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Hello everyone,
Peter, Head of Product Development and Quality Assurance here, and the changes coming up with our next release are so extensive that I figured we should start a new series outlining the how and why what has changed.
This particular release has been a long time coming, with many, many unexpected delays. The Civic Champs team isn't so large that we can throw an unlimited amount of money at our problems, so when we encountered critical bugs in our testing, our only choice was to spend the time necessary to get it cleaned up.
It was a painstaking process, and I'm particularly sorry for all of the lingering issues some of you all have endured in the meantime, but we've gotten everything we've been working on out the door! The size of this release was very out of the ordinary for us, so we should be back to smaller, more responsive updates going forward, but I'd like to thank everyone for their patience in this endeavor. Hopefully the update was worth the wait.
One thing to note: Not all features described below will be immediately available for all customers. The Event and Location features were a closed beta for some very patient pilot organizations, and we're going to leave that enrollment fixed for the time being. In the next 1-3 weeks, we'll begin a rollout of the new features, but if you're interested in being on the early adoption curve, you can fill out this form.
New Features and Bug Fixes (Immediately Available for Everyone)
Bulk Registration
We've added the ability for administrators to register multiple volunteers for multiple events simultaneously. The pathway for this is through the List of Events page, with the Add Registrations action:
To streamline the interface, we've split out multi-role and multi-shift events in the List of Events page, so that each row corresponds with a single registerable unit. If your Events typically contain many Shifts and Roles, you'll want to take care to make sure you're select the correct Event, Role, and Shift time for each bulk registration action.
And finally, there are currently some caveats and limitations with this feature. To make the interface as predictable as possible, we had to make it follow a couple of rules:
- The Registration is always added, even when it would exceed the maximum registrants limit.
- Any action that registers volunteers for Events that they don't qualify (because of incorrect Group membership, for example) will result in a system error.
- We're hoping to address this soon, although it turned out more complex than you might expect.
- Registering someone to a Shift and Role they're already registered for does nothing (and the rest of the action goes through as normal).
The goal was to create a system where it either works or it doesn't -- if the action goes through, everyone you selected will have a single registration for the Shift and Role you registered them for.
Something to keep in mind is that, while we have added the capacity to create hundreds of registrations with ease, we have not added a "Cancel Registrations" action that behaves at the same scale. Use this feature with caution, because undoing all those registrations could take significantly longer than creating them!
New Group Application Page
The Group application page is one of the oldest interfaces in Civic Champs, and we've done our first pass at cleaning it up. It now should appear much more like a Volunteer Profile, so that administrators can better access all of the information related to a volunteer when they're viewing Questionnaire responses. In cases where a volunteer has answered the same Questionnaire multiple times, their historical responses will also be available as well.
Preferred Contacts
In our last mobile app update, we added the ability for volunteers to select their Preferred Contact when editing their profile. For a contact to be set as a preferred contact, it must be verified, so volunteers wishing to change it may have to validate their other piece of contact information before hand. (You can also do this in the volunteer profile).
We're now reflecting this change in the Volunteer Profile, which you can see in the Preferred Contact field in the volunteer profile:
Custom messages should respect Preferred Contact rules for volunteers, automatically going to their preferred phone number or email address (or neither, when Do Not Contact is selected).
One thing to note: There is not currently an admin-side way to adjust this setting. The only pathway at the moment requires the volunteer editing it through the mobile app profile.
Small Changes & Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where editing Custom Events could result in duplicate registrations/disappearing events/all sorts of unwelcome consequences.
- Champions table actions such as Add to Group and Add/Remove Tags no longer require a selection before they are enabled.
- Established consistent layout and margins for Add to Group, Add/Remove Tags, and other similar add/remove interfaces across Civic Champs.
- Added Tags to the Champions table export.
- Fixed a bug preventing volunteers from registering for events that were past the Event Visibility window.
- Fixed a bug where the Registrations table would pull the previous days Registrations (i.e. not update to the correct list) when changing days.
- Allowed volunteers to claim existing (unverified) volunteer records when applying to Group applications without an account.
- Fixed a display issue where the volunteer group application header was not correctly scaling for phone-sized browsers.
- Added the ability for Civic Champs staff to "Archive" Groups.
- This will remove them from your Groups list, and no longer show them for selection in downstream functionality. One thing to note: This is a one way action, and unique name validation still applies across Archived Groups, which means you'll want to request this service with caution. (Just reach out to help@civicchamps.com with a list of Groups you'd like Archived, and we can take care of the rest.)
Improved Events and Opportunities: A Preamble
The largest part of the release is a complete overhaul to how the system handles Events and Opportunities. As mentioned above, only a handful of customers will initially see any changes here, but the code is all being pushed into the new version -- we only need to flip a switch to enable it for everybody else.First, for a bit of context, we began gather feeding and testing developing prototypes for our Event overhaul back in Fall of 2022. There were a handful of issues we wanted to address, so our goals were as follows:
Improve the way administrators manage events in series.
