Page 25 of 56

4 Ways TeamKinetic Can Help YOU Incentivise Volunteers

Retaining and recruiting volunteers can be a difficult task. With volunteering in high demand incentivising your volunteers may be the way forward to ensure retainment. Now, you may ask… “Incentivising volunteers! How can I do that?” Keep reading, TeamKinetic may just have the answer you are looking for…

1. Logging Hours/Leaving Feedback

Your volunteers give up their own time to help your organisation. So giving them some feedback even after they have volunteered will show how much you value them and will mean more to them than you may think! 

TeamKinetic allows you to leave feedback when logging a volunteer’s hours. If you forget or don’t have time to personally thank your volunteer at the end of their session, this section gives you the chance to do so. It also let’s the volunteer log their own hours and leave feedback about the opportunity they joined. As someone who has volunteered in the past, receiving feedback from anyone at the organisation is such a great feeling and has pushed me to come and volunteer again. This could be your volunteers.

2. Achievement Badges

This incentive is a great way to push your volunteers to log more hours. Once a volunteer logs their hours, they will add together to create their total volunteer hours. A small way to help increase volunteer hours is to have achievement badges when they reach certain hour milestones.

TeamKinetic has achievement badges automatically on their system. So, for example, if volunteers were to reach 10 hours combined they would get the badge ‘Super Member’, at 50 hours  they could get the badge ‘Dedicated’ and so on. 

The achievement badge’s pictures and names can be customised by yourself. These badges are a great way to incentivise volunteers and get them to keep on volunteering so they can reach the next milestone.

3. Hour Trades

Wouldn’t it be great for volunteers to trade all of their logged hours for real life items!

Well, TeamKinetic has just the thing. Hour Trades. Your volunteers can use their logged hours to trade them in for things such as vouchers, T-shirts, hats, entry to museum/art galleries, sporting activities… Whatever items you feel fit. This type of reward recognises a volunteers contributions and can push them to want to volunteer more.

4. Custom Award Badges

Have you ever thought about starting a ‘volunteer of the month’ award? To give your volunteers an extra incentive to volunteer more or make them feel appreciated? Yes? Keep reading, you may like what you see…

TeamKinetic allows you to create custom award badges for your volunteers. These could be ‘volunteer of the month’ or ‘volunteer of the year’. They can be absolutely anything you want and look however you want, with the fully customisable option! Once you have assigned the award to a volunteer, they will receive an email with the award in it to congratulate them. Again, this recognises the efforts your volunteers put in, helping you to retain more volunteers and hopefully gain more.

Start Incentivising Today

If these incentives have drawn you in and you want to find out more, you can watch the video below where we go through the system to show you each incentive.

Even more intrigued, head over to our website and start your FREE 30 day trial today to explore the whole of TeamKinetic! Be sure to also visit our social media pages to find out more information about TeamKinetic Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube

You can also give us a call on 0161 9145757 and we would be happy to talk with you about our system. 

We hope to speak to you soon, Stay Safe!

Training Module: Using TeamKinetic to manage your volunteer programme.

An exciting, in-depth look at how to use TeamKinetic on a day-to-day basis to run your volunteer programme. Partly hands-on, your tutor will talk you through setting up opportunities and allow you to see the system from different users perspectives. At the end of this training session, you will have a good understanding of how each user interacts with the system and how to communicate and manage your volunteers and service providers.

Who Should Attend?

Either new employees who have taken over the role of administrator OR existing administrators who would like a refresher of all the main functionality.

What does it cover?

Volunteer Life Cycle

A practical session where attendees will experience the system from each users perspective covering the following:

  • Registering as a provider
  • [As a provider/admin] Creating an opportunity
  • Registering as a volunteer
  • [As a volunteer] Joining the opportunity
  • [As a provider/admin] Managing and communicating with volunteers on the opportunity

Managing Volunteers

  • Searching for volunteer/s
  • Search filters explained
  • Adding volunteers without an email address
  • Inviting volunteers onto the system
  • Criminal checks
  • Volunteer groups
  • Meetings and Inductions

Recognition and Rewards

  • Achievement badges
  • OpenBadges
  • HourTrades

Managing Opportunities

  • standardising activity tags
  • Shared opportunities
  • References
  • Events
  • Accreditation badges

Reporting and Insight

  • Reporting library explained
  • Exporting information

Effective Communication

  • Notifications
  • Volunteer news
  • Sending volunteers an email or text
  • Volunteer/Provider bulk emails

How to get Help

  • Support tickets
  • Contextual help

Questions and Workshops

Any questions will be answered and workshopped in the final segment, helping you to apply what you have learnt to your own unique programme.

