Just a small release with some bug fixes but still a couple of new features for added value!
Bulk Actions on Sessions
Great time saver here for those that deal with many sessions on an opportunity. Similarly to when you are using the volunteer or opp search, you can check individual, or all sessions, and perform some actions on them.
Currently, you can email all the volunteers on that session, update the session’s time and duration, download the volunteer details for everyone on the selected sessions, and delete the selected sessions. There is also the potential to add further actions if anyone has any great ideas.
Admin Chat Rooms
We hope you’ll get on board and make use of this new feature where you’ll be able to ask advice and give advice to your fellow volunteer coordinators.
We’ve currently got three fixed rooms and you can add new posts and reply in much the same way as you do now for the opportunity chat rooms. You can also subscribe to each room and get email alerts when new posts are added.
You’ll find the chat rooms in the Help and Support menu. We are quite excited about this and hope you can use it to good effect.
As always, we are ready to take your feedback and questions in all the normal channels.
Pretty much on time, we are now entering the beta release phase for our next major release, bumping the version number up to 2.2.
So what’s coming in this release, read on to find out.
New Opportunity Creation System
We’ve been aware for a while of just how long and intimidating the opportunity creation forms were, especially for new users. There was also the issue of the ‘Quick’ opportunity type mixing together an opportunity that was quick to enter, with an opportunity that was only being used to advertise an opportunity for providers that have their own volunteer management systems.
So we have created a new system for creating opportunities that splits everything into smaller chunks, offers people an easier way to add new images, less complex location entry, and is a lot simpler to use.
For those providers that are managing their own volunteers, there is a very clear option selection card that explains what will happen. These types of opportunities will also have a much simplified management page that lets the provider know how many people have viewed the opp, clicked the more info buttons, and who those volunteers are if we know.
Better Sharing Options
If you share your opportunities via LinkWide or into the national Scottish system MILO, then you’ll notice some improvements.
Firstly you can now belong to multiple LinkWide groups, and have individual sharing settings for each group; so you can share into one group but only accept shares from another group for instance.
If you are sharing to MILO you can now add existing opportunities to MILO, previously you could only share at the point of opp creation. When an opp is shared you’ll also see all the details you need to find it in MILO
New Date Custom Question Type
We’ve added date as a custom question type for volunteers and providers, and updated the custom question search filters to match.
This opens the door for some very useful reporting and recording methods for volunteer or provider details that are not covered by our regular registration or profile details. By recording dates against volunteers and providers, you can use the filters to find out which people have dates that have expired or that are due soon by using the equals, before, after, and between date filters.
You can imagine the potential for recording and managing things like yearly training, qualifications, driving licenses and insurance etc.
Schedule Bulk Emails
Create an email and schedule it to be sent at specific times. This is a super useful addition and is great for running campaigns or for sending emails over the weekend when you don’t want to be working!
Reporting Improvements
We’ve added applicants for opportunities to the reporting page so you can see at a glance how many applicants are in each status.
We’ve audited all the reports and aligned provider, admin and summary reports so you see the same numbers everywhere!
We’ve added a new download report which has all volunteer opportunity data that can be aggregated by opportunity or session, including custom fields.
The day schedule report is now available for providers as well, of course, limited to just their opportunities.
The mapping features have been added for providers so they can locate all their opportunities and volunteers.
You can now filter and search providers based on their custom fields and also filter volunteers on their qualification names and lapse dates.
Any downloads from the volunteer or provider search page now include their custom field responses.
Opportunity Custom Badges in Search Page
If you’ve added custom badges to opportunities (and if not, why not!), your volunteers will now be able to see those badges in the search page and also filter on those badges.
Useful Hints and Tips
You’ll see when you log in that a small hints and tips area appears at the top of the page giving you some quick info about a feature. We’ll be adding to these tips continually as new features come online and you can choose to switch them off completely or hide them for 30 days if they are starting to bore you!
We hope this will introduce our customers to new features or techniques they might not be aware of.
Manage Your Account
We’ve added a new icon to the top right which allows you to manage your account, it also tells you who you are logged in as if you have multiple accounts.
From here you can also switch the hints and tips back on if you have changed your mind! There are a few other settings to help personalise your experience and we’ll be adding more, so suggestions are welcome.
New Automated Emails
We’ll now remind providers when their opportunities are close to finishing, along with a link to update the opportunity.
Volunteers will get a message wishing them all the best on their birthdays and thanking them for volunteering.
We have also added a reminder email for volunteers to log their hours for past opportunities and complete post-opp surveys and uploads if they are required.
Volunteer Inbox
A brand new message inbox for volunteers that shows all the emails and messages they have received and lets them reply directly to the sender. This should help volunteer questions about specific opportunities get through to the provider rather than using the general purpose contact us page.
Talking of the general purpose Get in Touch page; if the volunteer is logged in it will redirect them to the new inbox area above and they can select from the TO field either the organisation or any of the providers they are currently engaged with. This will reduce those misdirected messages even more.
Dashboard Improvements
We’ve added a panel for ‘Things happening today’ that shows sessions and meetings and things like that that are happening today.
Panels that are empty or not needed. For instance, if you auto-approve providers, are now hidden.
More and more tables throughout the app are now sortable in place using the icons at the top of the columns, with no page refresh required.
Improvements to Max Slot Numbers for Sessions
You can now alter the global maximum slot number per session from the sessions tab, rather than having to go to the restrictions tab.
For flexible opportunities it looks like this;
And for sessional opps, there is a little button to reveal the options, it could be quite a destructive process so we want to make sure, and it looks like this;
There are also over 120 smaller bug fixes and improvements in this release many as a direct result of support tickets and feature requests so keep them coming.
