Product Updates

AngelPointers: News, Features and Tips 11.19.08

courtney — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:57:00 -0600

What's New

50 Attendees Join AngelPoints for the First State of the Product Call
Ever wonder what new features AngelPoints has planned or what is happening with your feature requests? 50 attendees joined the AngelPoints team for our first State of the Product call on November 12. This forum, which will be scheduled quarterly, is your opportunity to hear a recap of recently released features, find out about upcoming product plans and share your feedback and questions with AngelPoints. The team also unveiled our new Ideas Portal, giving you more say and better insight into the way we prioritize feature requests. Keep your eyes open for information about our next call in the first quarter of next year.

AngelPoints Launches Ideas Portal
AngelPoints recently launched our client-driven Ideas Portal. This portal is a space for you to tell us what you need from AngelPoints products and services. You can post your ideas, as well as vote and comment on ideas posted by other clients. AngelPoints will be commenting and updating the status of issues to give you greater transparency into our product development process. We will be using the Ideas Portal as we plan out our future roadmaps and will give priority to the items with the highest votes.

We are currently in a soft launch of the Ideas Portal, so we ask that you designate one primary person from your company to be point of contact for adding ideas. To gain access to the Ideas Portal, please contact Kate Derrick at kate AT angelpoints DOT com. (If you RSVP'd to the November 12 State of the Product call, you should have already received your log-in information.)

New Icons and Usability Improvements

Improving your user experience is one of our top priorities. To this end, we’ll be making a number of changes over the coming months to improve usability and the overall look and feel of AngelPoints.

Some of these changes are relatively minor in nature, such as using standardized, more intuitive icons. The new Driving Directions icon is an example of a change you’ll soon be seeing when we update all of our system icons before the end of the year.

Addressing more substantial usability issues, such as those that will streamline your workflow, will undergo refinement through out beta testing program before being communicated and released to you. If you are interested in participating in the AngelPoints beta program, please email beta@angelpoints.com and we will contact you.

Flexible Opportunities Improvements
Several improvements have been made to Flexible Opportunities. First, volunteers can now search for Flexible Opportunities by location, and the default date range on the search is consistent with other scheduled events. In addition, the Flexible Opportunities have been added to the monthly Manage calendar, making it easier for manager to see all events in one place.

Rewards
Much of AngelPoints’ product news through the rest of the year will center around the development and launch of our new Rewards module to better support programs such as Dollars for Doers and grants. We’ll keep you informed here in AngelPointers of these additions so that you can coordinate with your Account Manager to add them to your site.

EVS'07

release_date:

11.19.2008

New Features and Tips

courtney — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:26:53 -0600

What's New

AngelPoints has recently added the following new features. All of these features are now available to you, with no need to contact your Account Manager to turn them on for your site.

Any & All Filtering in Participants Reports - Event Managers can now filter their Participants Reports to show volunteers in All selected groups, or in Any selected groups. For example, you can use the All filter to search for participants who are in a group for a particular geographic area and who belong to a specific department, such as the Midwest branch and the Marketing department. Alternatively, you can use the Any filter to search for participants who are in either one group or in another, such as participants in the Midwest or the Northeast.

Validate Hours - The Validate Activity Hours page now shows the organization associated with each activity. Organizations listed in the IRS 501(c)3 database are displayed in capital letters, and organizations that are not are shown in a lighter font and are not shown in all caps.
Downloading Large Reports - Microsoft Excel has a maximum row limit of 65,536 rows. If your report is larger than this, the Download button will be deactivated and you will not be able to download it. To download the information that you need, break up your report into more manageable segments, such as intervals of three months, by specific locations, or by group.

EVS'07

release_date:

November 2, 2008

From Before to After: Improvements to Event Management

courtney — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:03:20 -0500

What's New

AngelPoints has recently implemented several enhancements and new features designed to improve your event management experience from start to finish. Among these improvements are:

A New Look for the Event Calendar - Helping your volunteers find great events is just one part of ensuring your event is a success. To make this easier, we've improved the event calendar for volunteers by providing a full calendar view with each event listed on their related dates. Volunteers can quickly get to registration by simply clicking the event name on the calendar.

