I just asked AQB Soft for a solution of a problem that comes up quite frequently when I set up my copy of the UNA framework. So, I thought I gonna address this to the whole community, since I suppose that there will be others who experience the same challenge as me regularely, when working with associations (or different types of membership organizations).
My case is, that my community consists of associations that I can service very well with the mods and fuctions the UNA framework offers. They can build special interrest groups, events, publish their docs, journals and congress reports, etc. That's the part I really appreciate.
But, on the other hand, the only thing that they can't do is to tell members from non-members. Let me explain in detail.
If there's a congress of a bigger association, it will invite their member organizations at no additional attendence fee, because attendence fees are already covered in their own yearly membership fee. Non-members should also have the option to attend, but they will have to pay for their attendence. This rather common use case for associations organizing events cannot be depicted in UNA events (and other paid content) mod, because when creating a new event, it's either every member has to pay (paid event) or nobody has to pay for it (default event).
Since I think, that associations are a perfect target group for the UNA community builder framework, I'd suggest that such a use case should get more consideration in the module development of UNA.
T
Here's another use case, for when it's useful being able to tell paying members from non-paying members, apart from associations. Let's say a company wants to create a customer community. Therefore, they invite their own customer base to join their organization profile on their UNA framework built platform. Now the company organizes events on- and offline for their customer community, like roadshows, asking an expert for tips&tricks in a streamed online meeting, participating in free courses, etc. Of corse, all of those events would be offered for free to existing customers (because the company tries to up- or cross-sell with those events). But for leads, the company might wish to collect fees from non-customers, for covering the costs of a roadshow or any other event. In that case, again an option is needed to distinguish between non-paying members from paying members in context elements.
I wonder if some form of generic tool can be used to achieve the same. Like, say, "coupon codes" for paid groups - so that admins could generate coupons to allow free membership, or, another option is to have a checkbox for "free access for invited members" - so that if a member is directly invited, they don't need to pay.
Perfect for the @AQB Soft team? May be a combination of the points, points voucher and QR code module...