Create a members' area (or intranet)

Before starting

If you've built your association's website on Springly, it might be a good idea to create a space reserved for your members, also known as an intranet. This private space offers a number of advantages, which we'll discuss below.

• Benefits of having a members' area
• Creating a members' area

Benefits of having a members' area

Providing your members with a dedicated space on your association's website has many advantages, both for you and for them. This makes it possible to:

• Promote membership of your association, by reserving private content for your members (resource articles, fact sheets, or documents reserved for volunteers, for example).
• Protecting personal information of your community, by placing elements such as the directory on your members' area, for example.
• Easily share information internally, simpler than sending an e-mail, you can share the latest information with your members from your website. As soon as it's saved, it's up to date in the member's area!
• Allow your members to modify their profile information, updating an address, changing a telephone number, etc. So your member base stays up to date without you having to intervene.

Creating a members' area

To create a members' area from your platform, simply create a new menu on your website.

Then simply modify the visibility of this menu and related pages, so it is reserved to certain members.

To do this, go to Website > Menu and Pages , and click on the "..." icon of the menu you wish to reserve for your members. Then all that's left to do is define your privacy settings by clicking on "Name and menu visibility".

You have several options:

• "Community" restricts the visibility of your menu to people belonging to your contact database. They must therefore be logged in to access the directory page on your site.
• "Administrators" allows you to restrict access to your platform's administrators.
• "Some groups" restricts the visibility of the space to one or more of your groups.
• "Members" and "Donors" allow you to reserve the space for people respectively identified as members and donors within your database.

By default, all pages belonging to the member area have the same privacy settings as the menu. However, you can customize access to each page by clicking on the  "..." icon and then on "Page name and visibility".

You can then customize the access parameters to the page in question, as well as defining the page's behavior for people who don't have access to it:

• Allow to see that the page exists, but deny access to it;
• Hide the page for uninvolved parties.

Once you've created your member area, you can choose to add a login button to your site. To do so, we invite you to consult article on the subject.