The New Pre-Event Volunteer Questionnaire - Want to capture important information from your volunteers before your event takes place? The new Pre-Event Volunteer Questionnaire lets you survey potential volunteers and helps you ensure any pre-requisites are met. Volunteers will be prompted to take the questionnaire before signing up. You can check questionnaire results by downloading the event roster.
An Improved Events Report - The Events Report has been improved to give you more at-a-glance and clickable information. The names of the Event Managers now link to their profile pages, and events link to their detail pages. Additional improvements include the listing of the event type, the number of friends and family signed up for events, events without registrants or hours, and the maximum number of sign-ups.

EVS'07

release_date:

October 24, 2008

Highlight your Program's Recent News with "News & Information"

elana — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:04:54 -0500

What's New

News & Information - Now you can highlight your employee volunteer program's current events by using the "News & Information" feature. Many of you may remember this feature as "What's Happening" in EVS version 1.0. Please contact your account manager to turn on and demo this new feature.

EVS'07

release_date:

July 15, 2008

Recurring events just got better ...

elana — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:34:19 -0500

What we've made better

Recurring events:

We're continuously enhancing our product to make it as efficient as possible for you. In this release, we've enhanced our recurring events functionality to save you time in editing events. Now you can edit a series of events or "recurring events" with one click.

When editing a recurring event, you may edit any part of the event (location, date/time, description, friends & family etc.) and simply click "Save" at the bottom of the screen. The option to edit the single occurrence or the entire series will appear.

Don't know when it's best to use recurring events?
Here are some great examples we've seen across our client base:

Daily Events - Daily events easily meet many of your unique needs. You can include the "just weekdays" option to make sure your events don't span over the weekend and you can even indicate a daily pattern and set it to any day you wish. Many of our clients use these daily events to power their week long volunteer initiatives during National Volunteer Week, Week of Caring, or a signature company week. Note: If your event happens for every day for more than 1 week, it is best to create a Flexible Opportunity instead.
Weekly Events - Weekly events are designed for fairly regular volunteer activities. Just like the daily events, you can customize them with a variety of options such as indicating the specific day(s) you'd like it to occur on and how often you'd like it to happen (Example: each Mondays and Fridays of every two weeks). Great examples we've seen: Meals on Wheels events that happen every two weeks on Fridays, recurring tutoring events that happen after school every Tuesday, or even volunteer opportunities that take more than one occurrence to get the job done, such as a Habitat for Humanity house that your company has committed to finishing).
Monthly Events - Monthly events give you the option of indicating the specific day or date you'd like your events to occur. (Do you want it to occur on the 9th of every month or the last Friday of every third month?) More client examples: Junior Achievement events that happen every month for three months or disaster prep trainings that happen every month.
Annual Events - Many of our clients like to set annual events in the system so volunteers can plan ahead. Does your company have annual signature volunteer days or any events such as a walk-a-thon or races that happens only once a year?
Intra-Day events - These are events that happen over one day and are helpful when you need to schedule shifts for your volunteer event. Great examples of these are blood drives, fundraising walks such as AIDS or Cancer walks, or any event where you need a certain number of volunteers to cover different shifts over the course of the day.

EVS'07

release_date:

June 27th, 2008

Bienvenu le Français!

elana — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:39:58 -0500

What's New

Parlez-Vous Français?

Now you can view the entire AngelPoints site en Français.

In the "My Account" tab within the "My Page" tab, click on the My Volunteer Profile" tab. Simply select "French" as your preferred language et Voilá !

EVS'07

release_date:

May 28, 2008

Making your Life Easier, One Report at a Time

elana — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:18:58 -0500

What we've made better

We pride ourselves on delivering a world-class application that has extensive reporting tools specifically designed for the corporate market. This release we've made our reports even better and, dare I say...even prettier! Now your employee volunteers, group/team managers and even system managers (like you) can view data easier.