How do I sign up?

You can access this training from your HELP > EXTRA TRAINING menu. Purchase the number of credits you need and then click on the BOOK button and select your course and dates.

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

TeamKinetic – Interim release 1.3.3

It has been a busy few months at TeamKinetic during the Covid 19 summer, but we’ve still been updating and fixing TeamKinetic regularly. What we haven’t been doing well is letting you all know about the changes, apologies.

We have now pushed through our last interim updates and fixes before our next major release in Q1/2 2021. TeamKinetic is up to version 1.3.3!

Here is what is new.

New Opportunity Details Layout

We’ve, hopefully, improved the layout of the opportunity details or more info page. Peoples monitors are getting larger with a higher resolution, so we have adjusted the layout to a two column view.

On mobile or small screens this reverts to a single column display.

External opportunities

When adding a quick opportunity (super admins can enable quick opportunities for their providers from the settings area), you have an extra option to mark the opportunity as external. When selected the user enters what external organisation is responsible for the opportunity, the web address for more information/application, and the advertising end date. 
 
When a volunteer views the opportunity they are informed its an external opportunity, and are redirected via an apply button to the organisations own website.

Secret Opportunities

These are not clandestine opportunities for secret agents, but a way to hide open opportunities from search results and opportunity suggestions throughout the application.

Volunteers with the exact link will be able to view and join the opportunity as normal, but those without access to the link will not find the opportunity.

In all other regards the opportunity behaves just like a regular opportunity.

Add Volunteer Meetings in Bulk

You can now create and add volunteers to meeting dates directly from the bulk actions on the volunteer search page. So you can add 10 or 20 volunteers to a group meeting very easily.

We’ve also updated the text a little to make it clear that you can enter a zoom/meet link in the location field if your meeting is going to be virtual.

Private Notes for External Volunteers

You can now add private notes to external volunteer profiles. These private notes are not viewable by the administrators of the volunteers home application.

New Volunteer Search Filters

You can find two new filters in the TYPE area for a volunteers disability and special needs status.

Completed Community Task Report

We are still working on getting some more insightful reporting around community tasks in the next major version.

In the meantime, you can download a complete list of all completed tasks from the community task page. It includes dates, times and which volunteer that completed the task.

You’ll find the download button at the top of the completed task column.

Healthcheck Status Included in Member Downloads

This is an update for the accredit module in TeamKinetic (interested in managing events and printing access badges straight from TeamKinetic? Get in touch).

When you export event member details the export now includes their latest healthcheck status.

POD Report

We’ve included a small POD report in the main reporting area which tells you how many admins, providers, opportunities, volunteers, and hours are in each pod.

We will be adding some more detail in the next major release.

Public Roadmap Accepting Votes

You can now access our public roadmap straight from the help menu, read up on what features might be heading down the road and also importantly, vote on the features you would most like to see.

We will be keeping an eye on the votes and endeavouring to push the most popular features to the front of the release queue, so get voting.

New Help Videos

We have added a tonne of new help videos to the Tutorial Videos section in the your help menu.

They are super short informative videos about specific features or processes and well worth a look.

Increased Maximum Image Size

The maximum width of images for provider and event profiles is now 1900 pixels, so the quality of the image on large displays is now a lot better.

We have also adjusted some of the image processing to improve the size/quality performance.

Facebook Live 

Please join us for our Facebook Live on Friday 13th at 2pm on our Facebook TeamKinetic Customer Group to see these new updates in action. Make sure you are a member of this group before 2pm tomorrow to make sure you can watch the live! Just click here to go to the group. 

A Spooky Competition

Who doesn’t love a good competition? We certainly do!

With COVID-19 still looming, we are determined to help companies boost staff and volunteer morale with a little help from the spooky season. That is why we have created a list of 7 different ways you can lift the (spooky) spirits of those you work with. And, we are want YOU to send pictures in of your organisation getting involved with any of the 7 ideas below; the most creative one wins our ‘trick or treat’ prize. But, you only have until the 1st of November to send your creative pictures in.

