Category: Application Features and Tutorials Page 2 of 6

Information regarding the features of VolunteerKinetic and how to get the best from the application.

Volunteer Reward and Recognition just got easier with TeamKinetic and Tempo Time Credits

On 14th February 2024

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Looking to supercharge your volunteer reward and recognition? Well, within the TeamKinetic volunteer management system, you can now give your volunteers Tempo Time Credits for all their hard work.

Who are Tempo? What are Tempo Time Credits?

Tempo is a registered charity that builds local and national organisation networks by bringing people together in their local communities to carry out valued voluntary work.

The Time Credit model recognises and rewards volunteers for the hours they give. Volunteers can exchange Time Credits for experiences, products or services – like cinema tickets, entry to visitor attractions or even a coffee and a slice of cake! These experiences, products, and services are provided by their ‘Recognition Partners’.

How does Tempo work within TeamKinetic?

Volunteer reward and recognition has never been easier. Within TeamKinetic, Admin users will control the whole process. They can decide which opportunities merit Tempo Time Credits and determine how many credits are available.

Meanwhile, your volunteers can seamlessly join Tempo. They’ll gain instant access to their credit balance and local offers directly from their TeamKinetic dashboard. Once volunteer hours are confirmed, the conversion process is a breeze. They can effortlessly exchange their hours for Tempo Time Credits, giving them the freedom to spend or gift them as they choose.

Getting started with this integration depends on a few factors. Are you a TeamKinetic Enterprise user? And do Tempo have a recognition network set up in your area?

See below for a map of where Tempo presently operates:

If Tempo aren’t in your area, fear not! You can discuss your options with Tempo’s CEO Rachel. Also, if you’d like to become a recognition partner yourself, there is opportunity to do that. This would involve offering experiences for volunteers to redeem with their Tempo Time Credits.

The Impact of Tempo Time Credits

Not convinced yet? Read all about the impact Tempo can make for volunteers and communities below:

And see this great video for a visual look at Tempo’s impact:

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I get started?

Please see the graphic below for more instructions.

Book a chat with Chris: https://savvycal.com/Chris-Martin-fd7fab21/Tempo

Book a chat with Rachel: https://savvycal.com/rachelgegeshidze/9d48a957

Can you provide more details on the specific benefits or incentives offered through Tempo Time Credits, such as examples of experiences, products, or services that volunteers can redeem?

Redeemable services include: classes at the local leisure centre, shows at the local theatre, and a day out at the zoo. You can read case studies from volunteers using Time Credits in this report.

How does TeamKinetic ensure the security and accuracy of volunteer hour tracking within the system to facilitate the seamless exchange of hours for Tempo Time Credits?

Only provider-confirmed hours will contribute towards the amount of Time Credits available for redemption. Furthermore, limits can be set on how many credits can be redeemed per opportunity/in a certain amount of time. Rolf will work with you to set these guidelines.

Are there any potential costs or fees associated with integrating Tempo Time Credits into the TeamKinetic volunteer management system, either for organizations or volunteers, and how are these managed or mitigated?

Yes, you will have to set up a contract with Tempo. However, on the TeamKinetic side, there is no extra charge to get this activated within your system.

In the meantime, you can read more from Tempo themselves. Their CEO Rachel was kind enough to write us a lovely guest blog all about Tempo and the great work they do.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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Have you enjoyed using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on Capterra, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

The New TeamKinetic App

By Alex Evans

On 31st January 2024

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

After a long period of development, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the new TeamKinetic App! The app is free for all, and our Enterprise users have the option to adopt their own white-labeled version.

The Power of TeamKinetic at Your Fingertips

The new TeamKinetic app brings the power of our desktop platform to your pocket.

Our new app is more user-friendly and modern with a redesigned and intuitive interface. We’ve ensured that the user experience is consistent across Android and iOS devices, so no matter what platform your users prefer, they’ll enjoy a seamless and unified experience.

With the new app, your volunteers will now have access to features such as expenses, roles, the ability to apply for opportunities, document uploads/downloads, and profile management.

The base TeamKinetic app will be free for all users, including all the material and support required for everyone to use and share with their volunteers.

However, if you’re an Enterprise user, you can access the exciting new ability to have your app white-labeled.

White-labeling

All enterprise users can have a branded version of the TeamKinetic app tailored to their organisation’s unique identity.

