Category: Application Features and Tutorials Page 4 of 6

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

We have been slowly pushing out our 2020 Q1 interim changes for v1.4.1 and this will be complete by 7th February 2020.

You’ll have noticed a few differences already but these are the highlights, along with many bug fixes.

Improved Accessible Universal Search

The universal search is super useful but we know some customers are having trouble with the time delay used before searching and focusing the mouse on the results box.

This was done to improve its accessibility because without that switch of focus to the results window users of assistive technology and keyboard only users, would find it difficult to access the results.

We have listened to the feedback and have completely redesigned the universal search so that it is now even more accessible without annoying mouse users by switching focus.

The same results panel will appear but it now captures keyboard inputs so that using up and down, escape and return will enable keyboard users to navigate the list without ever switching the focus from the search box.

In addition all the correct ARIA attributes have been added and an additional assertive announcement for screen readers that will let the user know how many results have been returned and how to navigate them.

Login With Social Media (Single Sign On)

You’ll see a change to all login pages shortly; admin, provider, and volunteer login pages will have additional buttons for logging in with Google, Facebook, and for providers and admins, LinkedIn.

Your registered emails will have to match of course but if they do and you are already logged in with Google, Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll get bumped straight to your dashboard just by clicking one of the social media sign in buttons. The first time you do this you may be asked to give TeamKinetic permission to receive your email address, we have to get that in order to match your account.

New Search Behaviours

We have adjusted the way the search filters are added to make them more accessible. Previously when you selected the type of filter it would be added automatically to the search. This renders it unusable for keyboard only users as they are not able to skip through the available filters without triggering their addition. So we have added a physical button you use to add the filter and some other improvements to make the search accessible.

New Search Filters

We have added some new filters to opportunity, provider, and volunteer searches, and also rearranged some others.

The new TYPE filter now contains multiple types of opportunity you can filter by, sessional, flexible, applying, and requiring references. We will be adding more as we test them.

For volunteer search we have added date FIRST and date LAST joined an opportunity along with a LINKED TO filter for finding which volunteers are linked to which providers.

Improved Reporting Text

We have updated the help tool tips on the reporting page to better explain what data is being shown. In particular around what is meant be converted, new, active, etc.

Universal Search Updates

The ordering of results has been changed so that older, less active volunteers, opportunities, and providers are less likely to appear in the top 5 results that are shown if there are many matches.

Dashboard Updates

We’ve altered the open opportunities display to remove the open/closed status (because of course they are all open!) and switched in a text category status which is also an accessibility improvement as the category is not communicated solely with colour.

There are lots of other smaller improvements, like adding more notifications to the top left notification area when actions are taking place, standardising button behaviour, harmonising more user interface elements and generally cleaning up!

Enjoy.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Post Release week two. Gifting owed hours.

By Rolf Herbert

On 15th November 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features

Next in our on-going FaceBook Live sessions for TeamKinetic 1.4 we will be talking about gifting hours and how TeamKinetic approaches the whole idea of hours and rewards.

Usually a volunteer attends a session or a flexible opp and logs their hours which are then also logged and approved by administrators or providers.

Occasionally however volunteers might have done extra hours, or you want to incorporate hours from historical projects that you know the volunteer deserves.

For these situations you need to gift the volunteer owed hours.

Just pop along to the volunteers management page and find the HOURS tab on the left. Within that section you’ll see an area called Add Owed Hours. Here you can add a title or reason for the owed hours, say ‘Previous work on the footpath programme’, then enter the total hours and minutes the volunteer will be credited with.

These gifted hours are treated exactly like hours earned on opportunities and will show up in your KPIs and reports.

If you mistakenly add owed hours you can remove them at anytime.

When owed hours are added the full hour total is added to the volunteer and provider, so the totals are kept in balance.

Join our Facebook live session on Tuesday 19th November to find out more about owed hours.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Post Release week one. The document hub.

By Rolf Herbert

On 11th November 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features

I hope you are all settling into TeamKinetic 1.4 and enjoying the new features.

We’ll be continuing our weekly Facebook Live sessions over the coming weeks till we have covered all the new functionality and questions that have come up about the new release.

This week it’s all about the Document Hub that lets you create a repository of documents, links, and text that is accessible online by your volunteers and providers.

The document hub is available from the super admin settings menu (only visible if you are logged in as a super admin). From there you can add a resource for a volunteer or provider and create one of the three types; link, download, or just a plain text information resource.