 

1. Get Creative

Whether you are working from home, or still in the office, that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative for Halloween. Why don’t you decorate your desk (or work from home space) with some spooky decorations? This is a cheap and fun way to ensure you can still make the most of the haunting holiday, despite COVID-19 restrictions. You can even make it a friendly competition and reward the person with the spookiest desk!

2. Get Fancy…Dressed

Whether you are still in the office, working from home, or volunteering, you can still make a show-stopping appearance in some fancy dress this Halloween! You could even do spooky make-up too. 

We are currently working from home, but I know I will still be dressing up this Halloween. Why don’t you get speaking to your volunteers and employees to encourage them to take part in some fancy dress this year? You can even make it another Halloween competition. Have a look at some popular inspiration below.

3. Low-key spookiness

Fancy dress and make-up not your thing? Don’t worry. You could simply wear some spooky socks, a terrifying tie, a Halloween headband, or a scary scrunchie. And if you’re working from home, you can even just wear some Halloween pyjamas at your desk, whatever gets you in the  positive spooky spirit while COVID-19 is about.

4. Carving Out Spooky Competition

One thing that screams Halloween fun to me is pumpkin carving. Mine is currently on the table staring at me as I type this, ready to be carved along to a spooky film. Even with COVID-19 still lurking about, this is still something you can get your staff and volunteers involved in. You can make it a fun competition over a Zoom call, perfect for keeping things COVID-19 safe whilst also boosting morale.

5. Ghoulish Games

Did somebody say…quiz?! If there is one thing we love at TeamKinetic, that is a good quiz. Especially one that fits in with the festive holidays. This is another idea you can use to boost the morale of your staff and volunteers. You could arrange a Halloween quiz over a Zoom call and do your quiz over a PowerPoint presentation? 

6. Bewitching Baking

With COVID-19, actual baking may not be possible. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase some spooky cakes to give out to your volunteers and staff. This is a perfect way to encourage some spooky spirit in a minimalistic way. These could be cakes, biscuits, chocolate apples, you name it! In fact, take a look at a few of your options in supermarkets now.

7. Spoooky Social Media

Holidays such as Halloween acts as the perfect opportunity to put your company in the spotlight for getting involved in festivities through social media. You could redesign your logo and header picture for October? We use Canva to make our profile look spooky; take a look at what we have done below and it may spike you with some spooky inspiration.

TeamKinetic Twitter- @TeamKineticUK

Inspiring Each Other

Everything is uncertain right now, with a lot of things being cancelled and many of us beginning to work from home again. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t all inspire each other to still enjoy the upcoming holidays. Share these ideas with your staff and your volunteers, send your pictures in before the 1st of November, and we can make sure we use Halloween to boost morale! And, one of you will be lucky enough to win our ‘trick or treat’ prize!

Send us your pictures through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Or email them to us at chloe@teamkinetic.co.uk

Managing Micro Volunteering

Micro-volunteering is the idea of volunteering in ‘short bursts’. This means volunteering in short and convenient ways, at times and places which suit everybody’s schedule. What makes micro-volunteering different from standard volunteering is that it can be done online or face-to-face, and doesn’t require any long term commitment. This means that the volunteer also doesn’t have to go through an application or training process first. Micro-volunteering is perfect for both volunteers and organisations! It has the potential to attract a wider diversity and greater number of people, including individuals who wouldn’t have got involved otherwise due to conflicting schedules. 

Examples of micro-volunteering include:

  • Delivering supplies to those isolating from covid-19
  • Signing online petitions
  • Writing blogs
  • Retweeting and posting relevant content to social media
  • Two minute litter pick
  • Buying a homeless person food or a hot drink
  • Researching and completing online surveys
  • Donate old clothes and goods to a charity shop

Remember this..?

Going Beyond the Ice Bucket Challenge | Ipsos

Remember when the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral in the summer of 2014? Where everyone, including big celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, would tip a bucket of ice water over their head to raise awareness of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Well, this was a perfect example of micro-volunteering. While this wasn’t classified as your ‘typical’ volunteering, it engaged people all over the world and encouraged them to donate their time and resources into raising awareness of ALS. This viral challenge raised $116 million over two years from people engaging in this challenge who previously might not have got involved if it wasn’t for micro-volunteering.

How has COVID-19 impacted this?

The rates of micro-volunteering will have naturally increased from COVID-19. This comes from people having too much spare time and wanting to use their time to help others during such a negative time.

