Advance Release Date - April 4, 2017

Public Release Date - May 1, 2017

Applied To All 2.0 Sites: May 1, 2017

Version 2.8 was released to a select group of clients on April 4, 2017. Revisions to that version, along with some additional features, were incorporated as Version 2.9. Both versions are included in this release.

Notes
​- You can view many of these enhancements in video form on our Vimeo page.
- Except where noted, the following applies to our Volunteer Module only. Except for very specific cases, these changes do not affect the Advanced Events, Service Learning, or Disaster Response modules. Those special cases will be pointed out in these release notes.

As you begin to explore your updated site, you'll notice some changes in the volunteer view, the agency manager view, and the site manager view.

Two buttons have been added to the volunteer's utility bar:

In addition to these changes, the profile dropdown may include a My User Groups option.

A user can select My User Groups to view details of any user groups they belong to.

In the Manage Needs table of the agency manager view, an agency manager can now see if a need is public or private, if it is associated with an initiative, and if that initiative is public or private. Privacy is indicated by a closed lock icon; see examples below.

In addition, the agency manager also has new fields and capabilities on their Create Need and Update Need forms.

Finally, the agency manager can now see team information on their exports of needs and responses from the Stats area.

Site managers have some new options under the Volunteerism menu.

In addition, if you go to Volunteerism > Needs, you will see a new Initiatives heading.

Click this heading to access your initiatives-management area.

Finally, if you go to the Reports area, you will see several new reports listed.

Initiatives is a new feature for grouping needs that fall under a certain umbrella. Initiatives are useful in various situations, including:

Site managers can assign needs to initiatives. Site managers can then assign initiatives to specific volunteer groups, add custom response questions for initiative needs, customize automated notifications for all needs within an initiative, and more.

Notes:
​- As a site manager, you can allow agency managers to attach their own needs to initiatives.
- If you wish to override the term "initiative" on your site, contact our Customer Care Team with your request.

You've probably already noticed that initiatives can serve as an alternative to the Advanced Events Module. We came up with initiatives in response to clients' requests and suggestions regarding the AEM, which wasn't consistently meeting some clients' needs. It worked well for some clients, but others wanted more freedom with need duration types, applicability to regular needs, and more control over the need-posting form. You can still use the AEM as always, but you may find that initiatives offers an easier, more accessible way of grouping needs under a single umbrella. With the new user groups feature, you can offer individual needs—or entire initiatives—privately to different groups.

User groups are a tool for grouping volunteers into categories based on common workplaces, clubs, or volunteer groups. User groups can also be used for selected volunteers who have expertise or training in an area (for example, volunteers who are veterinarians, or who are qualified to prepare tax returns).

Once associated with a user group, a volunteer can then associate any of their need responses with that user group. As a site manager, you can make initiatives and needs privately available to user groups, such that anyone outside of an assigned user group cannot see or respond to the private needs.

Note: If you wish to override the term "user group" on your site, contact our Customer Care Team with your request.

As a site manager, you can now mark individual, non–AEM needs private or public. As mentioned above, you can also make initiatives private, where only the user groups you specify can see the initiative details.

The teams feature has undergone a major rebuild. Team leaders now have expanded team-management capabilities (including the ability to email team members, add team hours, and clone a team). Site managers can now create teams from the site manager panel, and they have all of the same team-management abilities of the team leader, and more. Agency managers can now clearly see team-related information when viewing responses and hours.

Note: These features apply to standard needs only. They are not available in the Advanced Events Module.

Both site managers and agency managers have new options for posting needs:

Note: If you wish to override the term "attribute" on your site, contact our Customer Care Team with your request.

Volunteers have new options when finding and responding to standard needs.

The search/filter feature now includes options for Outdoors and Wheelchair Accessible needs.

A volunteer who belongs to one or more user groups can now select the user group with which they want to associate their need response and any hours they submit for the need later. A volunteer is not required to select a user group. The option to select a user group does not appear if the volunteer doesn't belong to any user groups.

Once a volunteer has submitted a response, they can return to the response later and change the following elements:

To access the area to edit their need response, they can select Need Responses from their profile dropdown.

This will take them to the Volunteer Responses area of their profile, where they'll see the option to edit their responses. Note that they can also use this area to add hours, and that team leaders can access their team-management area from here as well.

Note: If a volunteer wishes to unregister from a need, they should go to the need itself. They can click on the linked need in their Volunteer Responses area.

With these new features come new reports! The Reports area of your site manager panel now includes reports on initiatives and user groups. In addition, team leaders can now access a team resume, and user groups can view user groups reports.

