You can also do this trick with webforms or with profiles.
One feature of Powerbase is the ability to send a personalized email to existing people in your database that allows them to update their own information using the Profile feature. Each person that you send this email to will have a special, unique link that is good for 7 days. When that link is clicked it opens the database in their browser with the fields of information within their contact record that you want them to update. If those fields contain information already, then that information will appear in their profile form and they can edit it if they wish.
Here’s how you can do this:
Check your data
Make sure that the people you want to update their info in your database already have a record with at least an email addresses. I know, obvious, but still...
Create the Form Builder
We have a full help file on creating form builder forms which explains all the ins and outs.
When creating a form builder for users to update their information, there are number of special settings that must be set:
On the form tab:
- Form Settings: Permission: Use exactly one of these generic permissions
- "Generic: Allow any authenticated contact" (if you allow email-link and/or logged-in users)
- "Generic: Anyone with secret link" (if the email-link is the only way to get in)
- "Generic: Allow all users (including anonymous)" (if you allow anon and/or logged-in and/or email-links)
- (Do not require any other permissions.)
- Form Settings: Placement: Page Route: Yes, fill in a value (civicrm/my-path)
- Form Settings: Placement: Accessible on front-end: Enable
- Form Settings: Placement: Expose To: Message Tokens
Individual tab on the form:
- Individual 1: Security: Form-Based
- Individual 1: Autofill: Current User
- Individual 1: Allowed Actions: Must enable "Update". In some cases, "Create" may also makes sense.
- Individual 1: Accept ID from URL: Disable (not strictly forbidden/tested -- but just doesn't make sense with any "Form-based" security. It's a feature for RBAC use-cases.)
Create the email
In your email, you will need to include the link to the profile form you want people to update. When composing the email message, you can use the "Tokens" option to find the Form Builder you created. If you scroll to the "Forms" section of tokens, you will see two options for every Form Builder form you have.
- Full Hyperlink - Use this token if you plan to include the link in the body of your message. It will be properly formatted as a hyper link.
- URL - Use this token if you are specifying the link as part of a button setting - it will only include the link itself.
Test
When doing this for the first time, make a small group to use for testing. Make sure that your are NOT logged into PowerBase when you click on the link in the email. This will allow you to see the experience that your users will have.