COVID-19 has made the majority of the population go into self isolation to protect themselves and to protect others. This then meant many volunteers had the suspend their volunteering duties- this is where micro-volunteering comes into play! Micro-volunteering has allowed volunteers to continue their contributions whilst isolating at home. For example, VolunteerScotland has seen 60,000 people come forward as a response to COVID-19, prepared to help in the most difficult of times- and this is just Scotland!

 

The future of micro-volunteering…

Micro-volunteering is only going to continue to grow, especially considering the current climate, and this is something we need to encourage. It’s simple, without micro-volunteering there would be less people volunteering their time- especially during COVID-19. 

One of the biggest barriers to volunteering is people not having the time. Work commitments is the biggest barrier at (49%), with people ‘doing other things with their spare time’ closely following (35%), and child commitments following at (23%). Micro- volunteering allows people to contribute to volunteering around their schedule. This can even be sharing something on social media to raise awareness.

With COVID-19 now also causing volunteering barriers, micro-volunteering has come to the rescue. Micro-volunteering has allowed volunteers who are self isolating to continue to contribute to a cause from the safety of their home. This could prove to be the future for many volunteers who may not feel safe to return to face-to-face volunteering for a while. This then allows organisations to continue to receive volunteer support, despite the current COVID-19 situation.

How can you encourage micro volunteering with TeamKinetic?

During the peak of the COVID pandemic, we added an entirely new feature set around micro community volunteering. It includes a new admin and provider management page. Your volunteers also have access to their own progressive web app, allowing them to join micro volunteering tasks and record their progress using their phone.

Step 1 – Enable the community tasks feature from your super admin options menu

As you can see above, there are a few options available. Remember to give access to your volunteers and allow them to download the web app in order to access your community tasks.

Step 2 – Add your community tasks

Select ‘Community Tasks’ from the ‘Opportunities & Providers’ menu. Once you have enabled them in the super admin options menu.

Hit the big GREEN plus button to add your first community task.

There are some important things to know when adding your community tasks;

  1. All the data you add in the red section is visible publicly to your volunteers.
  2. The first set of data in the yellow section headed ‘Private Data’ is never revealed to volunteers.
  3. The second set of data in the yellow section headed ‘Data Shown to Assigned Volunteers’ is only revealed to the volunteer that applies and is accepted for the task.

You can describe the task here and provide a location for the recipient. This is as well as restricting which volunteers have access to see and pick up these tasks. You can restrict by their ID check, criminal check status, and whether they are linked to the assigned provider or not.

All your volunteers that have logged into the web app will receive notifications when new tasks are added. This will either be in the app for Android/Chrome devices or via email for iOS devices.

Step 3 – Get your volunteers completing the tasks

By enabling access to volunteers in the super admin options menu, your volunteers can login at ICanHelp.teamkinetic.co.uk. Additionally, by switching on the relevant options, you can also select to advertise the web app to your volunteers when they login on their dashboard.

When they login they will see a familiar mobile app interface and can search and select community tasks and apply to join.

Once they have applied you will see their application in your admin community tasks management page. From there you can assign them to the task. The volunteer will receive a notification that they have been assigned a task and can then view the full details in the app. Once they have completed the task, the volunteer can then update the status within the app.

It’s a super easy and fast way to encourage participation with those small micro-volunteering activities in your community. This will also help to build lasting connections.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch or open a support ticket if you need more help setting up your community tasks. You can chat to us through our website or directly email us at chris@teamkinetic.co.uk.

 

Macmillan at the Highest Peak in the UK

Our Macmillan fundraising trip to the highest peak in the UK, Ben Nevis, was meant for a balmy May day  in 2020. COVID put a stop to that, and after numerous false starts the date turned out to be a potentially chilly and wet late September 2020. As it happened the weather gods were fantastically generous and gave us a crystal clear, dry, and windless day. Our guide reckoned you only got 10-15 days like that a year.

Our group of 23 was split into rule of 6 compatible mini groups.We then hit the trail at a frosty 8am, with our groups starting at staggered times for COVID safety. 

The trial is easy to follow and very well maintained. If you are thinking of doing it, don’t be put off by the height, its a moderate gradient all the way up but steady with no scrambling or climbing. We took 3 hours to get to the top at an easy pace for us. If you go in the summer and start early, you’ll have 10 hours of good light to reach the summit and return. If in doubt hire a guide who can make the decisions about weather and timings for you.