Your logo, brand colours, and unique app store name will be used, creating a seamless extension of your brand. Customisation will not include functional elements; all apps offer the same features.

White-labeled applications will also allow volunteers to register directly within the app, streamlining the onboarding process.

The yearly cost for a white-labeled application is £800 per year and can be added directly onto your existing yearly fee. All white-labeling will be done on a first-come-first-served basis as we have to roll these out gradually.

How to download the TeamKinetic App

You can download our app for free on iOS and Android now. Just search ‘Volunteer with TeamKinetic’ or click the links below.

If you are an enterprise user wanting to discuss adopting a white-labeled app, please fill in this form.

We can’t wait for you to explore the enhanced capabilities of our new app.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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Have you enjoyed using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on Capterra, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

TeamKinetic 2.3.1 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 6th June 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Following on from 2.3.0 which was a pretty large minor release we have some new updates for you which came about from support tickets and chats about the latest version

Easier Volunteer Reporting

We get asked pretty regularly what ACTIVE means and how to find out how many active volunteers there are or other criteria about active volunteers. Active volunteers are those that have joined a session OR logged hours on a flexible opp between the dates selected.

To this end, we have split the basic reporting available for volunteers into an ACTIVE and a REGISTERED tab. So any figures you are looking at in the active section will represent volunteers that have joined a session OR logged hours on a flexible opp between the dates selected. The registered section will show the data for volunteers that have registered between the dates selected.

More Volunteer Search Filters

To help with discovering your active volunteers we have also added new filters called ACTIVE/INACTIVE to the volunteer search pages so you can search for activity or lack of it between dates.

If you need to find out how many volunteers have a pending application or have been waiting for a long time for their opp application to be processed you can use the new Application Status and Date Last Applied filters.

Block Access to Volunteer Uploads

Providers were able to always view the documents and qualifications that volunteers uploaded if the volunteer was linked to the provider. There is now a new super admin option where you can switch this off so that only administrators can view these documents.

Opportunity Promotion for Providers

Providers are now able to send the opportunity promotion email straight to all their linked volunteers via a checkbox in addition to being able to add emails manually.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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TeamKinetic 2.3.0 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 12th April 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

For a minor release, this one is quite major! There are no breaking changes or anything huge but some great improvements.

Match ALL or ANY on the Volunteer Search Page

On the volunteer search page, you can now select ALL or ANY as the matching criteria. This means you could search for volunteers that are a member of any of a set of groups, or that live in any of a set of postcodes for instance.

Not Checked Option When Filtering

When filtering on custom questions that are checkboxes you can now filter by these boxes not being checked. Previously as nothing is stored when a box is unchecked this was not possible.

Volunteer Action Log

A great new feature that allows admins to check what has been happening with a particular volunteer. Currently, it displays what opps they have viewed, when they have logged hours, joined sessions, and so on. We’ll be extended this with more logged actions in future releases

Create a PDF of Opportunities

Find the opportunities you want to include in the PDF, click their checkboxes and you can now print a nicely formatted PDF with an opportunity on each page.

You get a few options of what to include in the printout and a handy QR code is included so volunteers can find the opp quickly on your website.

Multiple LinkWide Group Membership

For those of you that are in a LinkWide sharing group (get in touch if this sounds like something you would be interested in), you can now join multiple groups, each with its own sharing ruleset.

Editing Existing Resources

You can now edit your existing resources…no need to delete and recreate which is a real-time saver. Additionally, you can also edit the order in which the resources appear.

Select Specific Map Location When Creating Opps

We’ve added back in the ability to move the map marker when creating opps with the new opp creation screens, jsut as you could when editing an opportunity.

Email All Providers from Opp Selection

Previous to this release, when you select a number of opportunities from the opp search page it was only possible to email all the volunteers on those opps. You can now also email all the providers who created those opps. This is great for chasing up providers who have outstanding volunteer applications for their opps for instance.

Improved Email Logging

The storage of the plain text version of sent emails has been improved so you won’t see all the HTML stuff when looking at a volunteer or provider email log anymore.

Better Upload Image Support

We can now support all modern web image formats including WEBP when you are uploading images anywhere in the app.

Over 50 smaller fixes and improvements have also been added which I hope will make you even more productive day to day.

As always, we are ready to take your feedback and questions in all the normal channels.