My Participation Report - Now when your employee volunteers download their personal Participation Report, they'll notice a new look & feel to it, which includes an aggregate summary of their activities and a snazzy design with enhanced headers and colors.

Detailed Participants Report - Last release, we developed this downloadable report that includes detailed information on your company events. This release, we applied a new look & feel to it, which allows group and system managers to easily see aggregate volunteer information with the same snazzy design in the Participation Report above.

Managers will also notice these stylistic changes in every report of the application including: Organizations, Events, Board Membership & Participation, New User, Recent Activity, Event Managers and Master Roster reports. Download some reports & check it out!

EVS'07

release_date:

May 12, 2008

Attachments, Reports and much more!

elana — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:20:33 -0500

What's New

This release we're focused on fine tuning our application to make sure it's delivering the most value to the 3 million plus employee volunteers that use it. Plus, what better time to release these enhancements than right before National Volunteer Week (NWV), which is our busiest time of the year.

Detailed Participation Report -- We pride ourselves in the ability to deliver the reports you need to make your program a success. We've enhanced the Participation Report to include a way for you to download more information about events. Now group managers, event managers and system managers can download in Excel a "Detailed Participants Report", which includes extra fields like the title of the events your group participated in, a short description of the events, the event type, whether the volunteer was an employee or friend or family and much more!

New File Manager -- Have any last minute files you need to let your volunteers know about? Now you can attach files when you promote an event! Plus, you can also attach files when you copy/clone an event..so attach away!

EVS'07

release_date:

April 28, 2008

Go on! Attach files everywhere. We dare you!

tracyshaun — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:27:57 -0500

What's New

File Manager -- Now your volunteers don't have any excuses for not receiving any waivers or liability forms. Just say "it's in the event!"

In our last release, we gave the file manager feature to System Managers. Now, we leveled the playing field and expanded it to Group Managers. Now they can play with this feature when they create and edit events! The File Manager creates a quick and easy way to include links to the files that you upload. Just click the little document icon within the event description and either choose from the list of files previously uploaded or upload a new file of your own. The title of the file will be inserted into your event description and a link created to the file itself. It's that easy.

We've also included a top of the line virus scanner to examine every file uploaded to your site. You can rest assured that no one will accidentally spread a computer virus through the files your managers upload.

Participation Report -- We've also included a useful feature in the Participation Report for System Managers. It is now downloadable. Its worth repeating. The Participants report is now downloadble! Now System Managers can get every detail behind their employee volunteers in a snazzy downloadble report. This new participation report includes each and every volunteer event your employees have been involved with (based on the report filters you use).

What we've made better

Master Roster -- We're not ignoring Group Managers anymore ;) They now have access to the Master Roster report. They can look at all the groups they manage or view data from just one. The report also includes all of the custom fields that you send over in the data uploads.

Sign-up Date & Time -- We're giving you even more information to help you manage your event rosters. Now you can view the time a volunteer signs up for an event on the managed roster view. Plus, the sign up time is included when you download the roster..aggghhhh..yeah!

Unique ID on Reports -- Each report in the site now includes the Unique ID of the volunteers in the report. This will help all of the companies who have more than 20 people (like us :)... and more than one "John Volunteer" out there. You can also reconcile data you pull from our system with your own internal data or reports pulled from other systems.

We're rolling up our sleeves on...

Group Manager Reports -- More leveling of the playing field. We're working hard to give Group Managers the reports they need. Many reports are available only to System Managers now, but we'll be opening up these reports one-by-one over the next couple of months.

Site Settings: Off or On? -- Based on your requests, you'll soon be able to turn off the ability for others to see your employees' public profile. Employee profiles typically consist of what causes they support, skills they possess and a tidbit about themselves. With this feature on, any employee can simply click on a volunteer in an event roster and be taken to their profile. We're also applying this same on/off concept for Independent Volunteer Activities (IVAs). Now you can choose whether or not you'd like your employees logging IVAs.