The trail starts at the visitor centre, crosses the river, passes an excellent pub and hostel and quickly starts to climb. After 90 minutes or so we got to Lochan Meall, the halfway point!

Lochan Meall – halfway

From the lake there are a series of switchbacks, the guide called them the Christmas Tree, and then a short steep section till you reach the summit plateau. And then the top!

At the top

It was a great feeling to get to the top and we felt so lucky and privileged to have such a clear and glorious day to look out from 1,345 meters across the Nevis Range and the Western Highlands.

We felt lucky and glad to be alive. Don’t take it for granted, cancer hits every family and everyone has their own story. On the way home we learnt that a friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer; young, fit, new family and wife, a tragedy. It was an honour to raise a little over £7,000 for Macmillan who every day helps that family and that friend get the most from the time they have.

This was an amazing experience, and raising money for a charity like Macmillan only made it better.

“Volunteer Management Software for non-profits? I don’t need that!”

Volunteer Management Software. A scary term which sounds completely crazy to those who have religiously used Excel to manage their volunteer workforce. So, I get it, it can be frightening going from years of working on hundreds of excel sheets to just one piece of tech. But, what if I showed you how easy it can be? 

So let’s take a look at some of the most common sayings non-profits have when talking about volunteer management software. 

What even is volunteer management software?

Volunteer management software is an online system which allows your organisation to manage all of your volunteers in one simple space. With TeamKinetic, our system allows you to recruit, manage and retain volunteers through various methods. You can create volunteer opportunities, events, rewarding systems and much more. 

I’m no good with technology!

With volunteer management software you don’t have to be tech savvy! Most software nowadays is very straight forward and is made to be user friendly, otherwise, no one will use it. So, there is no need to be nervous about using this particular software. TeamKinetic have easy to read tutorials which guide you through your site to help get you started and understand the different areas. We also hold training sessions so you and your staff can gain an advanced knowledge of the software. 

We have a limited budget!

We understand this so we offer not only a free trial but also a free version! This allows organisations with limited budgets to use our software and have unlimited active opportunities and unlimited volunteers. Giving your organisation the chance to manage your volunteers FREE of charge!

We don’t want to change!

Change can be hard but sometimes it’s for the best. Today, many young people are becoming more interested in volunteering, especially for non-profits. The youth and technology go hand in hand so in order to attract the younger generation you will need to start heading down the tech route. But don’t fear TeamKinetic is here. Research shows our software is effective at recruiting younger volunteers. This could be down to our digital tools that let you share to social media or the fact the younger generation prefer that digital approach. This is a great way to start building up a variety of volunteers whilst still retaining past volunteers. 

Other departments take priority when it comes to new software!

Every non-profit relies heavily on their volunteers, so, having a good system to allow for the proper management of your volunteers must be a big priority. However, we understand that perhaps you feel you don’t have the time to set up the software and that your time could be better spent doing other things. That’s fine! We understand – that’s why we try to make the setting up process as easy as possible! At TeamKinetic we have tutorials which can be followed when setting up a site and even training with our team to help configure that new system to meet your organisations requirements. 

We are a small organisation – We won’t need it!

No matter how small, organisations need this type of volunteer management to be able to better manage their volunteers. Having a system which ultimately runs itself means less time creating and maintaining Excel documents and more time promoting your volunteer service and helping volunteers. TeamKinetic is host to many small organisations, so we know our volunteer management software is flexible for all companies. 

TeamKinetic for Non-profits

At TeamKinetic we want to ensure that your organisation is reaching their full potential when it comes to volunteer management. You can recruit and retain volunteers, create opportunities and events, give rewards and gain feedback, and many other features. Our software gives you the chance to have all of your volunteer management in one convenient space. And for a limited price. 

We hope that your hesitations about trying out volunteer management software have disappeared, but, if they are still lingering call us on 0161 914 5757 we are more than happy to talk you through our software in more detail! 

Alternatively, take a look at our website to find out more and start your FREE trial today! Or, read through our social media pages for more tips and tricks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube

We hope you enjoy our system!

Conquering Ben Nevis

Ben Nevis is one of the UK’s most famous natural landmarks, and is the tallest mountain across the British Isles! It is a long and strenuous climb that takes around 7-9 hours, guaranteed to leave you with stiff legs the next day! But it also leaves you with a big feeling of accomplishment.

