Over the past few months we’ve been hard at work building the next generation of VolunteerHub. This is the first of several posts detailing some of the features coming in just a few days.
Bing maps
Recently and without warning, Yahoo! discontinued the mapping service we were using for creating event maps, so we’ve re-implemented this feature using Bing maps instead. There is nothing you need to do to take advantage of this–if you had event maps previously, they will simply start working again. And as before, if your volunteers click on the map a new window will open with an interactive map where they can plot a route to the event location.
More attractive emails
Until now, VolunteerHub’s email notifications (event confirmations, reminders, thank-you’s, and so on) have been text-based. With this update we combine your chosen color scheme with HTML formatting to create a much more attractive email experience. And, if you checked “Show map of location” for the event, its confirmation and reminder emails will include maps as well!
Google Analytics
VolunteerHub now supports web traffic analysis via Google Analytics. To activate this feature, just follow these steps:
- If you don’t already have a Google Analytics Web Property ID, go to Google Analytics and sign up for an account.
- In your VolunteerHub site, navigate to Setup / Organization tab and scroll down to the Google Analytics setting.
- Enter your Web Property ID in the text box.
- Click the “Save Organization” button.
Note: Although VolunteerHub will begin tracking immediately, it may take Google a day or two to display the new traffic statistics in your Analytics control panel.
Verification dialog when manually cancelling registrations
Based on customer feedback, we’ve added a new verification dialog box whenever you cancel a user or user group via the manual event registration page (“Registered Users & Groups”).
Dedicated User Group Membership page
For customers with lots of user groups, the expandable tree control at the bottom of the user editing page sometimes causes performance issues in certain browsers. We’ve remedied this situation by creating a new dedicated User Group Membership page that is specifically designed to display very quickly on all browsers. Customers will 100 user groups or less will continue to see the tree control, while customers with more than 100 user groups will see an extra tab for the new page.
The changes look great, but when will they take affect? I signed up for google analytics, but don’t see a box on my setup page to enter the code. I think it’s better to announce something once the user can actually implement it.
@Tara Yes, in the past we have always published feature announcements after deploying them to the servers. However, some customers expressed that they were caught off guard when unexpected changes suddenly appeared in the system. Beginning with this release we are trying a new approach and posting details on our blog ahead of time so that people will know what to expect.
@Alaina, you can locate your web property ID in your Google Analytics account by clicking the “check status” link. It will look something like this (UA-XXXXX-YY). Here is a link to the Google Analytics support page that may provide additional information: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=113500