TeamKinetic v1.3 March 2019 Release

Hi there and welcome to the 1.3 release of TeamKinetic. We’ve got some great new time saving features this time round, the normal raft of small fixes and tweaks and a large dollop of accessibility improvement as we journey towards a fully accessible system for all users.

Headline Updates

• Full screen layout for administrators and providers. We’ve removed the logo header bar to give more room for what matters
• Brand new dashboard for administrators and providers
• Universal search across volunteers, opportunities and providers is available right from the top menu on all pages
• New mapping library which produces we think, better looking maps
• Trusted status for providers
• Upload your own custom areas for reporting and searching
• Contextual help bar available anytime from the top menu
• Keyboard accessible menus
• Accessible forms
• Accessible help tooltips
• Accessibility layout improvements
• Front page slider image controls improved
• New application options
• New POD functionality
• Pause or end participation in a flexible opportunity without leaving the opportunity and losing hours.

New Dashboard

We’ve completely redesigned the dashboard for administrators and providers and it is now very much focused around helping you to get the tasks you need to do, done!

Authorisations, latest chatter messages, logged hours since your last visit and lots more are displayed right there everytime you login. We’ve added some insight into your programme, like who is logging hours, which opportunities or providers are performing badly and suggested tasks to keep on top.

We think this new dashboard will be a real time saver.

Universal Search

From the top menu bar you now have access to a number of new areas including the universal search. It’s a stripped down lookup service that will find matching volunteers, opportunities and providers.

Its obviously not as fully featured as the specific search pages for volunteers, opportunities and providers, but its fantastic for navigating quickly between different things. It also gives you a little visual clue as to the status of each entity, red for access denied when a volunteer, unauthorised when a provider and closed when an opportunity and green for access granted, authorised and open respectively.

New Mapping Service

We are switching to Open Streetmap for our mapping service. This is a fantastic open sourced effort to map the world without the propriety nature and vagaries of being in the Google ecosystem. It also has we think more natural looking maps.

Contextual Help

We have built a foundation for us to enable contextual help on every page. This will be accessible from the help icon in the top menu and will reveal all the help topics and tutorials for the page you are currently using. Both administrators and providers have access and we hope it will help new providers especially, get the most from TeamKinetic, and of course ask you less questions!

We are working hard to get help for as many pages as possible on launch but we’ll be adding them progressively and in response to questions that regularly arise. Let us know if there are any topics you’d like to see in the help menus to aid your users.

Accessibility

I’ve already blogged about the accessibility improvements we have coming in this release. This has been a really rewarding process and I’m looking forward to some feedback for how we can keep improving in this area. Most of the effort has been concentrated in the volunteer’s portal but there have been improvements throughout.

New Administrator Controls

• Include the volunteer stats in the weekly email. We had some reports that volunteers that were interested in volunteering but hadn’t yet taken the plunge, we’re getting discouraged seeing zero stats every week!
• Overlapping session booking option. Using this you can control if volunteers can join sessions which overlap or conflict. We are working on providing a further control to determine how close the sessions need to be in order to initiate the conflict. Volunteers are informed if they attempt to join sessions which overlap, on either the same or different opportunities. By default volunteers are not allowed to join overlapping sessions.
• Require volunteers to upload a photo before they can join any opportunities.
• Display nationally shared opportunities on your version of the native mobile applications. When enabled users will also be able to view and join nationally shared opportunities direct from their applications.

Ending Flexible Opportunity Attendance

For very long running flexible opportunities its useful to know if volunteers are finished. Previously this was only really possible by asking the volunteer to leave the opportunity but that meant there was now a hole in the audit trail and information for that opportunity.

Volunteers can now click a button when logging hours to say they won’t be logging any more hours and have effectively left the opportunity.

The same functionality is also available for administrators from the volunteer list on the opportunity management page. Just click the pause icon to flip the volunteer to the finished state and the play icon to flip the back. The volunteers that have finished are separated from the still active ones so you can easily keep track of your flexible volunteers.

Launch Date

We’ve processed close to 200 issues for this release and there are many small improvements and bug fixes throughout the application and we are excited to be releasing 1.3 on March 31st.

Don’t forget you can test out all these features on the beta site using your regular administrator login. We’d love you feedback or review at Trustpilot.