The updates described below will have little or no effect on existing Galaxy Digital clients. These changes all affect the behind-the-scenes architecture of sites, and they are only explained here the sake of having all new features documented. Additional localization will be added in later versions this spring.

The ZIP code field now validates seven-character postal codes in addition to validating five-digit ZIP codes before a form is submitted, depending on whether the site serves Canada or the United States. Counties will not be used on Canadian sites at all. To make searches easier on Canadian sites, kilometers will be used when measuring distances between postal codes of Canadian sites or documenting the distance traveled in the Add Hours form. Finally, Canadian provinces will be shown on forms instead of American states if the site serves Canada.

The following terms on your Connect site can now be overridden with a term of your choice:

These language items have been added primarily so that Canadian clients can have their sites use Province, Postal Code, and Kilometers. These changes should not affect existing clients.

Site managers can assign a dollar value for volunteers' time in Site Settings. In the event that a site is missing data in its Value of a Volunteer Hour field in Site Settings, a default value is populated based on the site's state. Now, the system will use a value of $24/hour if the site lacks a state, the site is in Canada, or a value is otherwise not available.

Note: Province-by-province values are not available for Canada, so a national rate was used instead.

This change is primarily of interest for sites whose users who have had to white-list Galaxy Digital emails (mainly those coming from no-reply@galaxydigital.com) because the messages were getting caught in the recipients' spam filters. (This sometimes occurs if a company has a particularly strict spam filter.) In the past, we have instructed users to add no-reply@galaxydigital.com to their "safe senders" list, and to white-list the IP address 50.31.38.137. Recently, our email vendor forced a change of IP address. From this point forward, users should white-list the IP address 168.245.23.248, as well as the old one.

Click here to see a video overview of the 2.10 enhancements.

The following features have been added or updated with the newest release of the Connect platform.

Volunteers who respond to shift needs can now easily add those shifts to their Google Calendar. They'll have two opportunities to do this:

Note: Because a start and end time are not always defined for ongoing, runs until, or happens on need, this new feature only works for shift needs.

A weekly email will now be sent to agency managers with several important reminders, including:

Because this notification covers information offered in several other automated notifications (such as the Pending Hours Notification for Agency message), the agency manager digest can replace those. Those notifications are not being discontinued, however, so you can continue to use them if desired.

As with any template, you can customize the wording of the notification as needed.

Three new scheduling calendars are now available, making it easier for site managers, agency managers, and volunteers to see which shifts are coming up, and who has been scheduled to work them.

All users can view one month at a time, and calendars are searchable by distance, agency, and keyword or phrase. The data in each calendar is determined by responses to shift needs, and the start date and time of each shift.

A new "Today's Shifts" report lists all shifts that will occur on a given day, based on responses to shift needs. For each shift, the report includes:

Site managers can use this report to identify gaps in their coverage and determine where to focus recruiting efforts for important days.

Emails sent from Connect platform sites will now go through Amazon Web Services. This change will allow for emails to be stored more efficiently, queried faster, and sent more reliably. You'll likely notice a small decrease in the percentage of emails that fail to arrive to your site's users, if you notice any difference at all.

When posting a need, site managers and agency managers can now specify minimum and maximum volunteer ages for each need they post. When searching, volunteers can enter a specific age and see all needs that include that age in their range. The new search feature allows volunteers to more easily find opportunities for their age group.

A need can still be marked as family-friendly, and volunteers can still run searches for family-friendly needs.

The individual hours feature has been updated in a several ways:

As with previous versions, only site managers can approve individual hours within the Connect site.

The response confirmation notifications (the email sent to volunteers when they respond to a need) now includes four new template keys that you can add to the templates:

These links are not part of the notification by default; they must be added to the template message by a site manager.

Sites can now feature unlimited spotlights in the navigation menu. Site managers can select three spotlights to appear as banners on the dashboard while all other spotlights are available in the menu. With this enhancement, site managers now have greater control over how different elements of their sites are highlighted. In addition, the Settings > Spotlights area of the site manager panel now features an updated table for easier management of spotlights.

The hours table in the site manager panel (Volunteerism > Hours) can now be searched by typing a name, email, or need into a search box. This enhancement will make it easier to find hours that need to be approved, or to investigate a volunteer's service. It also makes the functionality of the hours-management area more consistent with the other management areas of the site.

If a site allows users to skip registration steps, that process now works even better for the new volunteer who is responding to a need for the first time. Rather than taking the volunteer to their Dashboard, the "skip-registration" links now return them to their need-response page.

The link to user registration that appears on the login page has been formatted to resemble other buttons (e.g. single sign-on, Facebook login, etc.) on that page.

Previously, the sign-up feature appeared as smaller, linked text. This new format should make it easier for volunteers to find the button and register from this page.

