Updated over a year ago

A directory is only as good as the day it was last true.

Somebody joins, fills in the job they had at the time, and moves on with their life. Two years later they are at a different firm in a different city and their card still says otherwise. Nobody is being lazy — there is simply no moment in a normal week when it occurs to you to go log in and edit a profile.

So the network quietly rots. Not dramatically. Just enough that the search that would have worked returns the wrong company, and the member who gets a cold email about a job she left in 2024 decides this place is not really for her.

What changed

The digest already lands in everyone's inbox every month. It now opens with your own profile — before the network news, before anything else.

Three fields — role, company, city — and the date you last changed any of them.

The date is the whole idea

Nobody knows how old their profile is. Showing them is most of the work.

Over twelve months old and the date turns amber. Blank fields say Not set in the same colour, the missing photo becomes a dashed circle you can click, and the button is a solid Update profile.

If everything is filled in and recent, it does none of that. It just checks.

That restraint matters. A section that shouts at everyone every month gets ignored by month three; a section that is quiet when you are fine is one people actually read when it is not.

Here it is in the email:

Why edits stopped spamming the digest

Making this work meant being careful about what counts as a change.

A profile gets written to constantly for reasons nobody cares about — a privacy toggle, an enrichment timestamp, a status change. If all of those counted, the "Updated" date would always look fresh and the Profile Updates section of the digest would fill up with members who changed nothing.

So the platform now tracks community-relevant changes separately: name, role, company, city, industry, skills, socials, photo, class year, hometown. Those bump the date. Bookkeeping does not. It is the kind of distinction nobody should ever have to think about, which is the point — the date means what a member assumes it means.

For coaches

Nothing to turn on; it is part of the digest for every program.

The one thing worth knowing: this quietly improves your directory for everybody. Every member who fixes their own card makes every future search better, and they do it without you chasing anyone.

One thing to try this week

Open your own digest and look at your own block first. If your date is amber, fix it before you send anyone else a reminder — the coach's profile is the one members check to see whether this place is real.