For volunteers the resource area is available straight from their dashboard.

For providers it’s available from their help and resources menu.

The document hub is a great way to communicate your policies to your volunteers and providers, as well as to provide initial help and guidance for their first few experiences.

Join our Facebook live session on Tuesday 12th November to find out more about getting the most out of the document hub.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Release week ZERO. It’s release week!

By Rolf Herbert

On 31st October 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, News & Views, TeamKinetic Features

This is it… the release date is upon us and on November 5th the next version of TeamKinetic will be appearing on your desktops.

This Facebook Live session will cover the excellent filtering and searching options that we have added to the volunteer, opportunity and provider search. We will also be talking a little about the release schedule and what we will be doing to try to ensure a smooth transition.

The new filtering selection allows you to add multiple filters easily without having to scroll up and down, we’ve also included custom fields where applicable.

You can add or remove filters automatically and the results will update each time.

The navigation bar allows you to scroll through the results, change the displayed number of rows, and tells you how many results in total we have found.

You can also download all the results to a CSV, this will create a file with a copy of every row, not just the ones you are viewing at the time.

If you select any of the results using the checkboxes in the first column the bulk task options will appear at the bottom of your screen.

The available options will alter depending on which search you are performing, but in each case, a window will pop up where you can confirm your action and provide any further details.

If there is only one action available for a row it will just be a simple text link at the end, this is also the case when searching for opportunities.

If there are multiple actions you’ll see the triple dot icon that you can click to bring up the actions, these are things like impersonate, email, manage etc.

You’ll start to see this table search and filtering pattern turning up throughout TeamKinetic, we think its a vast improvement and we hope you’ll think so too.

Join our Facebook live session on Tuesday 5th November to find out more about getting the most out of the application process.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Pre-release week five

By Rolf Herbert

On 26th October 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, News & Views, TeamKinetic Features

In our final pre-release Facebook Live session we are going to be looking at the opportunity application process and how to get the most out of applying opportunities.

Many of our customers have specific on-boarding processes for specific opportunities or types of opportunities. These checks take place before a volunteer can join a session on an opportunity.

Unlike requirements like inductions and criminal checks, the application process is specific to the opportunity and so all volunteers are required to complete the on-boarding before being allowed to join an opportunity.

When creating an opportunity look out for the selection options and from there you can choose to create an applying opportunity and also specify some of the other pre-requisites like references.

When a volunteer finds this opportunity they will be presented with an option to apply and will be asked to complete all the pre-requisites.

They provider and volunteer will each receive an email letting them know the application has been received.

The provider or administrator can manage the applicants from the regular opportunity management page. From the applicants tab they can view all the current applicants, approve or deny applicants and download the applicant list.

Once approved the volunteer is sent an email confirmation with a link to the opportunity and can then go ahead and join sessions in the normal way.

If the opportunity is a flexible opportunity the volunteer is automatically joined to the single session that represents the length of the flexible opportunity.

It’s important to remember that when an application is received, the volunteer is not yet on the opportunity, their application must be approved AND they must choose their sessions (if the opportunity is session based).

In summary the application process looks like this;

Create an APPLICATION opportunity
Wait for volunteers to apply
Process your applicants on the opportunity management page applicant tab
Continue to manage the volunteers that have joined your opportunity after having their application approved

Join our Facebook live session on Tuesday 29th October to find out more about getting the most out of the application process.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Pre-release week four

By Rolf Herbert

On 20th October 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, News & Views, TeamKinetic Features

This week we will be discussing a much requested new feature, that will give you far more control than ever over the communications TeamKinetic sends to volunteers and providers; customising automated emails.

TeamKinetic keeps your volunteers and providers up to date, with notifications about opportunity activity, chat room messages, applications, registrations and many other actions and events.

We have default content for all these messages but now you can edit and customise over 30 messages.

Its dead simple to edit a message, just click the edit button to bring up a window like below.

Each message has its own set of replacements you can use which will be replaced when sent, like opportunity title, opportunity link or the volunteer name. Just click on any of the blue replacement buttons in the right column and they will appear at the current position in your custom message.

You can also now attach files to these messages!

Join our Facebook live session on Tuesday 22nd October to find out more about customising your own messages.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Pre-release week three

By Rolf Herbert

On 10th October 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

For week three we will be discussing a new feature whose beginnings you may have spotted and wondered about in our last release; trusted providers.