Volunteer Opportunities Galore -- We hear ya. It's hard to create volunteer opportunities everywhere your business operates. We're partnering with some great volunteer opportunity databases to integrate their opportunities into our application as an additional service. It'll make it easy for you to bring these opportunities into your system so your employees have more to choose from when they get the urge to volunteer!

EVS'07

release_date:

April 17th, 2008

Documents and Files and Attachments Oh My!

tracyshaun — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:21:13 -0500

What's New

The File Manager -- At last you can upload your waivers, menus, instructions and more. Each of your files can be used for any piece of content in the site and can easily be re-used across multiple events or about pages. The new file manager is located under the Manage tab and shows you which files have been uploaded and instructions on how to include the file as part of your events' descriptions.

The Process for Logging Hours -- We have updated our Submit Hours page to include your most recent independent volunteer activities. We received great feedback from everyone about how volunteers were confused about where to go when they return to the site to log hours. Now, they're presented with both the company-sponsored events they took part in and the most recent IVAs so they can easily copy the information over when they volunteer again with the same organization.

EVS'07

release_date:

April 2nd, 2008

It’s Raining Data & Inspiration!

tracyshaun — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:55:33 -0500

As the rain clouds approach in sunny Sausalito, we thought it’d be fitting to shower our hard-working Employee Volunteer Managers with even more data. In addition to viewing aggregate survey information, managers now have the flexibility to view open-ended survey responses. So if you’ve been wondering what people really thought of your volunteer event in their prosaic responses… wait no longer!

And don’t worry—we never forget the volunteer. We’ve provided an area on the homepage that lets them know just how many hours they’ve submitted for the year. We’re all about features like these that encourages volunteers to get rid of that nasty “goose egg” (0) and submit hours!

What's New

Volunteer Hours -- Every volunteer in your system can see how many hours they’ve submitted during your “volunteer calendar year.” This date is specific to each client and may or may not match up to the calendar year. Right below their total hours, a volunteer will be able to click on a “View my hours history” quicklink so they can scrutinize their volunteer efforts!

Open-ended Survey Responses -- Up until now, we’ve only provided quick access to aggregate numbers for the responses to your surveys. It’s easy enough to find out that 95% of your participants said they “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” with the statement “I enjoyed my volunteer activity.” Now managers can easily see the open-ended responses to a question like, “If not, tell us why” inline with the other survey responses.

Search by login or unique ID -- We’re finding many companies aren’t as small as us and there may be 20 different “John Volunteers” within your company. To solve this problem, we’ve enhanced our user search, which included searching by name and location, to include searching by login names or the unique identifier you assign them.

EVS'07

release_date:

March 11th, 2008

Friends, Fonts & Colors

tracyshaun — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:54:02 -0600

This last release was a bit of a breather for us all. After the big push to get our brand new CRA module out the door, we took the opportunity with some "lighter" feature enhancements and requests to catch our breath. Even so, I think you will be very pleased with what we have for this time around.

Get creative with your event descriptions, promotional emails and custom content throughout the site.
Control the access to your company events so that only your employees can attend.
Increase the security restrictions for access to your volunteer site.

What's New

Expanded Content Editors -- We're building out the capabilities of our rich text editor so that you can get a bit more creative with how you express opportunities to your employees. We have introduced the ability for you to alter the size, the color and the font of your text. As always, you can embed images and provide links to external sites with more information, but now you have more freedom to design your events.

Configurable Events -- Until now, all of your events were open to the friends and family of your employees. Now, when you create an event, you can specify whether or not they can attend. When you turn the friends & family feature off for an event, employees will no longer be able to Add Friends and Family to the opportunity.

Security Enhancements -- We have introduced a number of enhancements to the rules you can apply to your employees' login names, password structure and expiration policies. This will allow you to more closely match the internal security policies your company has when it comes to integrating with third party applications like ours.

