Select Currency
Canadian Dollar
US Dollar
This article will help you to understand best practices regarding the storing of email addresses and creating personal hub accounts for children, as well as help you understand how Connection Card Pro works.
Connection Card Pro does not allow children under the age of 13 to create a personal hub account. We have made this decision for a number of reasons. This is partly determined by the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA). Although there are some exceptions in which case a personal hub account may not fall under the rules of COPPA, we have decided to adhere to those regulations regardless, as having access to their own personal hub account likely would not be in the best interest of a child under 13 anyway.
For this reason, we also recommend that your make it your standard practice to not store email addresses for children under the age of 13 in your database.
Here are a few considerations:
Rather than storing a parent's email address or cell phone number in a child's profile, we instead recommend linking the child and parents as a family connection. When sending emails/texts to the parents of children in a department, using our "Smart Box" for recipients, you can select the "Parents of" keyword. As long as children and parents are properly linked in their profiles, then selecting the "Parents of" for members of a group, Connection Card Pro will automatically send the email or text message to the email address or cell phone number which is on the parent's profile rather than the child's profile.
You can allow anyone in your database to have access to their personal hub account by sending them a direct invite link. However, if you allow individuals to register for personal hub access on their own, you may run into issues when storing a parent's email address in a child's profile.
When setting up a personal hub account without an invite link, the user will enter their email address and Connection Card Pro will find the person that email address is associated with. If that email address is associated with multiple people, then others may be ignored.
If the person that the system finds associated with the email address is under 13, then the creation of a personal hub account will not be allowed. Additionally, if multiple people have the same email address, then the personal hub account may end up being linked to the wrong person.
For this reason, we recommend not storing a parent's email address in the child's profile.
However, if for any reason it is important that you store the parent's email address with the child's profile, you could simply add a plus sign (+) followed by the child's first name when storing the email address in the child's profile. For example, if the parent's email is "MrsMom101@??...com", and she has two children, Cooper and Katy, then you could store mom's email in Cooper and Katy's profiles as "mrsmom101+cooper@??....com" and mrsmom101+katy@??....com".
By storing emails in this way, the emails will still go to the mom's email address (as long as everything before the plus sign is correct), but Connection Card Pro will treat this as a unique email address. This is also a great way for parents to sort incoming email for their children, as they can create filters to filter incoming email by the address used!