Release Date: November 2, 2016
Version 2.7 enhancements have been made to the following Get Connected, Corporate Connect, Campus Connect, and Community Connect modules:
Volunteer (Standard) Module
Added
Custom questions on the need-response form
When a volunteer responds to a need, they are taken to a need-response form where they can enter additional information, such as phone number, days available, and other notes. Site Managers can now add custom questions to this form in order to elicit even more specific information about their volunteers' activity. Click here to learn how to create and edit custom questions for the need-response form.
Source domain shown for needs, events, and agencies
Certain pages of Corporate Connect and Campus Connect sites now display some additional text to show that an agency, need, or event originated from a Get Connected hub. Here's an example from a need-response page; note that the Details section shows where the need originated.
With this enhancement, volunteers will now know where their responses, RSVPs, and agency-fan data are going, and the Get Connected hub receives credit for providing the agency, need, and event content.
Click here to learn more about setting up a Corporate or Campus Connect relationship with a Get Connected site.
"Powered by..." has been added to certain automated notifications
When a volunteer responds to a need or event, certain notifications will be automatically sent to that volunteer over time:
- A message thanking them for responding to the need
- A couple of reminder messages, if the need happens on a certain day
- A follow-up message, if the need occurred on a certain day
- A reminder message for an event
- A follow-up message once the event date has passed
With this enhancement, if a Corporate Connect or Campus Connect volunteer responds to a need or event that originated on the Get Connected hub, the emails listed above will now include "Powered by ..." text that shows the site on which the need or event originated.
Click here to learn more about setting up a Corporate or Campus Connect relationship with a Get Connected site.
User filter for causes
Site Managers can now filter users by their selected causes in the user filter.
To date, only interests were a part of the filter. This change applies to both the user-management area and the Email Blast.
Headquarters sites can see users belonging to their reporting site
Headquarters (HQs) are special Get Connected sites that have been set to receive reporting data from other sites, regardless of whether they are set up as a Get Connected Hub, Corporate Connect site, Campus Connect site, or none of the above. HQ sites can now use the user filter and Email Blast tools to look for users on their reporting sites.
Improvement to VIP charts
When viewing a Get Connected hub site's Volunteer Impact Page (VIP), a user can now select to view data by domain, state, or region.
In the above example, the user is selecting to view data by state. The items in the State and Domain dropdowns are populated automatically. To have specific regions added for your site, contact our Customer Care team.
Site Managers can view fanned agencies
Site managers can now view and edit the agencies a user has fanned by going to Volunteerism > Users, clicking on a user, and then clicking Agencies. This agencies page shows what agencies the user manages (if any) and what agencies the user has fanned. A Site Manager can add or remove agencies from both lists as needed.
Updated
Hub causes and interests now available on Connect sites
When viewing the Causes and Interests tabs in Site Settings, Corporate Connect and Campus Connect Site Managers will now see their Get Connected hub's custom causes and interests, if any have been added. This enhancement allows the Corporate or Campus Connect Site Manager to select their Get Connected hub's custom categories to use on their own site. This enhancement will not disrupt the Corporate or Campus Connect site's ability to have its own custom causes and interests; however, all sites are still required to have exactly 16 causes and 16 interests.
Click here to learn more about custom causes and interests. For information on the default causes and interests, see the following articles:
Hub content now included in digest emails for Connect site users
Each week, all Get Connected, Corporate Connect, Campus Connect, and Community Connect users who have indicated interests or fanned one or more agencies receive a "digest" email. This email provides links to the latest needs posted for each recipient's preferred interests, as well as needs posted by their favorite agencies. Prior to this enhancement, users of Corporate Connect and Campus Connect sites only received information about needs posted on those sites—not about needs posted on the Get Connected hub feeding into their site. With this enhancement, the digest email now includes needs from both the Corporate or Campus Connect site and the applicable Get Connected hub.
For more information about the digest, click here.
Agency Manager table improvements
Agency Managers can now click on the headers of table columns to sort content so that items are easier to find. A new Added column in the needs table shows the date each need was added.
