This December, TeamKinetic has an early Christmas present for our customers. We will be releasing one of our largest ever update with some significant improvements and extra functionality across the board.  Below are the biggest changes.

• Session Names
• Use of “Google places” to search and create opportunity locations
• Complete re-write of the opportunity apply process
• Custom Open-badge awards
• Lots more customisation options
• Our POD system for enterprise clients
• Day schedule report available for everyone
• Invite new volunteers via email (for providers and admins)
• New search and download options for criminal checks
• All transaction emails sent via Mandrill for improved deliverability

As well as the raft of 150 or so bug fixes, minor improvements and speed gains.

We will be sending a notification to all our customers pointing you to this blog and also to encourage you to login to the beta site (using your normal login details) and give some feedback on the new features.

LOGIN AND TEST THE BETA SITE HERE

Your feedback is essential. We take your feedback seriously and it helps us understand your needs and issues. You also help us spot potential bugs and operational considerations that we may not have considered for this update. We take every care to test the application before we update the code but we don’t always have a test that fully represents your exact usage, so we ask you to login to the beta site and try it out for yourself.  

If you do find any issues or would like to raise some concerns, you can send feedback using any of the following ways.

1. Complete a support ticket in the HELP menu.
2. Send us an email and put in the subject line “BETA SITE”
3. Call us here at the office on 0161 914 5757 and press option 1 and talk to Support Team.
4. If you have not done it yet, join our Facebook ADMIN group and send us a message.
5. Send us a Tweet telling us what you think of the new features.

Named Sessions

When creating or editing opportunities you are now able to name sessions. This is great if you have an opportunity that might have sessions on at the same time, say water stations along a marathon route. Using this new feature you could have 5 sessions within the one opportunity, all at the same time but identify them as, Station 1 – at 5Km, Station 2 – at 15 Km and so on.

New and Improved Search

Many of you will have already tried out the new search at various points along its beta testing. We have been able to incorporate much of your suggestions and it should now be much easier for volunteers to find opportunities.

You can now enter a place name in the location field and not just a postcode, this lookup is powered by Google Places which have over 2 million defined areas and places. This is a great improvement as its now possible to perform a search like; show me opps within 2 miles of Liverpool, or Bristol University and so on.

There are extra filters like accessible and expenses paid and the sorting algorithm has been improved. If a search is entered the results are automatically ordered by relevance and those opportunities with the search terms appearing closest together will be at the top.

The new search also prevents empty searches resulting in hundreds of unfiltered opportunities being returned. For those of you lucky enough to have hundreds of available opportunities a user will be asked to enter at least a distance or a search string in order to limit the number of search results.

New Opportunity Applying Process

The applying process for opportunities has now been improved greatly. When an opportunity is marked as APPLYING, volunteers will be able to view the opportunity and its sessions but will not be able to join any sessions. Instead, they are asked to “apply”. At this point, any pre-requisites demanded by the opportunity are completed and then they are passed to an “New Applicant list”.

The applicants for the opportunity are visible on the opportunity management page for the admins/providers. From there you can view their details and pre-requisites and decide whether to approve or deny the application.

Approved volunteers are informed and are then able to join sessions as normal. Denied volunteers are also informed but are not able to join sessions or reapply as they remain in the applicant table as unsuccessful.

Open-badge Awards

You can now create your own badge awards to give to volunteers. These are designed around the OpenBadges system and volunteers will be able to store these badges in their own external badge backpack and use them anywhere where OpenBadges are accepted.

OpenBadges are a great way to reward volunteers in a way that enables them to build a recognisable portfolio of achievements that they can use to develop their skills everywhere.

Once a badge has been ‘baked’ into their backpack they can choose where and with whom to share that achievement.

In this first iteration, you can only award badges manually using the volunteer profile. We are looking at the possibility of creating automated awards based on a number of criteria; hours, opportunities, length of service etc.  We would love to hear your ideas about the kind of badges you might like to have?

You can get some help designing badges with the great online tool badge.design.

Extend The Customisation Of Your Site

We have opened up more of the system for much greater customisation by the super admins.

Using the super admin menu you are now able to customise all “registration form labels”, “help titles” and “help content” right from the SETTINGS menu.

Fancy a new front page look? Then check out the new LOOK & FEEL menu and enter your own HTML code for the front page and get a quick preview before saving and making live.

For power users, there is a CSS section where you can change the entire site style if you want. You can target home page elements, links, containers and change margins, colours and anything else you want. The custom CSS file is loaded after all defaults so you can override any existing settings.

If you would like your site to be updated but don’t have the skillset to do it, in-house, drop us a line and one of the team will get in touch to talk through your ideas and potential costs.

POD System

Enterprise clients can now choose a new type of application structure that we call PODs. This enables you to split up the administration of providers and opportunities into PODs and assign administrators to those PODs.

POD administrators only have access to the providers in their POD and the opportunities they have created.

Each POD also has an editable mini homepage that the POD admins can create to advertise their own opportunities.

It’s a great way to enable separate departments within a larger organisation some autonomy whilst keeping all your opportunities in one place for your volunteers.  If you think the POD might be something you and your organisation would like to know about then get in touch with our sales team on 0161 914 5757 and they can talk you through the options.

Day Schedule Report

The day schedule report is available from the REPORTS menu and offers a quick insight into the activity on any day across all opportunities and events.

Simply pick your time period and the report will return all sessions that are  happening within that period, including the volunteers on each session and stats about that session. You can also check in volunteers right from this screen which will log their hours for that session.

Its a super easy way to keep track of what’s going on over the days and weeks ahead.

Invite Volunteers via Email

Invite your existing volunteers via their email address. Just paste a list of comma separated emails or upload a CSV to send out an invite email with a link to reigster on your system. Maintains a list of all invited volunteers and lets you know if they have registered yet. Providers can also upload their own separate lists and if volunteers join via the Linking address in the email, they will automatically be linked to the provider sending the invite.

For administrators you can find it in the SETUP section of the settings menu. For providers it is in the VOLUNTEER menu.

Search and Download Expiring Criminal Checklists

Search for volunteers with expiring criminal checks and also for those criminal check applications that are overdue and download the results.

An enforced maximum validity for a criminal check has been added to your application options screen. Whenever a criminal check is added this date represents the maximum allowable time before the check expires. If an expiry date is entered which is beyond this date it will be reduced to the maximum allowable period.

This ensures that all criminal checks on the system have an expiry date and the new search page makes it easy to find expiring checks and get prepared.

All Transaction Emails Sent via Mandrill

All our transaction emails, that is emails that are sent automatically in response to an action like joining an opportunity, are now sent via Mandrill. Mandrill is one of the largest transactional email platforms, sending billions of messages a month.

This move will aid deliverability and reduce false spam alerts.

That’s the big stuff

This update contains a lot of improvements to TeamKinetic, we encourage you to try out the beta site for yourself. We welcome your thoughts and your feedback, so please don’t be a stranger and get in touch.

Facebook Live interactive sessions are coming soon on all these new features and more, join our ADMIN’S Group now and don’t miss out.