This mountain is a lofty 1,345 meters high. To put this into perspective the London Eye stands at 135 meters high and Big Ben at 96 meters high. They don’t call it the tallest mountain for nothing! And our TeamKinetic Software Engineer, Rolf Herbert, is about to climb it in aid of Macmillan.

Rolf’s Ben Nevis Adventure…

On the 27th September our software engineer is taking on the Ben Nevis challenge! Rolf is taking this challenge on with 30 team members, with only a few having real experience for such a challenge!

“Macmillan is a superb charity that helps so many people in a positive way, it helps celebrate and appreciate what you have even when you are at risk of losing so much. Sharing an adventure with friends in a stunning location, whilst raising some money, seems an apt way to help” – Rolf Herbert

About Macmillan…

At Macmillan Cancer Support, they understand the many ways in which a cancer diagnosis can affect your life. But from the moment you’re diagnosed, through your treatment and beyond, Macmillan are right there with you, offering emotional, physical and financial support.

They take the time to understand you as a person, so that they can provide the support, tools and inspiration you need to find your best way through. They do it like this because they understand that everyone’s cancer journey is unique. 

Macmillan Cancer Support is a group of millions of supporters, professionals, volunteers and campaigners. And together, they make sure you are treated like a person- not just a patient- and get the support you need to live life as fully as you can.

Read how Macmillan are helping people today…

Best of Luck Rolf!

Everyone here at TeamKinetic applauds Rolf for taking on this challenging climb to raise money for a brilliant charity! We wish you the best of luck and we can’t wait to hear all about it (and make sure you wear some good shoes)!

If you wish to support Rolf on his endeavour for Macmillan, follow the link below.

Celebrities Who Do Great Charity Work

Celebrities are some of the richest people in the world, whether they be actors, footballers, or singers. Today, we take look at the celebrities who really care. The ones who donate their money and time to causes they’re truly passionate about.

Here are a few of the celebrities doing great work, and maybe it can inspire you to follow in their footsteps…

Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie speaking to Syrian refugees, celebrities who volunteer, charity, volunteer management, volunteering, volunteer management software,

Angelina Jolie has always been associated with being charitable, and today is no exception! Despite becoming one of the biggest names in Hollywood, she still used her time to help others…

  • Since 2001, she has embarked on field missions around the world and met with refugees in more than 20 countries.
  • In 2003 she set-up the Maddox Jolie Program that is today known as the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation (MJP). The foundation is dedicated to eradicating extreme rural poverty, protecting natural resources and conserving wildlife. They even donated $1 million to Doctors Without Borders.
  • 2016 saw her set up the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict which aims to ensure that children and young people affected by conflict, internal displacement, and refugee status are not denied their fundamental human right to education.

David Beckham

David Beckham. celebrities who volunteer, charity, volunteer management, volunteering, volunteer management software,
  • Has been a UNICEF ambassador since 2005 and travelled across the world to see the work that they do. Beckham has visited Swaziland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and the Philippines.
  • In February 2015, to mark his tenth year, UNICEF and David launched ‘7: The David Beckham UNICEF Fund’. The 7 Fund states that they are “tackling bullying, violence, child marriage and missed education, and making sure children – especially girls – get a true chance to realise their potential”.
  • The 7 Fund has also supplied polio vaccinations, drilled wells and brought clean water to schools and communities. They’ve also provided HIV medicine to pregnant mothers and given life-saving food to malnourished children.

Miley Cyrus

Miley often speaks out on social issues too – here she is at the Women’s March in 2017.

From rising to fame as Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana to creating media frenzies with her provocative live performances, Miley has had quite a journey in the public eye! But through it all, she’s kept her charitable spirit…

  • In 2009, she started a program for Youth Service America called ‘Get Ur Good On‘. Its purpose was for youth to support each other in their missions to do ‘good’ in their communities. Get Ur Good On Grants awarded 100 $500 grants to support projects that addressed critical community needs such as poverty, education, and environmental sustainability.
  • In 2014, she founded the Happy Hippie Foundation. The foundation provides homeless youth, LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable groups with consistent support services, education and employment opportunities.
  • Finally, in 2018 Miley, and her then-husband Liam, donated $500,000 to Malibu Relief after their home burned down due to the California wildfires. They noted that they wanted to give back to the place that “created so many beautiful memories for themselves and others”.