EVS'07

release_date:

Leap Day, February 29, 2008

Announcing Our New CRA Module!!!

tracyshaun — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:47:38 -0600

This update section has been a bit sparse lately. That's because our engineering team has pulled a rabbit out of the hat with a gorgeous new CRA module for EVS. Read about it below... They also managed to squeeze in a few (really great!) enhancements that I'm sure you'll be pleased with. A number of our clients (that's you) have been clamoring for these... we're getting better at mixing in enhancements to existing features while we knock out the big ones.

Manage, track and report all of your CRA-related volunteer activities.
Build a comprehensive view of participants from multiple events with the Master Roster.
Easily order your content pages with an easy-to-use drag & drop interface.
And more!

What's New

Launch of our CRA Module -- Our new and improved CRA module makes it easier for our financial clients to manage, track and report all of their CRA-related volunteer activities. With multiple levels of access, a simple workflow, many ways to explore your data and a clean reporting download - you can be confident in the data you collect and report out to stakeholders and auditors. We've introduced a new, branching survey structure to make it easy for you to define what data you want to collect and not bog down your volunteers with irrelevant questions. Read more about the new CRA module...

Master Roster -- When you're holding many different activities on a single day and you need a single place to see all of the participating volunteers, the Master Roster is the report for you. Many of you have a single day (or week) during the year where you organize the majority of your opportunities. This report will give you a cross-activity view of every volunteer and give you more tools to organize and track the day's activities.

EVS'07

release_date:

February 12th, 2008

Board Memberships & Event Managers

tracyshaun — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:46:07 -0600

The past 3 months have been filled with intense product development as we lay the groundwork for our powerful CRA module. We worked closely with our financial clients to make sure you're going to get the best product possible when it comes to running volunteer programs within the context of the Community Reinvestment Act. Look for a big release in a few weeks as we start to roll out the product to our existing clients.

Meanwhile, we were able to push forward in a number of areas for all of our non-banking clients:

Track board participation hours with a new Board Participation Report
Know who your event managers are with the Event Managers Report

What's New

Board Participation Hours - We gave volunteers the ability to enter their board memberships last release, but now they can log their time spent volunteering in the capacity as a board member for the organizations they represent. On the right-hand side of each volunteer's My Page is a place for them to tell you about the board(s) they sit on. Then, when they go to log their independent volunteer activity, they can choose which board position the activity was for.

Board Participation Report - Last release, we pushed out a report letting you find out who sits on the board for which organizations. Now, you can see all of the hours being logged by your volunteers for their board memberships.

Event Managers Report - Ever want to see who has been leading your volunteer events? Now you can! You can retrieve a list of the people who have run your events (including the number of events and total participants) for any given time frame or area of the globe. Some of our clients use this report to reward and encourage the folks on the ground putting your corporate volunteering strategy into practice.

EVS'07

release_date:

January 21st, 2008

Targeted Messages Make the World Go Round

tracyshaun — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:19:01 -0500

The weather is turning here in Sausalito. We had the first rain in what seemed like months. This cold, grey weather is great for staying focused on good product design (at least for me!). It's been awhile since the last update. We've upgraded another handful of clients over the past month and have been working hard preparing the way for our new & improved CRA module to be released at the end of this year. Meanwhile, we've got a number of goodies for you:

Refine your promotional messages with an enhanced event promotion page.
Track your board memberships and view all of your employees' memberships.
Express yourself with a full HTML editor on the extra content you have in your "About" pages.

What's New

Promote by Skills & Causes -- The event promotion screen has allowed you to promote out to pre-defined groups within your company (as well as individual volunteers), but now you can refine your promotional messages by targeting your employees by the skills and causes they define in their volunteer profile. Looking for environmentally-minded accountants? For marketing professionals interested in health-related causes? For kid-friendly folks looking to end poverty and hunger in your regional office? It's all easy now with our enhanced event promotion page. Just select the attributes of the kind of people you're looking for and compose a message just for them. Targeted invitations have proven themselves better at engaging your employees than broad generic communications. Have fun!