Trusted Providers

Trusted providers have an elevated set of privileges compared to your regular providers. The could represent for instance, providers that are internal to your organisation, or those that have received extra training.

To add the trusted status just use the button in the provider management page. You can also use the new provider search pages to change the status of multiple providers in one go.

What are Trusted Providers?

Trusted providers have some extra abilities over your regular providers;

Their new opportunities are auto authorised
They can add criminal check and induction required status to their opportunities
They can add any volunteer to a session, not just those that have already joined one of their sessions or that is linked to them

Join our Facebook live session on Tuesday 15th October to find out more about the trusted provider features.

TeamKinetic 1.4 – Pre-release week two

By Rolf Herbert

On 7th October 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Welcome to week two of our pre-release introductions to the new features coming in TeamKinetic 1.4.

This week we will be focusing on the new features in the add opportunity page and when searching for opportunities.

Adding a New Opportunity

When your admins or providers add a new opportunity they will now be given an immediate choice of whether they wish to create a complete or a quick advert opportunity.

If they choose the quick opportunity type they will be presented with a much reduced option list for the opportunity. This is aimed at people that either don’t have much idea of what the final opportunity details will be, but want to get on and start recruiting, or for those organisations that will probably be managing the post sign up process themselves.

The resulting opportunity will be a flexible opp that is set to start immediately and will run continuously.

Once created the provider and admins will have full control over the opportunity and can add further details, or convert to a session based opportunity at anytime.

We have also updated and we hope simplified adding sessions to an opportunity. We’ve taken out some of the confusing language around the types of opportunities you can add and instead just asked them to make a choice between an opportunity with sessions and a flexible opportunity without sessions.

If a user picks the session based opportunity they can then choose a recurring session structure or can add the sessions individually.

Searching Existing Opportunities

For 1.4 we have a great new set of features for searching and filtering opportunities.

You’ll notice straight away that this is very different from our previous opportunity search page!

You can now page through the results, add filters, download the results and perform bulk actions on the opportunities by clicking the checkboxes at the start of each row.

This type of search table will be appearing throughout the application in future version and is already implemented for volunteer and provider searching complete with custom field filtering.

We will be running a Facebook live session at 2pm on Tuesday 8th October going through these new features and answering questions.

TeamKinetic 1.4 Release Notes

By Rolf Herbert

On 1st October 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials, News & Views, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

TeamKinetic v1.4 will be released on November 5th, there will be fireworks and parties all across the UK!

1.4 is a big release where we have brought together many requests for new features and also importantly we have made big steps towards unifying the interface to create a consistent experience everywhere.

1.4 will probably be our last new feature focus release for a good while. The next few releases will be focused on continuing the unifying process, improving the foundations, continuing our accessibility improvements and tidying all those loose ends up.

So head over to our Beta site and login with your regular administrator details to take our next version for a spin.

New Feature Highlights

Customising Automated Emails

We have added a brand new email editor so that you can customise over 30 of the TeamKinetic automated emails.

New Searching for Volunteers, Providers and Opportunities

Completely rewritten search pages for volunteers, providers and opportunities. Much clearer and cleaner layout with row and bulk actions, paging, and filters.

Search for Volunteers by Custom Field

Custom fields are included in the filters, so you can filter and search for volunteers by all the profile and registration fields you have added.

Ability to Customise Your Genders & Ethnicities

Add, remove,re-order and re-map your gender and ethnicity results. These custom lists will also be reflected in the reports and downloads.

Collect ‘other’ Ethnicity and Gender

If registering volunteers select OTHER from the gender or ethnicity list they will be presented with a text box where they can enter their self identified gender or ethnicity.

You can use the new custom gender and ethnicity management shown above, to view, add and map these other entries.

Trusted Providers

Providers can now be marked as TRUSTED, this means that they will have additional privileges including:

Ability to add ANY volunteer to their opportunities (not just the providers limited cohort of volunteers).
Only allow trusted providers to create opportunities which require CRIMINAL RECORD checks.
Trusted provider opportunities can be auto-authorised.

Set Maximum Volunteers PER SESSION

When creating or editing opportunities you are now able to set a maximum volunteer limit on each session independently. When creating repeating opportunities each session will default to the same maximum but you can then adjust these session by session if required.

Define Time Gaps Between Sessions

Need to define a minimum gap between session that a volunteer can join? Now you can!