Change to notification for cloned needs and events
Prior to this enhancement, whenever a need or event was cloned, the system created a brand-new need or event, which immediately triggered a notification email to certain users. We have changed how cloning works in order prevent these notifications from being triggered until after the cloned need has been updated and saved. The cloning process does not change at all for Agency Managers and Site Managers; the only change is in when the notification to users is triggered.
Formatting change to "Respond as Team" button
The team-response button for volunteers has been updated to be more intuitive and easier to locate.
| New Button | Button Prior To This Enhancement |
 |  |
As you can see above, the old button only showed a team icon, whereas the new one shows the icon with the Respond as a Team wording. In addition, an "individual" icon has been added to the individual Respond button, as shown here: 
Email template status applied to in-app messages
All emails sent from Get Connected, Corporate Connect, Campus Connect, and Community Connect are also sent via in-app messaging. Previously, if a Site Manager marked an email template as inactive (in Communication > Notifications), the email would no longer be triggered; however, the corresponding in-app message was still being triggered. With this enhancement, the email template status (e.g., active or inactive) will now be applied to both emails an in-app messaging.
For information on changing the status of a notification template, click here. For more information on in-app messages, click here.
Form backgrounds darkened
The background color of all forms on your Get Connected, Corporate Connect, Campus Connect, or Community Connect site have been darkened so that fields are easier to see.
Digest email uses language overrides
If your site uses language overrides, these overrides will now be applied in the digest emails as well as on the rest of your site. For more information about the digest email, click here.
Y and N used instead of 1 and 0 on need export
Previously, the Agency Manager's export of needs showed a "1" to indicate that a need accepted teams, and a "0" to show that it accepted individual responses only. To minimize confusion, "1" and "0" have been replaced with "Y" and "N," respectively, in the export.
Blog author on blog post
Your site's blog now shows who authored each post. Now your users can know who wrote what when reading the blog.
An icon, accompanied by the author's name (as shown above), appears on the blog post itself, not in the listing of posts or on the Dashboard.
Change to exporting process
Your site has many opportunities to export data into a spreadsheet. In the past, clicking an Export command resulted in the creation of a spreadsheet with the requested data. Sometimes the spreadsheet would be created immediately, but sometimes it would take longer, particularly for spreadsheets that included a great deal of data. With this enhancement, clicking an Export command will trigger an email to your inbox within 60 seconds. This email will include a link to view the export.
This enhancement was made in order to decrease the time necessary to create new exports for all sites.
Removed
Obsolete email templates removed
Obsolete email templates include (1) no-longer-applicable templates from older versions of the code and (2) templates that have not been used in a very long time. All obsolete templates have been removed from all sites in order to reduce the amount of clutter in the notification templates
For more information on existing notification templates, click here.
Advanced Events Module (AEM)
Added
Company and agency AEM dashboards show user hours
Company Managers and Agency Managers can now see how many hours a volunteer has submitted for a given AEM need by viewing the responses to that need.
With this new column, Agency and Company Managers will now know how many hours each of their volunteers has submitted, and whether or not they still need to add hours on a volunteer's behalf.
Updated
Needs can be cloned from the back of the site
AEM needs can now be cloned from the Site Manager Panel. Previously, a Site Manager could clone an AEM need only by using the Live Preview feature. With this enhancement, Site Managers now have a Clone button for each AEM need in the Site Manager Panel. This button is located at the bottom of the need form. (Needs are accessed by going to the All Needs area of the advanced event and clicking on a need in the listing displayed.)
Disaster Response Module (DRM)
Added
Volunteer skills and services report
In the Reports area of the Site Manager Panel, sites using the DRM now include a "Volunteer Skills and Services" report. This report lists all volunteers who have disaster profiles and shows which skills and services they have checked off. Like all Connect site reports, this report can be exported into a spreadsheet.
Updated
DRM skills added to the DRM user import
For DRM imports, you can now include a comma-separated list of DRM skills and services in the import template so that they are imported along with the profiles. Contact us if you would like our template for importing DRM profiles, or if you need to import data. Click here to see a list of the current default skills and services used in the DRM.