Board Memberships -- Sitting on the board of local organizations is a great way to give back to your community. Now all your employees can enter their board memberships via their My Page screen. And, you can run a report showing everyone who sits on a board.

Free-form Content -- The HTML editor we provide you on event descriptions, event discussions, site content and other places is now available for your About pages. Tell your employees about your volunteering policies, highlight your star volunteers, or run a spotlight on your company's partnerships with local non-profits. There's no limit on what you can do with your pages now...

Enhancements

Improved Volunteer Selector -- We have an improved way for you to select potential volunteers within the Promote Event screens. You can easily search for your employees and one-click select each of them. And, no matter how many pages and searches you do, you can verify your distribution list by switching to the Selected tab. Try it out!

Clarification on Aggregate Numbers -- Our set of reports are showing aggregate numbers for the set of data you're looking at, e.g. total hours logged across all events, all participants for a given time period, etc. The first row in each table will give you these numbers, but we've also added a unique value so you can get a sense of the exact number of volunteers, hours or events for any given view of the report (filtered by time, groups, location, etc.).

You're Signed Up! -- A very subtle, yet helpful feature... when searching for events, you will now see the events you're already signed up for. You can always see all the events you're signed up for by visiting your My Page screen.

A Guide for New Users -- When new employees join your company or existing employees visit your volunteer portal for the first time, they will see a helpful overview of the three most important places to visit: their volunteer profile, the event search screens and the support page.

Improved IVA -- We received a lot of feedback about the wording and the layout on the Log IVA screen. We've taken that feedback and did a make-over on that page and made it much clearer and simpler for your employees. Keep the feedback coming. We love it!

Coming Soon

Full Board Participations -- The new board memberships you logged with the new feature from this release will soon have the ability to be associated with the IVA's you log for your organizations.

IVA Surveys -- In preparation for our CRA module, we will be giving you the ability to attach a survey to all IVA submissions.

Volunteer Notifications -- The manager will soon have a choice on whether or not to have an automated email sent out to volunteers you manually add or remove from an event's roster.

EVS'07

release_date:

October 16th, 2007

Surveying the Activity

tracyshaun — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:57:21 -0500

Another short 2-week iteration and we have a few more goodies for you program managers. We're still working through the "Product Top 40" and will continue to do so through the end of September. Some new things you can do:

Judge activity within your site with the new Most Recent Logins report.
Look back to when your employees first logged in with the new New Users report.
Get creative with your messages to event participants through an enhanced "contact roster" screen.
Survey your surveys in the reports tab with a list of all your surveys in one place.

What's New

Recent Activity -- For the first time in EVS'07, you now have a view into your users' activities on the site. It's a small, yet fortuitous step. The new most recent logins report will tell you exactly when the last logins to the site were. If you just launched a big initiative within your company, you can check-in to see how many people logged into the site and get an idea of how successful your campaign messaging was. Over time, we'll be adding more to this view as it morphs into a larger set of Activity reports so you have more visibility into your program's activities.

New Users -- Curious who logged in for the first time last week? Or last month? Or, have you just launched with AngelPoints and sent out a big promotion to get your employees into the site to sign up for all your opportunities? The New Users report will tell you exactly who logged in for any given time period. And, you can click through to see each individuals history of volunteer events.

Aggregate Survey Reports -- From the last update, you noticed we gave you the ability to see aggregate survey results across all the events where the survey was presented. Now, within the Reports tab, you can get a list of all the surveys you use and quickly see the aggregate responses for each one.

EVS'07

release_date:

August 25th, 2007

August Means Goodies for the Manager!

tracyshaun — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:24:14 -0500

This release cycle we focused on a number of improvements that will help the event and program managers do their jobs a little bit better. Over the next few releases, we're working on a "Product Top 40", a list of fixes and enhancements that have been culled from all of the feedback from our clients and prospects. What you can do now:

Plan your events with the managed event calendar.
Organize them with enhancements to the managed roster.
Learn more about your volunteer program through new filters on all reports.
Interpret qualitative feedback through the aggregate survey summary reports.