TeamKinetic Admin Guide

By Alex Evans

On 19th January 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials, Training

Welcome to this TeamKinetic Admin Guide. This is essential for any admin user setting up a new TeamKinetic site, or any new member of staff using an existing TeamKinetic site.

In this post, you’ll have access to all the TeamKinetic quickstart videos. You can get help at any time by clicking the ? help icon in the top right of your screen within the system.

Overview

An overview of system users and what functions each user has access to.

A look at the relationships between each user.

Initial Setup

The initial setup steps confirm things like your about us page and other application content.

It’s also important to set up your registration settings including what data to collect, and opportunity categories.

Remember there is always help available on every page by clicking the ? at the top right of your screen.

Look and Feel

During step 3 we will cover how to add your logo, set up all the colours for menus and links, and set your page backgrounds and the home page content.

Your First Opportunity

Adding opportunities is of course a fundamental skill to learn!

We have a number of different types of opportunities and many options available for creating an opportunity that serves your needs.

It can be as simple as a quick opportunity which has only a few questions to answer, all the way up to a complex repeating opportunity that spans months.

Invite Volunteers

Now you have your application set up just how you want it and have some shiny new opportunities ready for your volunteers, you’ll need some volunteers.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to get your volunteers registered is to send them an invite email with a special link they can follow to register.

You can keep track of all your invites by going to Volunteer Management → Invite Volunteer.

Manage Opportunities

Once your opportunities have been added and volunteers are starting to sign up you will spend a good percentage of your time managing your opportunities and the volunteers that have joined.

Our opportunity management dashboard has all the tools you’ll need to communicate effectively with your volunteers, schedule new sessions, place and move volunteers between sessions and lots more. It is probably the major hub for your application.

Create Events

An event is a group of opportunities that has something in common.

Each event gets its own mini-site with a picture that you can share and link to.

Events also show up on the opportunity search page and in the weekly newsletter. This makes it easier for volunteers who are not bothered about what they do but just want to be part of the big event.

Volunteer Rewards

Rewarding your volunteers is vital to maintain and improving retention rates.

We have a few ways you can reward volunteers including the achievement badges, both automatic for hours served and your own Award Badges that you can award for any reason (volunteer of the month etc.).

We strongly encourage you to set up your own Award Badges and bring a smile to your volunteers.

Communication

You’ll need to stay in touch with your volunteers and there is a myriad of ways to do that with TeamKinetic.

There are a range of customisable automatic emails, email groups, email filters (by age, gender etc.), system notifications, Facebook, Twitter and using SMS texts.

You’ll always be in close contact with your volunteers.

Reporting

Reporting and insight are invaluable to finding out what has been going on in your programme.

Here you’ll learn about the various reporting, maps and visualisations that are available out of the box with TeamKinetic.

You can also request custom reports just for your organisation if required.

Mobile Use

Volunteers can download the TeamKinetic mobile app for their Android or Apple phones, allowing them to log in, join opportunities, log hours, update their information and much more.

If you still need some help using TeamKinetic, don’t hesitate to use our live chat feature. This can be accessed under Help and Support.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

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Are you enjoying using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on G2, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

TeamKinetic Volunteer Guide

By Alex Evans

On 16th January 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials

Welcome to the TeamKinetic Volunteer Guide. We’ll go through the key things you’ll need to know about the system so you can get started volunteering for the causes that speak to you.

You’ll have received the welcome email by now and we urge you to take a look as it will contain essential information.

The first screen you’ll see after registering is your Dashboard.

This is the hub for your volunteering and where you will find most of the information you need. You can access the various sections from the menu on the left-hand side, just click any of the headings to move to that section. Lets take a look at some of the key pages;

Click below to go to each page.

TeamKinetic 2.2.1 Minor Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 12th December 2022

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

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.

TeamKinetic Guide for New Staff Members

By Alex Evans

On 3rd May 2022

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Training, Volunteer Management

Here at TeamKinetic, we appreciate that new staff members aren’t going to be able to jump straight into using our system to manage their volunteers. They’re going to need a bit of help – but don’t worry, we’ve got that covered with our TeamKinetic guide for new users!

If you have a new starter, or you’re starting somewhere new yourself, this blog is for you.

Here are some ways we can get you up and running managing volunteers on TeamKinetic…

Quickstart Guide

Our ‘Getting Started with TeamKinetic’ Guide is usually for completely new customers with new systems. However, in this case, it can be a good way to help people get to grips with the system.