Steve also went through the new release in a few online sessions. If you missed them, you can catch up by clicking here.
Thanks everyone.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
Roles are a great tool for onboarding your volunteers and can be better in many cases than using custom registration or profile questions. Learn how to create a role, add it to an opportunity and process your applications.
Who Should Attend
This is an advanced topic and you should be familiar with how to create opportunities, use the application process and other ways to restrict volunteer access to an opportunity.
Join Steve in this session on reporting with TeamKinetic. He covers everything you need to know, from general reports to requesting your own custom reports.
Knowing how much volunteering has been taking place and on what types of opportunities offers a real key insight into the success of your volunteer programme. This session will cover the most commonly used aspects of the reporting menu and how to find the answers you need from your TeamKinetic system.
Welcome to another TeamKinetic Masterclass. This time we’re looking at safeguarding good practice in TeamKinetic, including managing manual and digital ID and background checks.
Safeguarding is a complex and tough subject, with no single strategy that works for everyone. Hopefully, this Masterclass will illustrate the tools and functions in TeamKinetic that can be incorporated into your safeguarding strategy.
We will start with manual background and identity checks which are the traditional methods, moving on to introduce our fully integrated, digital ID and background checks. No more in-person or post-office identification checks!
Background checks are just the start, there are many other tools and functions in TeamKinetic that can help.
We will also be taking a look at storing and distributing documents, data retention and data deletion, references, feedback, managing chat rooms and keeping accurate notes within TeamKinetic.
Who needs to learn about safeguarding help in TeamKinetic?
This is a topic for any admin users that are responsible for creating or executing safeguarding policies.
You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’.
If you’d like to suggest a masterclass on a TeamKinetic feature, please let us know. We’d be happy to develop one on any topic! You can get in touch via our website, email, phone, or social media. See all the important links below.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
Join Steve in this TeamKinetic Masterclass on managing volunteer expenses.
Allowing your volunteers to claim back expenses is a great way to diversify your volunteer base. Find out where all the features you need are, and also about our in-app payments system so you can pay volunteers directly.
Who is this TeamKinetic masterclass for?
This is an advanced topic and attendees should be familiar with how to create opportunities already.
You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’.
If you’d like to suggest a future TeamKinetic Masterclass, please let us know. We’d be happy to develop one on any topic! You can get in touch via our website, email, phone, or social media. See all the important links below.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
If you’re going to be managing volunteer references with TeamKinetic, this is the masterclass for you.
References are very useful, but it is a fairly new feature to TeamKinetic so might not have been covered in your initial training. In this masterclass, Steve will get you up to speed quickly on references and how to add them to your opportunities.
Who needs to know about managing volunteer references?
This is a more advanced topic. Therefore it is suitable for TeamKinetic admin users who are already familiar with opportunity creation and the onboarding and restriction model for opportunities.
You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’.
If you’d like to suggest a masterclass on a TeamKinetic feature, please let us know. We’d be happy to develop one on any topic! You can get in touch via our website, email, phone, or social media. See all the important links below.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
A masterclass in how to leverage the extensive functions and features in TeamKinetic when it comes to communicating with users.
In this TeamKinetic Masterclass, Steve covers the different communication tools available, what contexts to use them in, and how to use them most effectively when communicating with users.
Communication tools available within TeamKinetic include emails (singular/bulk), SMS text messaging, chat rooms, notifications, and newsletters.
Watch the session on communicating with users below, or click here
You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’.
If you’d like to suggest a masterclass on a TeamKinetic feature, please let us know. We’d be happy to develop one on any topic! You can get in touch via our website, email, phone, or social media. See all the important links below.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
Only a month since the last interim release and here we are again!
As you can tell from the version number bump this is a mostly minor release but there are a few goodies in there.
Email Failure Reports
Our Enterprise level customers can now see a report of the last month’s email failures. This includes hard bounces, where the email was returned for some reason and could not be delivered, rejects where the email address does not exist, and spam responses where the user has reported the email as spam.
In the case of rejects and hard bounces, the volunteer or provider email is marked as INVALID and in the case of spam reports they are marked as DO NOT SEND EMAILS. In both cases the email address will no longer be sent any bulk group, or weekly emails.
We are working on including the email content and subect so that you know which email raised the error and failed.
Event Area Updated
The event area has now been updated to match the look and functionality of the volunteer and opportunity search and manage pages. It looks a lot easier on the eye and for those of you that run a lot of events, you can now easily search them.
Storage Improvements
We’ve mow moved nearly all of the image and document storage to Amazon’s S3 which should improve load and caching times for images like the opportunity images, event images, downloadable documents etc.
There will not be any visible changes and it should be totally transparent to our customers.
Club Functionality Integrated
For those enterprise customers that use ClubKinetic, this has all been integrated into the main top menu bar under the, obvious heading, clubs!
The pages have also been updated to match the layout and functionality of the main areas.
New Qualifications Search Filter
For those customers that use volunteer qualifications you can now filter your volunteers on their uploaded qualifications.
Refreshed and Update News Area
For the administrators the news area has been refreshed and now looks and acts the same as the main areas of the application.
More Sortable Tables
We’ve added some simple sorting to tables that are not paged through many records, for instance the open opportunities table on the admin dashboard. Just click the column header to sort and each time you click the sort direction will be reversed.
There are also the normal smaller bug fixes and visual immprovements throughout the application. Many thanks to everyone that opens support tickets with ideas or lets us know if something isn’t working properly.
You’ll already be on the new release by the time you read this, so enjoy and get in touch if you have any comments.