If you are hosting an event you may want to enforce a time limit gap to prevent a volunteer joining two opportunity sessions with not enough time to get from one to the other. You can now define the allowable time gap between these sessions. For example, if you define 30 minutes then a volunteer will not be able to join a session that ends at 1:00 pm AND a session that starts at 1:15 pm.

Improve Page Layouts

Courses page
Find Volunteers Page
Find Providers Page
Find Opportunities Listing Page

Parental Consent Phone Number

When a volunteer registers who requires parental consent, it asks for their parents email and in addition for their parents contact number. This information is held against the volunteers profile so the parents can be contacted by telephone if required.

Inviting Volunteers

Administrators and providers can now invite volunteers to your system from their main menu. Volunteers are invited by entering their email address OR uploading a list of email addresses.

Administrators can see the list of all invited volunteers and we have also improved the messaging you receive when duplicates are added.

Volunteer & Provider Downloads Include Custom Fields

When you export your volunteer or provider data it now includes any custom fields.

Volunteer Note Improvements

Providers can now record private notes on their volunteers. These can be used for recording conversations or additional information related to the volunteers personal needs.

Both administrators and providers can now add and remove discrete dated notes creating a history and audit trail for notes.

Improved Interface For Uploading Images

There is now the ability to move and crop images when uploading them to either the front page, providers profile page or the events page.

Registration Captcha Updated To Simpler System

The Google Captcha v2 (the image picking one) has now been thoroughly defeated, which means we are making it harder for people to register but not any harder for robots, so we have removed it.

We now protect your applications from bogus registrations with a number of discreet features that will not get in the way of your volunteers registering.

Improved Interface For Applicants

We have added some notification reminders and visual clues if an opportunity has unprocessed applicants.

If there are any applicants that have not yet received a decision your home page will list them and if you manage the opportunity, the applicant tab will be highlighted and a notification appears in the summary area.

In addition we have improved the default email that is sent to providers when a new application is received to help clarify that difference between an application and a joining event.

Creating Quick Opportunities

The new opportunity screen can be daunting for new users and for those providers that have little or no training. It also assumes that providers wish to manage the entire volunteering life-cycle within TeamKinetic, which is not always the case.

We have added the option when creating a new opportunity to choose a quick opp. This gives a much reduced option list to the provider and allows them to quickly create an open ended flexible opportunity that starts as soon as it is authorised.

Combined Linked Volunteers and Volunteers Searching

Providers can now search for both their active volunteers and linked volunteers from the same search page. They can unlink volunteers directly from the search results and no longer need the separate linked volunteers page.

Pause Emails means PAUSE EMAILS, but not Brexit!

We have changed the pause emails button to pause all emails including when a volunteer is removed from the opportunity or session. When completely removing a volunteer you are given the option of sending the removal email.

Simpler Interface for OWED HOURS

If you have a volunteer who has done some volunteering outside of your system it is now easier than ever to record those hours within you system.

Always Accessible Super Admin Menu

The Super Admin menu is now located on the top right of your screen making it faster for the user to access.

Providers See More About Their Volunteers

We have increased the amount of information that a provider can see on volunteers who join their opportunities, this should help them in identifying who is best suited to particular roles. (NOTE: This also includes external volunteers).

Improved Interface When Copying Opportunities

We have changed the way you copy opportunities, you are now asked ‘what the new start date is?’ and the system will move all associated sessions accordingly.

Adjust The Size Of Your Logo

You can now adjust the displayed height of your logo when uploading.

TeamKinetic, Available Reports

By Rolf Herbert

On 20th June 2019

In Application Features and Tutorials

This post just lists our available reports, read a fuller description of what these reports actually mean and how to gain some insight using TeamKinetic’s reports.

Quick stats for all time volunteer signups, engagement and retention.

Website views and activity (views, visits, visitors)

Volunteer group membership

Volunteer activity in opportunity categories

Volunteer ethnicity

Volunteer age groups

Volunteer gender

Volunteer registrations over time

Volunteer engagement over time

Volunteer geographical area

Quarterly activity (volunteers, sessions, hours)

Opportunity categories

Opportunity status

Opportunity sessions over time

Opportunity tag frequency and engagement

Opportunity fulfilment as session filled percentage and hours logged

Opportunity feedback

Website search terms (top 20)

Hours logged by category

Hours logged over time

Day schedule report giving an overview of sessions, session subscription numbers for any day or date range

Map volunteer location (all or active)

Map opportunity location (all or active)