There were some pretty uncontroversial shortcomings here. For example, to make a repeating MWF event, for example, administrators either had to make a Custom Event, or make a Monday weekly event, a separate Wednesday weekly event, etc. On top of all of that, the process of making new events the same as previous events (or better yet, just extending the series) was basically non-existent. Most of our customers would just open two browser windows and manually copy + paste.
There were also some issues where the system was doing too much, although the intention was in the right place. The classic example here is edits to shifts after registrations have occurred. The initial goal in limiting that behavior was to make it harder for administrators to pull the rug out from volunteers, because the probability for miscommunication hugely increases once things start getting edited. Even help@civicchamps.com regularly receives emails like "I checked my registration email and went to the place at the time it said! No one is here!" -- but that is because the initial registration email contained the details of the event before the administrator edited it.
Balancing the needs of volunteers and administrators has always been delicate, but we're mostly in agreement that the current system was too restrictive in its permitted admin behavior. (Especially because admins can still get around these problems -- it's just laborious and time consuming!)
Scalability
Many actions in Civic Champs weren't viable at scale. Certain things, like registering volunteers, we've addressed with the Bulk Registration action mentioned earlier. For events, we wanted to make it easier to manage large and complex event calendars, but even the initial Calendar display made having more than 3 events on the same day a problem. The List of Events page was the first step to presenting information more clearly at high volume, but we also identified the need for other time-saving measures, so creating and managing events could be done as quickly as possible.
Clear Expectations / Ease of Use
There were several ways the old system was not clearly communicating its behavior to administrators. This ranged from event edits pulling things out of sequence, to more simple problems like "What does 'Opportunity' even mean, really?"
Any time we're adding new features, the increased complexity is going to make the entire process more confusing, so offsetting that with improvements in general clarity and useability was a must-have.
What We've Done So Far
Event Add/Edit Interface + Improved Edit Rules
The first major change we made is to clean up the interface for adding events. The old interface wasn't very friendly with smaller monitors, so we've moved everything to a modal-based interface, and tried to group fields in a way that was more intuitive.
During the refactoring, we also adjusted the rules for how and when administrators can edit events. Fewer fields are now required (you can now make an event without a description, for example), and nearly every field can be edited, even after registrations occur.
We currently do not allow editing Event Start or End Time, but that is because of a persistent bug, rather than by design, and we're hoping to have that resolved in the next week or two. All other fields should be otherwise editable now.
Event Templates
Administrators can now create Event Templates, either from scratch (in the Event Templates page), or saving an existing Event as a Template.
The way Templates function, is to allow you to preload all your fields the next time you go to make an Event, based on what is saved in the Template, but it doesn't go any further than that. Specifically, an editing an Event made from a Template won't change the Template in any way, or editing the Template won't change Events made from it.
Think of Event Templates as a really powerful copy + paste button when you're creating a new Event.
New Rules for Event Series
We've completely overhauled how we handle events in series. There are now additional recurrence rules, and edits will no longer pull events out of series.
Broadly, there are three types of event patterns:
- Selected Days Only
- This is a pattern where the event just occurs on the days selected in the calendar, basically what used to be a Custom Event. However, it now includes just a single day event as well (when you think about it, it turns out a Single Day event is just a Custom Event that happens on one day).
- Repeats Weekly
- This will repeat the selected pattern every week, allowing for MWF, T/Th, Saturday/Sunday, etc. series patterns.
- Repeats Monthly
- This will repeat the selected pattern every month, but it has two subcategories: Respect Date vs Respect Day of the Week
- Respect Date means the pattern will repeat on the selected numerical days (February 3rd + 4th, March 3rd + 4th, etc.)
- Respect Day of the Week means the pattern will repeat on the selected day of the week (1st Friday and Saturday of February, 1st Friday and Saturday of March, etc.)
- This will repeat the selected pattern every month, but it has two subcategories: Respect Date vs Respect Day of the Week
As mentioned earlier, edits to event series no longer pull the event out of series. Previously, when editing an event in a series, all of the edited events would have to be pulled into their own series, making it impossible to merge them back into the original group. Now, edited events maintain their relationship with the series, and will still receive series-wide edits as expected.
Point of Contact BCC
The Point of Contact emails wound up being more valuable than we anticipated, with many organizations requesting a way for it to have multiple recipients. To accommodate this, we've added the Point of Contact BCC.
When creating an event, the Primary Point of Contact behaves exactly the way the old Point of Contact used to. The new field, Point of Contact BCC, allows administrators to specify who should be BCC'd on the Point of Contact emails (volunteer registrations, cancelations, etc.), but their contact information won't be displayed on the Event page in any way for volunteers to see.
The selection for this is from your organization roster, so to add someone as a Point of Contact BCC, they need to be a member of your VOLUNTEERS Group, and will need to have an email address listed on their profile.
No More Shifts
You may have noticed in the videos above that there is no longer a way to specify Shifts. There are many, many reasons for this, and we did not come to the decision lightly.
Many of our initial designs kept Shifts, but we never achieved a flow that we were satisfied with. When we dove deeper into the problem, we noticed many long time customers actually stopped using multi-shift events entirely, and would gradually start to favor single-shift events. The reasons for this were many, from a more clear Volunteer Event Calendar (multi-shift events had a lower clickthrough rate, because volunteers would just see the entire event time, rather than the time of an individual shift, and think "that's too long for me!"), to Day of Event Instructions being more valuable when they're tailored to specific shifts.