The workbook covers all the basics, such as:

Creating and Managing Opportunities
Inviting Volunteers
System Configuration
Logging Hours
Rewarding Volunteers

If you have a new staff member who will be acting as an admin on your system and would benefit from playing with an empty system, give us a shout and we can set them up on one of our demo sites. This way, they can explore without altering anything on your existing system!

You can contact us via the live chat on our website.

Training Sessions

If you’d like to get stuck in as soon as possible and need some direct help from us, we’ll get you booked for a training session with our Implementation Manager, Steve.

Steve is a great trainer and will go through everything you need to know to do your job effectively! Training takes place online and can even be recorded and saved for future reference. Training is always personalised to you and your needs. This makes it one of the quickest and most beneficial ways to get started with TeamKinetic.

If you’d like to book 1-on-1 training, contact us via the live chat on our website, email Steve directly, or give us a call on 0161 914 5757.

Alternatively, you can join one of the open training sessions being held throughout the year. These are open to any TeamKinetic users and can be booked by going to ‘Help and Support’ –> ‘Extra Training’.

These sessions will take an in-depth look at how to use TeamKinetic on a day-to-day basis to manage your volunteer programme better.

After completing this training, you will have:

A good understanding of how each user type interacts with the system
How to communicate effectively,
Best practice for managing your volunteers and service providers.

Built-in Support

If you consider yourself tech-savvy and want to figure it all out yourself, our built-in support can help. Just click the (?) icon in the top right corner. You should be able to find tips on every part of the system.

This will open up our Help and Support menu.
This menu is searchable and should cover all aspects of the system.

Most convenient, it will show you a list of help topics relevant to the page you’re currently on.

Need a bit more help than you first thought? You can also access the Quickstart Guide and Tutorial Videos from this menu.

Anything you’re still not sure of?
Our Live Chat feature will get you in touch with one of us and we’ll help you out!

There is a TeamKinetic guide for any type of user – not just new starters!

Please note our operating hours are 9am – 5pm BST. Any contact outside of these hours may experience a delayed reply.

You can check the latest training dates from within your system. Just go to ‘Help & Support’ → ‘Extra Training’

TeamKinetic – 2.1.1 Interim Release

By Rolf Herbert

On 14th February 2022

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

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.

Thanks, TeamKinetic

New Features: Emailing and Expenses

By Alex Evans

On 13th December 2021

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features

We’ve recently released TeamKinetic version 2.09 and you may have noticed a few new features. We’ve added new emailing and expenses features in our latest update.

New Email Features

The video above lays out all the new features.

When creating bulk emails you can now select any number of opportunities to be included in the email. You have the option of including the events that week and if you want to show the volunteer’s statistics across the top. These are all displayed in exactly the same way as within the newsletter so its now possible to send a newsletter type email to any of your volunteers, for any of your opportunities, whenever you like!

We have also rearranged and refactored the preview and draft buttons so you can now send a preview email to your email instantly and save a draft copy without leaving the page. We also now update the saved draft each time you hit the save draft button, rather than creating a new draft.

New Expenses Feature

The video above lays out information needed when adding/processing an Expense.

This is an Enterprise only feature. Administrators will have to switch this module on and off via the
Super Admin Menu → Options → Opportunities → ‘Use the in app managed expenses module’.

Opportunities can now either be marked as ‘Managed Expenses’ and/or ‘Expenses Paid’.

Expenses Paid simply means that volunteers will be reimbursed. In this case, you should add details about what expenses are paid and if there’s a cap on the amount. This is useful for providers to specify that their opportunity pays expenses.
Managed Expenses means that volunteers will be able upload expense claims which can then be managed by administrators. Managed expenses are always also marked as expenses paid.

If enabled, volunteers can select applicable opportunities from their dashboard, upload a receipt, an explanation of what the expense is for, and the amount they are claiming. Admins will get an alert when a new claim is submitted by a volunteer and can manage them all from a simple interface.
The admin can view the receipt, adjust the claim amount, and update the claim status. A full history of changes and notes is maintained and viewable underneath the main claim.

Any issues?

New updates can create small problems elsewhere in the site (despite rigorous testing!)
If you run into any issues on your site, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. You can either use the live chat feature, or raise a support ticket.

You can also visit our website and find us on social media:

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