What's New

Managed Event Calendar -- Managers can now view all of their events in a big monthly calendar. This feature is a cornerstone in the current version of EVS and now it's made its way into EVS'07. You can easily navigate from month to month and jump ahead or back a year. Use this calendar to quickly gauge what events are coming soon and to schedule new events around existing ones.

Your Role	What You See
System Manager	All events in your instance of EVS. Every event your company has in the system will be shown on the calendar for system managers.
Group Manager	Only the events associated with the groups you manage. If you manage more than one group, then all events will be shown together.
Event Manager	Only the events you directly manage.

New Report Filters -- We have introduced two new filters to apply to all reports. Up until now, all of the data on the reports included hours from friends & family and from independent volunteer activities (IVAs). Now you can exclude either or both of them by un-checking the appropriate checkbox on the report's filter callout.

EVS'07

release_date:

August 13th, 2007

Community Enhances EVS'07

tracyshaun — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:53:38 -0500

The Enterprise Volunteer Solution (EVS)’07 Summer Release is designed to give managers a broader and deeper view of their employee volunteer organization. This release specifically is designed to provide you with a useful perspective on what drives your volunteer success. Volunteers will be able to use the site to have conversations about their experiences and develop an identity within the system, in order to help build new relationships within the company. Program managers will be able leverage these forums and informal data to enhance volunteer programs and other corporate social investments.

In all of our communities… big and small, public and private…our connections make our community. The new set of features will provide an environment in which your organization and its community involvement programs can flourish and expand; an environment in which your volunteers can find a voice and outlet for their desire to do good. And you will be able to hear that voice. We’re excited to support your efforts to take your company’s social investments to a new level. We are also excited to see what new connections and creative dialogues will begin to bloom.

What’s New

Managers have a direct line to each participant and a collective view of all the participants.

Exchange notes with specific volunteers for each event
Answer questions about logistics
Provide insights into the nature of each event
Encourage your “star performers” to help lead the events
Extract the positive experiences for use in promoting future events
Hear the thoughts of individual participants

Managers should see higher hours-submission rates.

More engaging volunteer experience will help encourage them to log their hours.
More repeat visits from volunteers should help them see the value in keeping their participations up-to-date.
A more engaged volunteer means a more active volunteer site.

Volunteers can self-organize before an event.

Share transportation tips; organize carpools; get driving directions
Build excitement before the event
Make connections with colleagues
Promote the event
Recall previous experiences with similar events
Provide color and perspective about the organization
Easily get weather forecasts for the event’s area

Volunteers can share experiences after the event.

Write stories about what they accomplished
Follow-up on new connections and friendships
Read stories from past events
Discover new perspectives on the volunteer experience

Everyone can share more of their own volunteer profile.

Tell others about what drives you to participate
Learn more about the exciting opportunities your colleagues are involved with
Identify yourself with affinity groups
Discover new opportunities through others’ public profiles
Put a face to your name

Outline of New Features

My Page – A brand new page to replace the “Volunteer” tab… organizing all of the information around your past and future volunteer events

An alert area to let the user know of past events they need to submit hours for
A list of their next 5 events (with a link to show all of their upcoming events)
A summary of their own volunteer profile
A list of quick links for the most common volunteer actions
A quick search box to find events by keyword

Event Discussion – Enables users to communicate, connect and share experiences before and after each volunteer event

A discussion area for each event
Pictures and profile links for each user
A WYSIWYG editor for each post you make

Public Profile – Enables users to discover and connect with others in their company that have similar interests

Connect with colleagues; share information about yourself; build community within your organization
Your choice to show a limited or expanded public profile
Office contact information
Name and small picture

Expanded User Profile – Gives users a way to enhance their volunteer profile for others to see

Open text area to share anything you want
Display your upcoming activities
Share the list of your affinity groups and supported causes
List the skills you have

