Version 2.16.1

Below you'll learn about the first batch of features added and updated for the Connect platform in 2019. Of special note is a new disaster-response platform. For many clients who were using our Disaster Response Module (DRM), the initiatives feature, which is available to all clients, has proven a sufficient alternative for disaster planning and response. As of this release, the DRM is discontinued. For clients who want to take disaster planning and response to the next level, a new offering, the Readiness Disaster Intelligence (ReDI) System, is now available. Sites that purchase the ReDI System will enjoy the standard Connect features, as well as the new ones described below.

Sometimes people get confused when they see a need they cannot respond to because they lack a qualification. You can now hide needs from unqualified volunteers with our new permission level. Set a qualification to "required to view selected needs," and that need will stay hidden from volunteers who are not qualified. Food banks and other Community Connect site managers will love how this focuses volunteers on the things they can participate in, and volunteers will love the simplification.

Qualifications are very useful, but they can become cumbersome when you are not asking for anything sensitive. Speed up your use of the site by setting some of your simpler qualifications to "auto approve." Your site will automatically approve volunteers' answers, so they can get started volunteering even sooner.

A new type of hour submission, "plus-one hours," is now available, making it easier for your site to capture hours more accurately. With plus-one hours, site managers can log hours for corporate groups that won't provide names or emails, and volunteers can log hours on behalf of friends or family (particularly children) who volunteered with them but do not have an account.

How many mission trips, alternative spring breaks, or other service trips do you have on your site? If you have even a few of these volunteer events across multiple days, you'll be excited to know about the new multi-date need type. With it you can communicate the necessary commitment to the volunteer more clearly. You'll also be better able to capture hours with the kiosk and other mechanisms, so your data will be an even better reflection of the impact made during the trip. Churches, schools, and clubs are especially likely to use this.

The most common type of custom report added over the last year is now a canned report. Your site now has access to a report on what the members in a particular group are doing. The "Hours by User Group" report, available in the Reports area of your site manager panel, will come in handy for your relationships with corporate groups in particular, as you can now get a clean look at their hours.

If you want your agency managers to answer unique questions on an initiative-by-initiative basis, you can now add those questions to the initiative. Use this feature to get answers about important things that only come up in limited contexts. This feature is similar to the "agency questions" feature available in the Advanced Events Module (AEM).

If your site connects to another Connect site, this feature will help ensure that content can be labeled appropriately. If you received needs from another site, you can now add or edit tags on those needs to mark them as "on campus," "great for families," and more.

When a volunteer views needs for a user group, they'll see a banner for that user group. This will help site visitors know that they are working with the needs meant for their group.

The first time you get designated as a site manager, you might not know where to go. Now, new site managers will get a note with important information they need to be successful, including information for contacting support and a link to the help center.

If you don't want volunteers to sign up for needs as individuals, you can mark a need as being for "teams only." This option will indicate that a need is geared toward larger groups, and it will help funnel individual members toward group leaders.

When anonymous hours are added by a site manager, the form will how ask how many people were working, and an unique hour entry will be created for each one. This will give you better reporting on how many hours entries there are and how large of shifts volunteers were working.

Your site originally required volunteers to select three causes and three interests when registering. This is no longer a requirement, and it will make registration even easier on new users.

Managers can now request that volunteers upload a file when a user answers hour-submission questions.

When a user signs up for a user group, they'll be shown the user group description and asked to confirm their choice. This new step will ensure that they know what they're signing up for, and they'll know when they've completed the process.

Small changes were made to the users' and leaders' views in SLM. These changes should help students know where to go, and professors to get the data they need.

The SLM section of the user filter has been updated to better reflect recent changes to the SLM.

In time of a disaster-relief effort, it’s important to have accurate information about your volunteers and how they can help. With our new ReDI System, you can establish disaster needs and initiatives on a site specifically intended for disaster response. You can ask detailed questions of your volunteers when they register so you know what tools they may have and what they can do. You can also filter for volunteers with specific skills or equipment, and quickly contact volunteers who meet your needs.

