

Categories! Your Own "Yellow Pages" Like Site

Business membership types allow for up to three categories to be selected.  These categories are based on Microsoft's "Bing" categories -- one of the most useful and concise set of categories that we have come across on the web.

Once you are using the business listings, you will have a graphical category selection area available within your search tool.  This will use icons based on your color theme.  Clicking on the icons will reveal the sub categories for that category.  Clicking on the sub category will take the user to all the listings within that sub category.

Some Notes

• As group admin, you can now change the bio for your users, as well as set categories for your business users.  As long as your business users fill out the basics of their profile, you can do the rest for them.
• The admin options have been moved to the tab on the search screen, to be consistent with all other applications within iGrOOps.
• Categories are kept in the member's main database record.  This means any changes made to categories will be reflected within all groups using that profile.
• If you change color themes, your category icons will change to match

Do NOT just change your existing categories to business.  This would make your member's e-mail addresses viewable by other members.  Be sure you get their OK beforehand if you are going to do this, otherwise, use one of your unused levels as your business membership type.

To implement a business membership type, you may want to move all your members to a different membership level.  You can do this one at a time, or we can do it for you.  Send us a private message requesting this letting us know which group and which levels to change to which levels.