Feel inspired?

Do you now feel inspired to take part in some charity work to help make a difference but don’t know where to start? Check out our website as a starting point to see the clients we work with, and the volunteering opportunities they have on offer.

Product Steering Group: 16/09/2020

That was our first ever product steering meeting and we would like to thank everyone for their feedback and comments, we think it went pretty well! 

This group was a chance for us to relay some ideas and details about possible updates to our system and get a feel for how our users felt about these updates. It was also a chance for us to listen to your ideas on future features which could be added to the system or at least were worth further exploration. 

So with that, let’s show you what was discussed at the product steering group 16/09/2020. 

Roadmap

The roadmap is what we are using to help with the potential new features being added to upcoming updates. We are developing this through the MoSCoW Project. These are the Must haves, Should haves, Could haves and Wish list. The MoSCoW project will allow a way of ordering potential features based on their feasibility, price, etc… This section is live on your systems and will be under the help menu and under the new entry ‘roadmap’.

The ‘must have’ section will be everything we plan on fixing for the next update. On each potential new feature will be a voting system so you can vote on which you definitely want and which you don’t. This will then bump up certain features which are popular. 

If you have any new features you want and we haven’t mentioned, you can open a support ticket and choose ‘new feature’, this will then be added to a certain part on the MoSCoW project. 

Rolf will be adding a comments section soon, so let us know what you like, what you hate and everything in between.

Watch the video below to see how to view the Roadmap and how to add a new feature. 

Community Tasks – Where next?

Community tasks were set up in response to the COVID-19 crisis. They are small tasks designed to provide community support to people who are unable to leave their homes. To test out the community tasks you need to enable from the super admin settings and you can try out creating tasks without publishing them to your volunteers. Watch the video below to see how to turn on community tasks. 

At the moment the way the community tasks work is they are separate from the opportunities volunteer page. We kept these separate at the beginning of this update to ensure volunteers wanting to help with COVID-19 tasks would just go straight to this site. However, we are now interested in knowing how we might integrate the two sites and features more effectively.   

We think Community Tasks are useful beyond COVID-19 but we open to where they will ‘live’ with in the application moving forwards. If you have any comments on this please get in touch with us or fill in the questionnaire we have sent our on the subject and let us know what you think.

Native Mobile Development

Our native mobile development unfortunately all but stopped during the height of COVID-19 because our developers have been furloughed and unable to work.

This would have been a new version of our Apps for iOS and Android with all features you would expect added in and some neat new customisation available.  We are committed to continuing to develop our apps but coronavirus forced us to make some difficult choices, one of which was to build our Community Task app using Progressive Web App technology. 

Using Progressive Web App (PWA) for the community tasks site was fast to build and was easy to roll out and it had almost all the same features of a native app however it just uses the web browser on your phone  instead of downloading the app store. 

There are pros and cons of both app types of app and we are keen to know what you think about using PWA more in the future!

Native Mobile Development

Pros – Available on both IOS and Andriod, gives the best overall experience and integration with the mobile device. 

Cons – Slow and significantly increases the lag for new feature incorporation.

Progressive Web App

Pros – Fast to build and implement.

Cons – Do not have access to all mobile capabilities, especially on iOS.

Focus – UI/UX

UI – User Interface 

UX – User Experience

Whilst looking at our set guidelines and rules for our interface we wanted to make sure it enabled a good workflow for our users and let them focus on the tasks they were doing, so we named it ‘focus’. 

Over the last 12 months we have been integrating this look across all the pages on the system. The new side bar gives access to extra features on that page and there is no restriction on sizing. Searching is much easier as the universal search bar is now at the top of every page along with the notification settings and help bar. The new alert messages will either be in red or green depending on urgency and the ones in yellow will be for standard messages. 

Please let us know once you notice these changes, what works well and what doesn’t. We are heading down the root of changing all pages to look like the one above, so if you see anything that can be changed, set up a support ticket to explain. 

Thank You!

We hope all of our clients enjoyed the Product Steering Group, there were some great comments and ideas being said which will enable us to create a clearer path for the future. 

So we can get some extra feedback from our Product Steering Group, please fill in the survey we have created. 

We can’t wait to hear more from you. And until next time…

Page 25 of 56

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén