Version 6.5 of VolunteerKinetic has now been rolled out across all systems. It represents a minor update to the software and contains the following key features.
Ability to Share Opportunities With Other Systems
You can now request your system to be linked with another system, allowing you to promote your opportunities to a wider cohort of volunteers. This update originated from GreaterSport where all 10 local authorities and 3 university systems have now been linked together across Greater Manchester, so when a provider or administrator creates an opportunity in any of the 13 systems they are asked if they want to share with their larger network.
How To Link Systems
1) Raise a support ticket detailing which system you want to be linked to.
2) Once your system is linked, you will see an additional question when creating opportunities (shown below), if you change this option to YES then the opportunity will be made available across all systems within that linked group.
Example: If you are only linked to one other system, by selecting YES your opportunity will be viewed by volunteers on both systems.
These external volunteers will be able to join the opportunity and the provider of the opportunity will be able to see the volunteers basic information and communicate with them in the normal way. So it will look and feel no different to the volunteers or providers.
The logged hours will belong to the system the opportunity is created in. But admins will be able to see a report showing how many hours their volunteers have done on external opportunities.
If you would like your system to be linked to another organisation the please let us know (obviously this will require consent from all parties).
Custom Areas
Administrators can now setup and search volunteers via their own set of geographical areas. So when the admin goes to the FIND VOLUNTEERS screen and clicks on the TOGGLE MORE SEARCH OPTIONS button they can choose to search for volunteers who come from their defined area list.
To do this you will need to raise a support ticket requesting an AREAS template, we will then send you an Excel spreadsheet with a list of all Outcodes in the UK.
Note: Outcodes are the first part of a postcode eg. L2 4GH the outcode would be L2, or M32 5KG the outcode would be M32.
Once you have completed the spreadsheet and sent it back, we will upload it to your system and the extra fields will appear on the RESIDENT IN AREA dropdown as shown below:
Provider Groups
A number of our customers will be using VolunteerKinetic to manage support programs such as Sports Leaders programmes or Duke of Edinburgh which includes recording and monitoring young peoples volunteering activity.
In this release we have enabled providers to create their own groups and move their volunteers between these groups. This will allow schools, that are providers to place their students in their corresponding class or Sports Leaders group and target opportunities and communications to them directly.
In addition we now allow volunteers to register via providers profile page, this automatically links the volunteer to the provider so the provider can see their logged hours and communicate with them.
Providers can also direct volunteers to a REGISTER AND GROUP page (shown below) this looks the same as the normal providers profile page but it allows volunteers to select a provider group when they register (eg. sports leaders L1) this will automatically put the volunteer into a specific provider group saving the provider the hastle of manually grouping them.
Reporting Snapshot
Just a quick change at the top of the REPORTING > REPORTING & ANALYSIS page to give some basic stats about your members. This shows the same opportunity stats as on the home page but also adds average age plus minimum and maximum age.
Interestingly this has brought to light an issue where genuine accounts have been added with seemingly incorrect birthdates giving some very young volunteers! It appears that people are entering the right day and month but not the correct year.
We will look at ways to make this less likely and will also be contacted all younger members (<16) to ask them to check and correct their profiles if their birthdate is incorrect.
There are also the usual small improvements, bug fixes and layout changes that all help to put a shine on the user interface. Still big news to come about version 7, TeamKinetic and our national site.
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