We found that Shifts had some fundamental implementation problems, and rather than put lipstick on a pig, we were better off improving what was already working. Things like Event Templates, and improved Event Series rules should reduce the burden that Shifts alleviated -- time spent creating overlapping events -- and freed us up to make what was left much cleaner and more intuitive.
One of the greatest advantages of Shifts was to aggregate similar volunteering opportunities into a single umbrella, but we found that very often, organizations wanted these umbrellas to exist across multiple days, not just a single day. What we're hoping will follow is some kind of Event Aggregation System, a way to lump several Events into a larger Event Category.
The ability to put single-shift events into an Event Category will hopefully allow things like sending links to entire weekends of activities, lists of corporate sponsored events, etc. Basically, we had to get rid of Shifts to make it possible to implement Really-Powerful-Shifts-That-Occur-Across-Multiple-Days.
With that said, if you like things the way they are, these Event changes are optional. Civic Champs will be happy to keep organizations on the old interface by request, with the understanding it will no longer receive updates or support.
Opportunities Overhaul -- Now Locations
As mentioned previously, even the word Opportunity was a constant point of confusion. It did not explain the entity very accurately, which was basically just a persistent geofence that allowed volunteers to check in/check out, and the creation of kiosks. We've overhauled this feature and given it a more intuitive name: Locations.
Locations serve two functions. One is a repository of commonly used addresses for your organization. Rather than fighting with the Google Places picker every time you create an Event, you can now create a Location, which is an Address with a name, and then pick it from a dropdown when making an Event or Event Template going forward.
The name is only on the admin side of things -- volunteers won't see it -- but the goal is to reduce the possibility for user error (selecting the wrong address) and to speed up the Event creation process in general.
The other thing Locations can do is the old job of Opportunities. Locations can be marked as "Allow volunteers to check in via Civic Champs mobile app" which is a slight misnomer, because it allows for more functionality than just that. It really means "Turn this Location into an Opportunity," but that would unfortunately be meaningless to our newer customers, who hopefully will never have to worry about what the word "Opportunity" even means.
When that toggle is flipped, the Location gains all of the old Opportunity features -- volunteers can check in via the mobile app, administrators can make a kiosk, and activities via the Activity Log can be added against it as an Opportunity (the old terminology still exists a bit at the moment, but we're actively phasing it out).
There are a couple changes we've made here. First, while you can specify an End Date, you no longer need to. When the End Date + End Time occurs, the Location will flip back off into its inert state (just existing as something selectable from a dropdown -- as if you untoggled the "Allow check in" toggle), but if you leave it blank, it will stay open indefinitely.
Second, all Opportunity Roles used to be dictated by the Role type, and shared every Role with Type = Opportunity. We now allow selecting Roles for the specific Location, so different Locations can prompt different Roles on checkout.
Non-Address Locations
Previously, all Locations in Civic Champs had to be physical addresses (specifically, physical addresses that corresponded with a location in the Google Maps API). This caused all sorts of problems for Events that didn't have a fixed address, such as virtual events, or locations confusingly deep in the woods, where a Google Maps address caused more confusion than clarity.
We've remedied this by adding the "This Location does not have a physical address" toggle, which allows for any string of text to define the Location. Obviously, there won't be a map thumbnail that corresponds with this, because that we're outside the Google Maps ecosystem, but it allows for Locations to have unconventional values, such as webpage URLs.
One thing to note: If you use this feature in tandem with "Allow volunteers to check in via Civic Champs mobile app" volunteers will not, in fact, be able to check in via the Civic Champs mobile app. The reason for this is because the app determines what users are allowed to check in through tracking their location, and then seeing what geofences they are within. Non-address locations do not generate any geofence, so no volunteer will ever be prompted to be allowed to check in.
We're hoping to address this in the future, but the complexity of the issue is unfortunately very high. Geofences don't care what organization someone is a member of, so we don't want a situation where every Civic Champs user can see a list of every non-address Location available, and then accidentally checking into another org's Location.
What is On Deck
In the near future (upcoming weeks), we're hoping for the following changes to the admin dashboard:
- Allow Start and End Time edits for Events in series
- Allow adjusting Start Date and End Date for Event series (extending or contracting the series per the recurrence pattern)
- Apply the new Group Application page to the View interface
- Allow Bulk Registrations for volunteers that do not meet Group requirements
- Clean up Locations behavior (there is a lot in this bucket)
- Truncate Tags with a Show More/Show Less in the Champions table (similar to groups)
As far as the mobile app is concerned, we're aware of issues with notifications, as well as persistent logouts. We're actively working on getting both of those resolved as quickly as possible, but the process has been significantly more complex than we initially estimated. It is harder to estimate the timeline for those changes, but (fingers crossed) it should be weeks as well at this point.
And just to reiterate, most of what we accomplished this week couldn't be possible without feedback from our customers. If there is a bug or issue we haven't got to yet, be sure to reach out via help@civicchamps.com, and let us know where things aren't behaving as expected.