Weather, Maps and Driving Directions – Provides useful information to your volunteers regarding your events

Pre-built link to the weather forecast for the event’s location
Quickly view where the event will take place (through Yahoo’s dynamic maps)
Get driving directions from your own location

Private Discussions – Gives the ability for event managers and volunteers to communicate privately about the event to share preferences and thoughts

Clear area in which a manager and a volunteer can communicate with one another
Managers can see overviews of all participants’ notes on the managed roster

Spanish & French – Users can now choose to view the entire site in Spanish and French

Each user can set their language preference
All interface elements are translated
Event content can handle full non-English character sets

Enhancements

The manager’s view of their managed events default to a chronological sorting and looks back 7 days and ahead 3 months.
Volunteers can easily clone previous independent activities to save re-entering information each time.
Participation notes now support HTML.
All top-level reports now include a summary row for total on the data.

EVS'07

release_date:

July 23rd, 2007

Survey Says: May is Feedback Month

tracyshaun — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 02:00:00 -0500

Feedback

Some great work in the month of May from a few of our clients prompted us to rush out an early version of our Feedback/Survey module. Event managers can now associate a post-event survey to any event they manage. They will then be able to view a great survey summary of all the data collected.

Are your volunteers enjoying their experiences? Do they learn new skills at the event? Are they enriched by the collaboration with their co-workers? You can ask your volunteers anything you want so you can gauge how successful your programs are. Our engineers should get a huge round of applause for the herculean effort the undertook to make this a reality.

Support Content

While we try to make our application as easy to use as possible, every once in a while you need some help. Our client support staff is great, but now we have a support content site at http://support.angelpoints.com. It's starting out small, but it's an easy-to-use wiki that we will be adding to over time as we introduce new or change existing features. You can find a link to it within your Support tab.

EVS'07

release_date:

April 27th, 2007

The pre-tax rush for Friends & Family

tracyshaun — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 02:00:00 -0500

(Version: EVS '07) You can't have a great volunteer experience without some friends to lend a hand. Your co-workers have been able to attend your company's volunteer events, but now, you can invite your friends and your family!

When you sign up for an event, you can visit the "Event Options" page and add any of your friends and family to the roster. If they're not in the system yet, it's easy to add them. Just select "Add Friends & Family" and choose "Create" to add your friend to the list. From then on, they will be available to add to any event you sign-up for in the future.

For managers, all of the hours that a friend or family member contributes to an event will also appear in each of the reports in your Reports tab. You can individually approve and deny the friends and family hours just like you can with individual employees.

EVS'07

release_date:

April 13th, 2007

Product Updates

AngelPointers: News, Features and Tips 11.19.08

What's New

New Features and Tips

What's New

From Before to After: Improvements to Event Management

What's New

Highlight your Program's Recent News with "News & Information"

What's New

News & Information Best Practices

Recurring events just got better ...

What we've made better

Recurring events:

What we're rolling our sleeves up on:

Bienvenu le Français!

What's New

Parlez-Vous Français?

What we've made better

What we're rolling up our sleeves on

Making your Life Easier, One Report at a Time

What we've made better

What we're rolling up our sleeves on:

Attachments, Reports and much more!

What's New

What we've made better

Go on! Attach files everywhere. We dare you!

What's New

What we've made better

We're rolling up our sleeves on...

Documents and Files and Attachments Oh My!

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

It’s Raining Data & Inspiration!

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

Friends, Fonts & Colors

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

Announcing Our New CRA Module!!!

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

Board Memberships & Event Managers

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

Bonus!

Targeted Messages Make the World Go Round

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

Surveying the Activity

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

August Means Goodies for the Manager!

What's New

Enhancements

Coming Soon

Community Enhances EVS'07

What’s New

Outline of New Features

Enhancements

Survey Says: May is Feedback Month

Feedback

Support Content

Coming Soon

The pre-tax rush for Friends & Family

Coming Soon