The disaster profile is a unique step in the ReDI registration process. Here the volunteer will enter information that will be especially helpful in time of disaster. This profile provides data that enables you to filter for volunteers with specific skills, experience, or equipment.

Based on feedback from clients, we've updated our list of disaster-response skills to better reflect communities' needs. This will allow for a better match when signing up for the site.

If you have the ReDI System, your site's user filter enables you to find a volunteers with certain skills. You can use the the filter to send email blasts as well.

Version 2.16.2

Public Release Date: March 4, 2019

Listed below are the new features and updates that have been added to all Get Connected, Community Connect, Corporate Connect, Campus Connect, and ReDI sites as version 2.16.2. For enhancements specific to connected sites.

If you're holding a large-scale event like MLK day, you can now prevent selected agencies from submitting needs for it. You can even do this across domains if your site is connected to another site with the Galaxy Link. Use this when you have an agency that hasn't completed important steps in applying for the event or when you don't want to distract agencies with information that isn't relevant to them.

Previously, when you cloned needs, the clones had to use the same date types (for example, "happens on") as the original need. This requirement has been efficient in some cases, but it's been inconvenient in others. You can now choose a new date type when you clone a need. As an example, you can clone a "happens on" need to be a shift need, or a shift need to be an "ongoing" need.

We've updated the look and feel of the search options on the front end of the site so that the "phrase" search is more obvious. Users will find needs faster because this search option is now easier to find.

A number of terms have been added to the language overrides. You can ask Customer Care to set any of them up for you, and you can see the full list in our article on language overrides.

If your site does not use causes (either because you are a single-cause agency or because they are just not a good fit for you), you can have the causes hidden from your site. This means that causes will not appear for users, on the agency form, or elsewhere. This will mostly apply to smaller Community Connect clients, such as Habitat for Humanity affiliates. Contact Customer Care if you would like to have the causes feature hidden on your site.

Sometimes a site manager wants to let need respondents know about a critical piece of information, but they don't want that information to appear publicly. If you add that information in the need's Comments field on the need-posting form, you can now have the comment included in the Need Response Thank You notification. Use this for things like sharing specific addresses or for sensitive use cases.

Below are the 2.16.2 enhancements that apply specifically to Galaxy Link sites.

Managers on the back of the site and users on the front of the site can now search needs by domain they come from. This will help them when they are looking for local data or when they want to get a better idea of where the content on the site is coming from. State sites and universities will get the most benefit from this features.

When two sites are connected using the Galaxy Link, there have been some limitations on one site's ability to add hours for users from the other site. These limitations have been removed, and a site can add hours for any user who has responded to its needs, even if the user comes from another domain. This enhancement will be especially useful to United Way site managers who work with universities.

If two sites are connected, all of the needs from one site flow to the other. Currently, if you want to stop all of an agency's needs from flowing to the other site, you can do that by stopping sharing for that agency. Now you can do the same thing with initiatives. Blocking an initiative will block all of the needs within that initiative from being shared.

Note: You can also share an initiative but block certain agencies on a connected site from adding needs to that initiative, as explained above.

Version 2.16.3

Public Release Date: June 3, 2019

Welcome to Connect version 2.16.3! Here are the exciting new changes to all Get Connected, Community Connect, Corporate Connect, Campus Connect, and ReDI sites, released on June 3, 2019.

Previously, a user group member would select a user group when responding to an opportunity. In response to many client requests, we have moved the user group selection option to the hours-submission form.

Volunteers and students should find the process more intuitive now, as they can associate their hours directly with their user groups or courses.

This significant change has a number of effects, listed in the following sections.

Many of our clients, especially universities, use user groups to track which students are working to meet course requirements. Site managers can now make it a requirement for students or volunteers to complete the User Group field when logging hours. If the User Group field is required, an additional "N/A" option will be available for those who do not want to associate the hours with a course or user group.

If a volunteer does not belong to any user groups, the User Group field will not be shown, and no selection will be required.

