Customize Directory Search

Go to Labels & Membership > Labels. Click on + Add Label, type your label name and then click Save. You can create as many labels as you’d like.

You can allow members to select their own Labels or you can assign them as the admin.

Allowing Members to Select their Own Labels

You can include a box on your Member Sign-Up and Member Manage templates that allows members to select their Labels when they join or log in to manage their accounts as shown here:

To add this box, go to Customization. Under each template (Member Sign-Up and Member Manage), click on + Add Box, and select the “Add/Remove Labels and Folders” box type. Next to “Selectable folders/labels” you will see all of your Folders and Labels. Click on each Label or Folder that you’d like the member to be able to choose from. The Labels or Folders you have selected or enabled will have a blue background.

You can set a maximum or minimum or minimum number of Labels/Folders members can select. This limits the number of categories a member can select in the directory, or limits the number of features a member can signup for.

Note: this limit is enforced when the member is updating or completing the form, it does not apply retroactively and will not automatically remove Labels/Folders if the member already exceeds the limit.

Click OK to save the box, and click Save Template to finalize the update to your template.

Note that you can create multiple boxes with different Labels that members can select in each box. So for example, you could have a box where the member chooses what committee they would like to join, and another box where they choose what business category to be listed in.

This method of allowing the member to select Labels may be superior to creating a drop down field: 

• If new selections need to be added, you do not have to manually re-sort the list so that it’s alphabetical.
• If you need to make changes to one of the selections when using a drop down field, changes result in the customer losing their selection. Whereas with Labels you can edit the Label name without the customer losing the Label.
• You can make this Label selection field “required” by setting the minimum number of labels to select to “1”.

Assigning Member Labels as the Administrator

You can also assign Labels to members as an administrator. Go to the member’s profile and click on + Add Label to add a Label to that member’s account.

If you need to assign Labels in bulk, you can do a bulk update using a CSV file. For more information on bulk updates please see Help > Membership > Importing Members > Making Bulk Updates Using Import.

For the final step, go to Customization > Directory Search. Click on + Add Search Box. Give the new box an appropriate title and select “Search by Folder/Label” as the box type. Then click on the labels you’d like website visitors to choose from in that box. The selected/enabled labels will have a blue background. Click on OK to save the box, and click Save Template to save the changes to your directory search.

You can create multiple “Search by Folder/Label” boxes to your directory search, allowing you to separate different types of labels. For example, you can have one search box for searching by committees, and another for searching by business category.