Managing Your Account
There are a few account-management things that are pretty generic or just don't fit neatly into the other walkthroughs, and this covers those. Everything happens in your user account area - once you're logged in, click Account in the top navigation and then Account Info to get there.
The Account Information page is where you update your email address or your password. If your email changes, you can come in here and update it even if you've lost access to the old inbox - as long as you can still log in with your current password, you're fine. If you've lost your password and can't get in at all, that's a separate thing: you'll need to use the password reset feature.
The Contact Info page is where you enter your name and location. Your name actually goes into your membership agreement, so before you sign it you can edit this freely, but once you've signed the membership agreement, your name info gets locked and you'll have to contact support to change it. Location info isn't used for anything beyond internal purposes, and you can change it whenever you want.
The Payments Dashboard shows everything tied to payments you've made, whether that's membership dues or donations. There are four tabs - charges, invoices, subscriptions and their status, and payment methods. On the payment methods tab you can see what's saved, edit or remove those, and add new ones.
One thing worth calling out: we do accept payment methods other than cards. Some people would rather not use a card, and some folks out of the country can't. The catch is that a few of these methods can take days to verify, so if you're planning to join the membership or get a document, add your payment method from the dashboard first. That way you're not in a spot where you've submitted your contribution but it's stuck on a three or four-day hold. When you add one, pick the method, fill out the details, check the box to save it, and hit Add Payment Method - and for bank accounts especially, make sure you click through that last confirmation step instead of stopping when it looks done.
00:09
Welcome everybody. In this video, we are going to go over a couple of things about how to manage your account. There are other videos where we go over things about managing your account that are very specific to those. So this is just going to have some of the extra stuff that is generic or doesn't fit into those. And to do this, you're going to have to go to your user account area. So in the top navigation, once you're logged in, if you click Account, then there's going to be Account Info, and that's going to take you to your user account area.
00:42
This account information page is where you can update your email address or your password. So if your email address changes, you can always come in here and update this, even if you don't have access to that old email anymore. As long as you can log in, if you still know what your password was, you can log in, come to this page, and change your email address. You can also change your password here, and if you lost your password and can't get in, you will have to use the password reset feature, which is separate.
01:16
This is the contact info page of your user account area, and here you can see that you can enter your name and location info. Your name is actually used in your membership agreement. Your location information we don't use other than for internal purposes. Before you sign your membership agreement, you can edit this information. But once you sign your membership agreement, since that's used in it, we actually lock it. So if I refresh the page now, here's what it looks like when it's locked.
01:43
So if you ever need to change your name info after you've completed your membership agreement, you will have to contact support. But you can change your location info at any time. This is the payments dashboard page of your user account area, and here you can see information related to payments that you've made, whether that be for membership dues or for donations that you've made to us.
02:10
You can see we have four tabs here, so you can see charges, invoices, subscriptions, and their status, and this last tab is for payment methods. On this payment methods tab, you can see your saved payment methods, and you can do things like remove them or edit them if you have to change your information, or you can add new payment methods using this section below. We do accept payment methods other than cards. So we know some people don't like to use cards. There's also circumstances where there are people out of country that can't use a card, or they need to use something special.
02:43
So if you need to use a payment method that's not a card, we suggest that you come to this area first and try to add it. That's because some of these payment methods might require days of verification. So if you're trying to join the membership or if you're trying to get a document, we suggest adding those payment methods here first so that there's not some type of situation where you have submitted your contribution, but then there's this three, four-day hold.
03:13
So if you would like to use a payment method other than a card, please do come to your payments dashboard here and do it that way. When you are adding a payment method to your account, what you're going to do is you're just going to choose the method and then fill out the information. So you see here, I filled out a card. Fill it out, make sure you check this box to save it, and then click this button, Add Payment Method. The reason I'm giving you this example is because it can be a little bit confusing for bank accounts.
03:47
So this is just an example in test mode. But once you go through this process, depending on what you choose, this will look different. And then you'll hit this point. And it may look like, oh, I've added it, but really what you want to do is you want to make sure to click this and finish it off like that. So there, now you've added it. You can see that it's in there. Just wanted to make sure I explicitly showed that last little step there.
04:15
And that wraps up everything else about managing your user account. There might be some things in other videos, but this is some of the most basic stuff. So if you have any questions beyond this, please feel free to reach out and let us know. Thanks for staying to the end of this one, and hope this was helpful.
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