In July 2011, the MACE-Dir working group distributed this survey, the development of which was led by David Bantz, U. Alaska. Respondents included representatives from a wide spectrum, ranging from small private colleges to large public universities, and included some from outside the US.

Institutions of learning often need to provide access to electronic services or resources to individuals who do not have a formal relation with the institution either as student or employee. Such users are often referred to as guests or affiliates or sponsored members of the institution (that is, rather than students, faculty, or staff). Access to a specific services may be provided to guests by ad hoc or exception processing, but such manual and application-specific processing easily leads to cumbersome and slow provisioning, inconsistent user experience, and consequent support headaches. Many institutions seeking to streamline, scale, and rationalize authentication and privilege management for an increasing number of services have developed systems (technologies and business processes) to manage guest identities - that is, to create and manage digital identities for guests, affiliates, or sponsored members within or parallel to management of digital identities for students and employees. This survey aims to collect information about how institutions have addressed this need. The results should indicate both the breadth of approaches already deployed and inform decision-making by institutions looking to develop solutions.