Hi Brandyn,
Thank you for this suggestion! I will include the following statement on our Enhancement Board:
"Add {{shift_time}} and {{team_name}} template keys to the Upcoming Need Reminder notification. This will help volunteers remember more detailed information about their responses."
Please let me know if that sounds right!
Thank you, and I hope you have a great Monday!
Autum
I have added this request to the Enhancement Board!
Would it be possible for all template keys to be available for all notifications? I'd like our Need Response Thank You to be able to include the Need Description key, which is available in the Agency Need Denied template but for some reason this one.
Hey Sarah,
Thanks for writing in! It's not possible for all template keys to be available for all notifications since the template keys have to be connected to the location they are needing to pull its information from. So, if we had all template keys available for all notifications, many of them would just not work the way admins would think they do and that would cause a bit of confusion.
That being said, since the Need Response Thank You notification does pull information from a specific need, I can see how the ability to add the need description would make sense and be helpful. To best summarize your enhancement request, can you give me more details on the information you find most important from the description to include in the emails to volunteers?
In the meantime, I can see that the {{need_comment}} template key is available to you in that notification. While information in that field is not viewable on the public need page, you can utilize it to add the information you'd like to share with your volunteers in your notification message.
Hope that was helpful, looking forward to hearing your thoughts here.
Shonie
Customer Experience Specialist
She / Her
It would also be helpful to have auto-notifications for people who sign up that are different for ongoing opportunities and date specific opportunities.
In general, I would like to potentially include the entire description, as some agency staff include different information in their needs. The Need Comment could be helpful moving forward, but many agency staff don't use it since it is not visible to the public, to retroactively adjust needs may be overwhelming if not impossible.
Sarah -- I can totally see how retroactively going back in to copy and paste the need description into the comment fields of already established needs would be time consuming. My recommendation is what you’ve mentioned, using this knowledge moving forward for your agencies to utilize the comments field to share specific information about their needs in the emails to their need responders. In the meantime, I will put the following onto our developers’ enhancement board:
“The addition of the {{need_description}} key to the Need Response Thank You email notification template”
Let me know if that is sufficient for what you're asking for!
Karen – Thank you for your input! All opportunities receive the Need Response Thank You notification upon sign up, including Ongoing opportunities. Are you wanting a specific template key to add to this initial notification and customize it further or just a separate email notification that goes out only for Ongoing opportunity responses? If it is the latter, what would you need this email notification contain? As a side note, because Ongoing opportunities do not have a specific date and time associated with them, there are currently no other auto-notifications, like the Upcoming Need Reminder, that are set to go out to those since there is no information for it to pull from.
Thanks,
Shonie
Customer Experience Specialist
She / Her
If I add the Need Comment to be included, but it is an older event where that is not filled in, will that just be blank or will it have an error message?
Hey Sarah,
I'm going to move our conversation over into a ticket so we can dig more into this together!
Shonie
Customer Experience Specialist
She / Her
Hi Shonie,
I'm wondering if {{need_comment}} shows up for all sites? I don't see that template key in my Upcoming Need Reminder.
I would really like to be able to replicate the same info below from the Need Response Thank You.
You are confirmed for {{agency_name}}!
Shift: {{need_title}}
Date and Time: {{shift_times}}
Location: {{need_comment}}
Best,
Cody
Hi Cody,
Thanks for your patience in my reply here. The {{need_comment}} template key is currently only available in the Need Response Thank You notification.
That being said, many site managers use that field for important information for their volunteers to know prior to when they show up for the need. I totally understand wanting these notes to also show in the Upcoming Need Reminder notifications as well.
That being said, I will add this to our enhancements board along with our other template key requests! In essence, you want the template keys available in the Need Response Thank You to also be available in the Upcoming Need Reminder notification, too. Let me know if I am missing anything!
Best,
Shonie
CX Specialist
She / Her
Yes- what Cody said! Please add Need Comment and/or Need Location template keys to the Upcoming Need Reminder emails.
We
are having a lot of issues with people not knowing where to go for their
volunteer opportunity. (Even though they signed up themselves on the
opportunity page with the address!!) We are trying to make the address VERY
apparent in the reminder email. To try and work around this in the past, we've
put a message that says something like "to view location information,
please click this link" and its the "need link" template key
there. But no one clicks it apparently. We could include the need
description template key and then put every opportunity address in the
opportunity description but then there would be a whole long paragraph in the
middle of the email.
Hi Lisa,
Thank you for adding your support of this post! I'll make sure that your support is noted in this enhancements request.
Thank you and I hope you have a great day!
Autum
Hi everyone,
Good news! I wanted to follow up here and say that our Development team has recently made the "Need Response Thank You" and the "Upcoming Need Reminder" email notification templates a bit more consistent.
They were able to add the {{need_comment}} key to the "Upcoming Need Reminder" template to use there.
Additionally, they have updated the {{need_date}} key in the "Upcoming Need Reminder" template to show the date and time if it is in regards to a specific shift. If it is in regards to a Happens On need, it will show the need date.
We hope this helps you all and your workflows. I will keep this thread open and not mark it as implemented, though, since there are a few additional keys folks have asked for that have not been added to the templates. However, we've still made notes on these for consideration in the future. It's a working progress!
These remaining suggestions include the addition of:
Brandyn Rodriguez
Can you create additional template keys for the Upcoming Need Reminder to include shift time and Team Name if they are registered for a team please?
I am constantly getting emails from people to confirm what shift they are registered for. I explain they can check on their dashboard and Volunteer Responses but I also check to see their shift time and give them that information too. Would really like if the shift time would be included in the need reminder email.
4 people like this idea