The best way to draw alumni to their new portal is to give them the opportunity to connect with fellow alumni. That means you’ll want an alumni directory! You may also want a parent directory, or a faculty directory that provides more detailed information than the public website. In this article, find out how to create a role-protected directory in your portal and even let your constituents update it on their own!
Building the directory page(s)
Just like a portal is a regular Composer page, only private, the main setup of a portal directory is the same as any other directory. If you haven’t done this before, or you need a refresher, refer to the steps in Create a directory page.
Managing constituent privacy
Configuring the profile visibility settings in Constituent Manager is also part of creating a public directory, so this part may also be a review. Use the edit pencils next to each profile field to decide whether or not it will be visible in your directory, as described in Set directory profile data visibility.
Even if your directory page will be behind a password-protected portal, it’s a good idea to select the specific roles that should be able to view certain information for an extra layer of security.
Note: Privacy settings are complicated enough as it is, so it’s only possible to create one Constituent Role Format per role. If you have a public faculty directory and a private faculty directory, for example, and both use the Constituent Role Format, logged-in constituents would see the private information on the public page as well. That doesn’t mean the information is publicly available, but it may cause concern.
Additionally, when constituents have multiple roles and conflicting privacy settings, the most permissive setting wins. Take care when publishing a directory with such constituents. A teacher who is also an alumna may not mind sharing her personal email with other alumni, but not want it in the faculty directory.
Setting up a directory is one of the most important times to make sure your privacy settings are correct, so use the technique described in Preview role-restricted content to double-check your configuration.
Override default settings
“One size fits all” rarely works for everyone, so you may find that you need to change some privacy settings for a specific constituent. Use the “Unpublish Profile” checkbox at the top of the constituent’s profile to hide a profile completely on your website.
If you only need to hide a certain detail, click on the blue label for the field to bring up the override settings. The field’s default setting will be indicated, as well as options to show or hide the field completely.
Giving constituents the ability to customize
Especially when it comes to alumni — who aren’t officially affiliated with your organization anymore — letting your community members decide what of their information they want to display in the directory (or whether they want to be in the directory at all) is a recommended practice. While you’re setting field visibility in Constituent Manager, you can enable these settings for specific roles, as well.
On the General Settings tab for the role you’re creating the directory for, select “Enable self-updating of full profile visibility” to let them hide their profile entirely and the “Enable self-updating of profiles” checkbox for updating their own profiles.
On the Profile Fields tab, enable “Enable updates to this profile field by group constituents” within each profile field that you want them to be able to update. If you want them to choose whether the information in that field will be visible, select “Allow this profile field to be hidden or shown by group constituents,” as well.
Putting this ability in the hands of constituents means that you don’t have to spend the time updating everyone’s profiles yourself! You may still want to monitor the update activity, so you can set up notifications for when updates have been made.
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