Volunteers can now select multiple user groups on the hours form. Previously, they were limited to a single user group when responding to a need.

A volunteer can now associated individual hours (those not associated with a need response) with one or more user groups.

The SLM Leader Portal, used by course instructors, has been updated to show that courses are associated with hours rather than need responses. In addition, the SLM Leader Portal's percentage charts have been updated to omit any hours that the SLM Leader logs. As a result, the percentages will now reflect student hours only.

Agency managers can now see all of their volunteers' user groups. When logging hours on behalf of a volunteer, agency managers can now associate the hours with any of the user groups to which the volunteer belongs. (Previously, an agency manager could only see a volunteer's user group if the agency manager also belonged to the user group.) They will also see respondents' user groups when viewing responses so they can know to expect people from corporate or other special groups.

For SLM sites, it is often important to prevent a student from adding hours to a course for a need hasn't been approved for that course. The site managers User Group form now has a setting to require students to associate hours with a course only if those hours are for a need that has been assigned to the course in your Connect platform.

The User Group resume, data explorer, User Group Summary, and Hours by User Group reports have all been updated to reflect the changes outlined in these release notes.

Here are a few other areas of your site that have been updated to reflect the change to user groups:

Site managers can now filter users by those who do not belong to a user group. (Previously, they could only filter for users who did belong to a selected user group.)

Added expressly so that managers can search for "users who are not in my court-mandated user group," this new filter options will provided additional flexibility when sending emails and help in specific use cases as well.

Site managers can now set up questions to be displayed for volunteers or students upon joining a user group. This new feature will particularly benefit sites where court-mandated volunteerism is important, where site managers need users to submit information relevant to the court order before they can be added to the user group.

Many user group members and students in SLM courses enjoy seeing their user group's impact on the user group resume. In some cases, such as with a user group that has been set up for court-ordered service, a user group resume may not be desired. You can now select to suppress the user group resume from selected user groups.

Site managers can now filter the back end Manage Responses table (Volunteerism > Responses) by the date and time of shift. This will let them create quick views of who will be on site on any given day, and it will let them manage those volunteers more easily.

When a site manager has a lot of needs to deactivate all at once, they can now check off needs on the back end Manage Needs table (Volunteerism > Needs) and choose the bulk action Deactivate. The most common use of this feature is to clean up old data quickly.

Version 2.17

Public release date: Sept, 2019

Version 2.17 of the Connect platform sees several small changes that will affect specific use cases. While none of these new features apply to every client, most clients will find at least one substantial.

The Volunteer Get Connected app has been increasingly popular among our clients, and site managers can now send a push notification directly to some or all of their users who have the app installed. Send people urgent updates or other information just like you would send an Email Blast.

We've created a few new reports for a variety of use cases. To make these powerful reports, we've done quite a bit of work behind the scenes to make sure you can get lots of meaningful data without the page taking forever to load.

The Daily, Monthly, and Quarterly Dashboards are build with board members' oversight and volunteer centers' daily management in mind. Get a broad swath of information about how your site performed, and send the information to PDF so you can give it to your supervisor and let them know the benefit the site is having.

Disasters are happening more and more often. Get Connected sites are often called upon to facilitate spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers and other recovery and rebuilding tasks. The FEMA report is designed to be filtered for your disaster work and exported so you can give the data to FEMA for reimbursement. It has been designed to meet their expectations so that you don't have to fret over getting things pulled together.

This report is designed with two use cases in mind. If you're a facility that wants to print out a badge for all users on your site or if you are a facility that wants to print badges only for users who have a shift on a given day, you can do that. The report is designed to be lean so that it will work with any label maker or process you have.

The Data Explorer reports now have date ranges. You can see data for all time or just a limited range. This will help you dig into your data and understand how your site is performing during a specific period.

Many sites are not using Events or have been forced to shoehorn events into their workflow because the feature was always displayed to users. Now you can hide the Events links from users and from agency managers so that it's no longer in the way.

