How to create a member area (or intranet)?

To create a member area (or intranet), create a dedicated menu in Administration > Website > Menus & Pages, then restrict the visibility of that menu and its pages to the people of your choice. A member area is a private section of your website accessible only to authorized users: it lets you share confidential content, organize internal information and strengthen member engagement.

This article covers:

• The benefits of a member area
• Creating a member area from your platform

The benefits of a member area

Giving your members a dedicated area on your nonprofit's website has many benefits, both for you and for them. In particular, it lets you:

• add value to membership in your organization, by reserving private content for your members (resource articles, how-to sheets or documents for volunteers, for example);
• protect your community's personal information, by placing items such as the member directory in your member area, for example;
• easily share information internally: simpler than sending emails, you can share the latest news with your members straight from your website. As soon as it's saved, it's up to date in the member area!
• let your members update their own profile information: a new address, a new phone number, etc. That way, your member database stays up to date without any work on your part.

Creating a member area from your platform

To create a member area on your website, start by creating a new menu in Administration > Website > Menus & Pages. If you've never done this before, see the article Create and edit a menu.

All you then have to do is change the privacy settings of this menu and its associated pages, so that they're reserved for certain members.

To change a menu's visibility, click the “…” icon of the menu you want to reserve for your members. You can also do this when creating the menu.

Then all that's left is to set the privacy options by clicking “Menu name and visibility”.

Several options are then available to you:

• “Community” restricts your menu's visibility to people in your contact database. They will therefore need to be logged in to access the pages in this area;
• “Administrators” lets you restrict access to your platform's administrators;
• “Certain groups” restricts the area's visibility to one or more of your groups;
• “Members” and “Donors” let you reserve the area for people identified in your database as members and donors respectively.

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

You can then customize the access settings for that page, as well as define how the page behaves for people who don't have access:

• let them see that the page exists, but deny access to it;
• hide the page completely from people who aren't concerned.

Your member area is now live: the menu and its pages only appear for authorized people once they're logged in. You can then create a login / sign-up page, then add a button to your website linking to this area by following the article Add or remove the member area login button on your website.

To go further:

• Create and edit a menu
• Create a login / sign-up page
• Add or remove the member area login button on your website
• Set up your Community's unique identifier