Though they are listed separately under the "Programs" menu, Households and Members are one module in DigiQuatics. Households is simply an enhancement to member management and creates a different way to group and view your members.
Grouping members into households is entirely optional. In some cases, we don't recommend using this functionality. Keep reading to learn more!
Adding Members
Visit the member page at https://www.digiquatics.com/members and you will see the "Add" button. It's very easy to add a member, as DigiQuatics only requires a first and last name. All other data is optional. Note that you can designate members as Adults or Children, and you can add a family, for instance, as a household to view data together. If you select "primary" for one member of the household, this will make their contact information (particularly their email) the main email for receiving lesson report cards.
DigiQuatics currently requires the Household & Members Module in order operate the Lesson Module's tracking and reporting features. This is most commonly referred to as "report cards" or lesson participant evaluations - but the language is determined in your settings. Learn more about customizing and setting up your own Lessons Programs here. Note that the Lesson Requests Module (click to learn more) is a separate standalone feature that is available for lesson registration.
Determining Your Member Management Needs
As mentioned above, it's important to consider which features are most advantageous - and which methods suit your goals. For example, here are some common ways our customers utilize the Household & Member Module selectively:
A private club or HOA wants needs a place to add their patrons information. They also want to track the neighborhood/block club to which their patrons belong. So they use group families into households and create their own custom member types in their settings in their DigiQuatics account. This is a very common method and perhaps closest to the original intended design for the Household & Member Module.
A municipal customer with a community swim lesson program doesn't necessarily need to track member data/patron information but they do want to send report cards to their lesson participants (or the participants' parents/guardians). So their chosen method is to simply enter a first and last name for all lesson participants with an email address, usually their parent's. Now, they can add these members to any lesson program they've created that the members participate(d) in and they can access report cards, fill them out over time, and email them to parents as frequently as needed.
A large rec center run multiple swim lessons programs on an ongoing basis. They frequently have new participants and need to add new members month to month. They also have a separate registration software in place. So, their method is to use the member importer heavily in order to take spreadsheet data generated from their registration software and bring it into DigiQuatics Household & Member Module. They elect not to use the Households feature in order to streamline and simplify their primary goal: sending digital report cards for their lesson participants. They simply make sure each member/lesson participant has the appropriate email address.
In all three of these above cases, the member importer can be used to export, edit (existing member data or add new members), then import the altered spreadsheet so the new data is present in DigiQuatics. This common method for updating household/member data is the easiest way to manage hundreds of your members.
Using the Member Importer
To start, download a blank template here or export your existing Member list.
Members will be looked up first by Imported Member ID if this value is present. This value can be a unique value from a third-party system consisting of alphanumeric characters. If the Member is found using the Imported Member ID, all other information in the row will be updated.
If the Imported Member ID is blank, the import will attempt to find an existing member by First Name, Last Name combination. If found, all other information will be updated.
As a fallback, if a Member is not found by Imported Member ID or First Name, Last Name combination, a new Member record will be created in DigiQuatics.
Members can be "grouped" together into a Household using the Imported Household ID field. A Household could also be known in a third-party system as a "Unit" or "Family" that generally groups less than 10 members together.
Imported Household ID should be a unique value from a third-party system. For example, all members with an Imported Household ID of "101" will be grouped into one Household in DigiQuatics. Members will an Imported Household ID of "102" will be grouped into another Household.
Date of Birth should be in the format "MM/DD/YY"
Gender can be a value of "M" or "F"
Role can be "Adult" or "Child"
Primary indicates if the Member is a Primary contact on the Household group. This is usually a parent or guardian. This value can be "Y" or "N" and you can have one or multiple primary Members in a Household.
CAUTION: How to Avoid Unintentional Household Grouping
If, like our example above, your objective is to upload/create new member profiles on a frequent basis (especially by importing) we recommend not using the Household functionality for simplicity sake. (Note: our team is working towards a revised Households feature).
It is very important to always check for Households that are incorrectly grouped. This can happen when data is imported and there are no household IDs assigned to members.
If you find that you have very large and incorrect households consisting of groups of members, it's not hard to fix this. You need to simply adjust two columns:
First, do an export and open the file, then look for Household ID and the Imported Household ID columns. Notice that the numbers are either all the same or grouped (this is an automatic Household ID at the time of import - it is generated under the assumption that all members at the time of import are in the same household).
Next, the best approach is to delete the entire Household ID column. Then, simply assign a unique Imported Household ID to each member. (e.g. HH001, HH002,... or 01,02,...10, 11, 12,). Use auto-fill to achieve this in a matter of seconds.
Make sure the email address are correctly associated to each member. Obviously, if a member doesn't have an email address, a report card cannot be sent.
Last, if you need support or assistance to ungroup your members from households - or if you wish to still group them but need help assigning IDs and cleaning things up - don't hesitate to reach out to our team via our chat!