It is recommended that you use your personal email address for your officer listing and to purchase your personal membership. You may also have a separate account with your generic officer email address to send messages, etc.
The long answer & FAQs...
Your account used in organization profiles, hubs, and officer positions is tied to one email address which is used to uniquely identify you within Givebacks. For PTAs, this identifies you and at every level of PTA, local through national. This is common practice in databases where a private unique identifier, such as your social security number, is not stored or accessible.
What's the difference?
As a volunteer, you are a person and should use your personal email to identify yourself as such. As an officer, for example, you are fulfilling a role that will be fulfilled by someone else in the future, and as such, any generic email address is tied to the role itself and should be maintained separately from you as a person. Keeping your personal profile separate from generic/role-based profiles makes it easier as you transition in and out of organizational roles.
What's wrong with using a generic email address on my personal profile?
If your personal profile is associated with a generic email address, it would be confusing later on as you transition out of your role, since you probably want to remain a member of your current organization/hubs. It would also cause problems in historical records, such as those at a state PTA, after you transition out of that role because someone new would receive emails sent to that address when the state office may need to contact you personally. If the generic email address is used to report officers, your state office may also be falsely led to believe that there was no transition of that position since the email address remained the same.
What if my officer email address will not be passed on to anyone else?
Even if your officer email address is specific to you as a person (e.g. Jane.Doe@SchoolPTA.org), it would still be best to keep this separate from your personal profile, especially if you are involved in multiple organizations. If you are only involved in one organization and decide to use your non-generic officer email address for your personal account, you will need to change your email address in Givebacks before leaving the unit because the officer email address will be discontinued when you’re gone.
What if I want messages to come from the organization instead of myself?
If you want to use a generic officer email address for your position, you should create a separate generic profile to go with it. That way you can pass the profile and email address to an incoming officer without impacting your separate, personal profile/hubs/email. You will need to log out of one and into the other to switch between the two. Log into the generic profile to send messages, etc. on behalf of the organization, or log into your personal profile to manage your family, act as Room Parent, Board Member, Chairperson, send a personal message etc. You can add the generic email address as a note in your personal profile bio to help other users make the connection, if desired.
Are there any good reasons to add separate, generic profiles?
Using generic profiles can be a nice way for future officers/admins to know which hubs the President, Treasurer, etc. should belong in, as they can look to see which hubs the generic profile is in and add the appropriate personal profiles to those same hubs. The generic profiles may also be made site and hub administrators for easy transitions. These profiles should not be used for membership registration but may still be added to the member-related hubs for communication purposes. For example, if there is no current secretary, that role's generic profile could still be listed as a hub admin for regular users to see and contact, as long as anything sent to that email address would be forwarded to or received by another active board member.
I really want my emails from my State PTA to go to my officer email. Is there a way to do this?
With a recent update, officers can now be added as an officer under their officer/PTA email instead of their personal email. To ensure that your name is listed as an officer with this email and not past officers, you must change the name on the profile first, before adding your officer email as an officer. To edit the profile, login with the officer email and click the icon in the top right corner and click My Profile. You can then edit the profile.
If you are an officer trying to add a different officer with this PTA email and it is still showing the past officer's name on the profile, you will need to suggest the changes to the profile to show the new officer's name. Once the changes have been approved by the new officer, you will then be able to add them as an officer with the updated change to their profile.
Questions? Contact Givebacks Support.
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