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.
Hot on the heels of 2.09 from December we have another interim release for you. This one focuses on improvements to the expenses functionality after feedback and suggestions from our fantastic users. As always though, there is plenty of stuff to talk about.
Volunteer Expenses Improvements
Volunteers now have a few more options; they can update their bank details at anytime, delete unprocessed expense claims, and quickly view any current claims. Additionally if the claim has not yet been processed the volunteer can also update any of the details. We’ve also adjusted the layout so it looks better on small and mobile screens.
Administrator Expense Improvements
Administrators can now create a new expense claim for any volunteer without impersonating them. Just tap in the name of the volunteer and complete the form, dead easy.
When exporting the expense details to a CSV, we now include a link to the uplaoded receipt file if it exists, which makes it easier to pass the details on to a different department.
The volunteer’s bank details are now also visible and editable on their management page. All processed claims when marked as paid, are stored along with the bank account details that were recorded at that time, so you will have a nice audit trail if accounts change.
New Custom Emails
We’ve added a couple of new custom email and also split the emails up into three tabs; sent to volunteers, providers and admins.
You can now edit the password reset email to add more information and instruciton if your volunteers are struggling. This email was previously sent but was not customisable.
We’ve also added a brand new process for when a volunteer removes themselves (see below) from the system and we’ve added a custom email to go along with that process.
New Restore Feature For Volunteers
Previously when a volunteer deleted their own account they were taken back to the homepage and their data and login details were immediately removed.
Now the new custom email (see above) is sent and the volunteer is given some information about what happens now; when their data is destroyed etc. Most importantly, the email contains a special link that the volunteer can use to restore their account if they change their mind, or in case of a mistake. The volunteer has 48 hours to restore the account before its removed.
More Customisable Registration Fields
We’ve added the data sharing confirmation questions to those that are customisable from the super admin pages. So you can now update the label and the tool tip for these fields.
We’ve also improved the tool tip recognition code for your customised registration fields so they show more effectively now.
Dual Language Support for Custom Questions
We did previously support dual language for custom questions but now super admins can edit and adjust all their own custom questions at anytime from the same interface as the main language questions.
Dual Language Support for Customised Registration Questions
Additionally super admins can now also adjust the text, labels and tool tips for all the required registration questions instead of relying on the fixed translations.
Provider Search Speed Improvements
You may have noticed the provider search page was slowing down and took a number of seconds to return the first set of providers. These slowdowns when using the same database query as previous are due to table size effects and data complexity. The same query works fine upto a tipping point, then its slows down precipitously. The query has been redesigned and is now nice and snappy again.
As this is an interim release, we dont have the beta test period we employ with our larger release. This means this release will be hitting your browsers this week. Get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.
Our sincere apologies for the length of the outage reported today, we always strive to give our customers the best possible service and we failed today to identify and resolve the issue quickly enough.
What Happened?
From approximately 08:30 on Thursday 30th December our services started reporting connectivity issues. These increased in severity until at approx 09:15 it was not possible to connect to any of our services. At this point our main network connections were reporting a network cable unplugged error.
The issue was restricted to wider network access and at no time was data loss an issue, the services continued to run successfully and data integrity was retained.
Full service was restored at approximately 13:30.
Why Did This Happen?
A network switch was reporting spikes in packets sent by our services and eventually hit the maximum threshold for packet traffic within 30 minutes. This activated the StormGuard feature of the network which helps to prevent malicious traffic taking over the network by isolating the offending section of the network.
No corresponding increase in traffic was reported and general network traffic generated by our services was within normal limits.
The switch was reset but would repeatedly trigger StormGuard and block access to our services.
What Did We Do?
Initially we requested that all cabling was checked, and this was found to be in place and seemingly active. We then checked our network drivers and reset all connections. It was suspected at this point that there may be a hardware failure of our own network cards and so a new server with new network cards was provisioned in case we needed to move data if we could not restore connections.
Whilst the new server was provisioned we started to audit connection points further up the network chain, that are out of our direct control, with our provider. Eventually a network switch was identified as blocking traffic from our servers.
Once the switch was identified as the cause of the outage, but no corresponding issue was found on the servers we requested that the network switch was switched to its redundant backup partner.
The switch is a deep level switch shared by other independent services and so the switch to the redundant partner takes time to effect.
Once the partner switch was brought online and the block removed all services were restored and all data fully available.
What Are We Still Doing?
We are monitoring network traffic between our servers and the switch and have instigated an audit of the server logs and access to rule out any possibility of malicious programs or access.
What Could Have Prevented This Issue and What Now?
We did not identify the ultimate cause quickly enough. The server interface does not include any indication of this block that is applied further upstream. Our service provider has already prepared some guidance on how to identify this issue in the future and is looking at ways to include StormGuard notifications in the user interface.
This issue was not caused by a bug or misconfiguration but a hardware failure. We could not have prevented the hardware failure, they will happen eventually, but as we were not aware of the potentially blocking actions of StormGuard it took us longer than necessary to restore access.
We will be updating our disaster recovery procedure to include making checks on upstream switches and other network hardware in the case that there appears to be network hardware issues with our servers.
We have had very few outages in our history. This is the first major outage that affected all customers and was persistent for more than a few minutes. Our last unexpected downtime was reported on March 20th 2021 and lasted for less than 3 minutes.
You can view our current and historical status report at https://teamkinetic.statuspage.io/
