Member records, photos and courses

Read What's synced and what you can edit first — it covers the general rule that synced fields are read-only. This article covers the parts specific to member records.

Members

Member records are synced from your member data source. Core fields — name, contact details, firm, member type, status, dates and designations — are overwritten on every sync.

There is one important exception.

The Member Profile group is yours

Inside a member record you'll find a group called Member Profile (self-editable). This holds the member's photo, their public mobile preference, website and social links, and their professional experience.

The sync never writes to this group. Anything a member enters there, or that you enter on their behalf, survives every future sync. This is the correct place to record member-supplied detail.

Everything outside that group is owned by the source system. If a member's name or firm is wrong, it has to be corrected in the source system — correcting it in the CMS will not hold.

A blank Designations field is usually correct

Most members do not hold a designation. An empty Designations field almost always means the member genuinely has none — not that the sync failed.

Member photos

Member photos live in their own Member Photos collection, not in the Media library.

This is deliberate. An association can have tens of thousands of member headshots, and putting them in Media would make the media library unusable for everyone doing ordinary content work.

A photo that a member has uploaded is never overwritten by an import.

Offices

Offices on this site are entirely feed-owned. Every field is read-only, and the collection is staff-only — office records do not appear on the public website.

This is stricter than it is on some other association sites, so don't assume the behaviour carries across if you've used another one.

Courses

Courses come from your association's education system and appear in the Events collection with their Kind set to Course.

The Kind field is read-only. Courses are created by the education sync; events are either created by you or synced from the events feed.

Course records are read-only — change them in the education system.

Note: Not every course in your education system appears on the website. Which courses are published is a decision your association made during setup. If a course you expect is missing, that is usually the filter working as intended — check with your account contact before treating it as a fault.

What's synced and what you can edit
Licence and designation data on member records