When a user submits a qualification answer and you mark it as Qualified, we will now email them to say they are approved. By communicating with a user when you approve their qualifications, you can encourage them to get back to the site and respond to needs that might have been hidden from them.

You can now add a link to qualifications so that users can either get more information, watch an important video, read a document related to the qualification, and more. You set the link for each qualification individually so that the information is always relevant.

We added the day of the week (e.g., Mon, Tues, etc) and the end time to users' view of shifts. This will help them know when the shift takes place and what's being asked of them.

When a user responds to a need, they sometimes want to respond to all or most of the shifts. This new feature will let them jump in and get involved with fewer clicks.

You might notice some branding updates. We've changed some of our logos, and you might hear us use different names for our products. The technology is still the same, but you might notice the following changes:

Version: 2.18.1

Public release date: November 4, 2019

The newest version of Get Connected is the first in what we're calling "Get Connected 2020," a celebration of our company's 10th birthday. Over the next several releases, we will make significant upgrades to features that our clients frequently use and care about the most.

In this version, 2.18.1, we focused on waivers and qualifications, which are of special interest to Get Connected Community clients. In short, we greatly improved the user experience for managers and volunteers, and we made sure that agency managers got a few things too.

Site managers can now put their waivers on the qualifications step of user registrations. This is especially handy if you want to keep users who don't sign the waiver from seeing any needs on the site.

Site Managers can also control which qualifications appear. One waiver can be in the registration process while another is not. Some of a site's qualifications can be on the registration while the other qualifications are not. It's up to each site manager to decide which ones are the right ones to put in front of every user who registers.

Previously, user's profiles showed a block of waivers and a block of all other qualifications. Now we show all of them in one block so that they are no longer confused by seeing two different categories.

Volunteers will see a qualification within the software at the point where they need to answer. For example, if a particular need requires a qualification, volunteers will see an overlay that allows them to provide an answer when they click on that need. If they must provide an answer to a qualification to see any needs, they will be prompted with an overlay when they attempt to view needs. In all cases, they will see an overlay that makes it easy to respond. Answers will still need regular approvals. But volunteers no longer have to navigate away and get lost in a list of qualifications that don't affect them.

Anywhere a user could submit an answer to a qualification as well as on the need page itself, we will display the user’s status for those qualifications. This will help users know what they can or cannot do and why.

If a user submits qualifications from a need page, and all of their answers are approved, we'll email them and invite them to return to the site and respond. This will keep volunteers engaged so that they don’t try to respond and get stonewalled, and then leave never to return.

Some sites have special rules around storing user's birthdays. The user can choose to save their birthday or not before they sign a waiver. (We have to know if the person is 18-years-old in order to present them with the correct waiver.)

The tabs in the manager's qualifications area and the fields on the qualifications form have been reorganized in order to improve the flow of creating a qualification. Also, managers will be invited to create waivers if they need to do so when creating a qualification.

Speaking of UX, waivers are now added on one page that does not require refreshing. Additionally, site managers will be invited to add the waiver to a qualification when they're finished.

If you want to have minors sign a waiver, but you don't want adults to sign the waiver, you can now set up a waiver to do that. If an adult tries to do something that requires them to interact with the waiver - for example, if they click a need that has a minor waiver attached - they will be moved forward with minimal interruption.

To date, giving an agency access to qualifications was an all-or-nothing matter. Now, you can be much more detailed. If you want to make a qualification available to only one agency or a select group of agencies, you can do that. Or you can make it available to everyone. An agency’s relationship to qualifications is now more similar to initiatives.

Agencies can now see answers to relevant qualifications when they look at responses. They can use this feature to see what people have answered as they are getting ready for shifts.

A new form for adding users, responses, hours, and even user group membership after they volunteer for you is now available. It's designed to be fast, and it's designed to be filled out for multiple users in quick succession. Use it after a colleague hands you a sign-in sheet from a shift.

When adding a user on the back of the site, managers can now choose to not set a password, and/or they can choose to send them an email inviting them to complete their profile. This will speed things up, and it will help with adding users after certain types of events.

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