How members gain access to profiles added by an admin

There are three main ways that profiles get added to a directory in Community Box:

  • members can submit their own profiles
  • Community Box can synchronise profiles from a third party provider such as MemberSpace or Thinkific
  • admins can add profiles manually in the dashboard, or import profiles from a spreadsheet

This article will cover the third case in that list: admin-added profiles.

Once the admin has added or imported profiles, it is common to want to allow individual members to gain access to those profiles, in order that they can keep their profiles up-to-date as well as fill in any missing information.

A membership account is the account that your members use to log in to the directory on your website, and which grants them access to the profiles that they "own". Members can edit or delete any profiles that they are the "owners" of.

To enable your members to edit the profiles that you added, you need to:

  1. Make sure each member has an account
  2. Make sure each member account has ownership of the profile that they should "own"

The Community Box dashboard has a feature called "Grant ownership" which will take care of both of these requirements. The "Grant ownership" feature will analyze each profile that you select, and either:

  • if a member account already exists with the same email address as the email address in the profile, then the profile will be assigned to that member account
  • if no member account can be found an email address that matches the one in the profile, then a new member account will be set up (with a randomly generated password) and the profile will be assigned to that member account
    • at the end of the "Grant ownership" process, you will have the choice to download a spreadsheet containing the temporary passwords for any new member accounts that were set up. You can download this and share the temporary passwords with each member. Alternatively, many customers prefer to let the members "claim" the newly added membership account using the "Claim your profile" feature.

To use "Grant ownership" on your directory:

  1. Go to Manage -> Entries in the Community Box dashboard so that you can see the list of entries
  2. Select the profiles that you would like to set up membership accounts for
  3. Click the Grant ownership button at the top of the page

How members claim their profiles

Once you have set up a member account and associated that account with the profile as explained above, it's time for the member to start editing their profile.

Let's assume that your directory is embedded on a website at https://example.com/directory

You can now send your member the following link: https://example.com/directory#confirm-account - notice the #confirm-account at the end of the link. This will ask the member for an email address. ⚠️The address they enter must match the email address of their member account.⚠️

This will take them through a few steps, such as confirm their email address by entering a code, and after that they will have access to their profile.

If this is the first time you are experimenting with this feature, it is often helpful to try out the flow yourself: add a test profile, set up a member account and then go to the link with #confirm-account at the end of the link as shown above, and go through the flow. This will give you a better understanding of how the profile-claiming flow works, before sharing it with the members of your community.