The agency name has been added to need cards, as shown in this example of a need posted by the agency "Higher Ground."

Previously, the text beneath the title was a truncated version of the need description. This change will make it easier for volunteers to know which agencies have posted which needs.

Pagination has been added to the top of all paginated tables for volunteers, agency managers, and site managers.

With this enhancement, Connect site users will be able to skim search results and find information more easily.

The county field on the user registration form had been updated to allow for a better workflow and clearer instructions. A ZIP code is still required before county can be selected.

Note: Because County is an optional field for user registration, your site may not have it on the registration form.

No new features or updates were made to the AEM.

The SLM now includes a Show Inactive button for the blocks and courses tables. In addition, blocks and courses can now be reactivated once they have been deactivated. (Previously, site managers had to contact Galaxy Digital to reactive deleted blocks and courses.) With this enhancement, site managers should be able to get data from past semesters more easily.

No new features or updates were made to the DRM.

Advance Release Date: September 25, 2017

Planned Public Release: October 18, 2017

Note: These updates do not apply to the legacy (1.0) version of Get Connected.

The following features have been added to all Connect platform sites.

Site managers can now create a system of qualifications to limit access to certain needs or prevent unqualified volunteers from responding to a need. You can use this system to store valuable information about volunteers, such as training expiration dates, driver licenses, and more. This valuable tool has several important elements, and you can learn more about them in these articles:

Note: As you'll learn in Managing Qualifications, agency managers must be first given permission to assign qualifications to needs before they'll see that option on the need-posting form.

In addition to grid view and list views, your Connect site now includes a map view of needs, events, and agencies. Locations shown on the map are based on address, so accuracy depends on filling in address fields. If only a ZIP code is entered, the map will show a location in the middle of the ZIP code. As with grid and list view, you can change your site settings to make map view the default view for all users.

When volunteers document a certain number of hours, site managers can reward them and record their accomplishment in their Connect site. Benchmarks allow managers to set a number of hours, a date range, and other conditions. The system then checks nightly for volunteers who have reached that the benchmark and emails them with a shareable badge. Badges also appear in the volunteer's user profile and on their résumé.

The following features have been updated for all Connect sites.

Some sites want to streamline their registration as much as is possible. To this end, site managers can now turn off certain default steps (selecting causes, selecting interests, and selecting agencies) in the registration process.

Sites can now have more or fewer causes and interests than the default 16 of each. Options are 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, or 24 of either, and the limits are set independently (for instance, you can have 20 causes and 8 interests). The count is limited to units of 4 for design purposes. To request that your count of causes or interests be increased or decreased, contact our Customer Care team.

Volunteers can now be asked to tell the site what days of the week, and what times of day, they are available. This feature replaces the availability fields that previously appeared on the need-response form. Availability appears in the user profile, can be added to the user registration form, can be searched in the user filter (and used in the email blast), and can be viewed in a new Volunteer Availability report.

Volunteers can now add a "distance willing to travel" mileage to their user profile. This information can be particularly useful for disaster response. You can add this question to the user registration form, and you can also search distances willing to travel in the user filter (and the email blast). The user filter looks specifically at users who are willing to travel to a given postal code.

If companies in your community use a Dollars For Doers type of program, you can have volunteers indicate a favorite agency for corporation donation-matching, or for corporate donations made based on hours volunteered.

The Household Income question has been removed from volunteer registration, the volunteer profile, and the list of registration questions that can be added. Historical data will be preserved.

The "Today's Shifts" report has been updated. You can now enter date ranges (rather than viewing shifts for a single day), and need titles are now clickable. When you click a need title, a new "Volunteer Availability" report will open in a new tab, showing all scheduled and available volunteers for the selected shift. Availability is based on both the availability information entered in a volunteer's profile, and the volunteer's perceived availability based on their other need responses.

A new "User Qualification Summary" report provides data about each of the active qualifications on your site, including the number of needs with the qualification and the number of volunteers who meet each qualification.

Site managers have a new way to add volunteers to a user group: They can add them in bulk from the user filter. This feature will be particularly useful for site managers who wish to add a number of existing users to a user group (for example, adding employees with a common email domain to their company's user group).

The following new terms can be overridden in your software:

To learn more about other available overrides, see our Language Overrides article.

There were no changes to the advanced events module this release.

There were no changes to the service learning module this release.

A new initiative type now appears for sites that have the Disaster Response Module (DRM). Marking an initiative with this new "Disaster Response" type will allow site managers to manage disaster-response needs in the ordinary need system, granting them access to shifts, team sign-ups, a red banner prioritizing those needs, and more. This new feature is not part of the DRM but is only available to DRM clients.

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