Friday, February 27, 2009

Nominations Are Now Open for the Corporate Engagement Award for Excellence

The Points of Light Institute is now accepting nominations for outstanding workplace volunteer programs to be considered for the annual Corporate Engagement Award for Excellence (previously known as Awards for Excellence in the Workplace).

The Corporate Engagement Award for Excellence will be presented at the 2009 National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco, California, June 22 - 24. 

To learn how to nominate your program, visit http://www.pointsoflight.org/awards/workplace/nominate.cfm. Nominations will be accepted through March 31, 2009. Best of luck to all of your fantastic volunteer programs!

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

New Online Help Site, Event Icons, Search Enhancements from AngelPoints

AngelPoints Releases New Online Help and Website
We are pleased to announce a number of new resources to assist you in using AngelPoints to effectively manage your Employee Volunteer Program.

Chief among these resources is our new comprehensive online Help, which you can access by clicking Help in the upper right corner of your AngelPoints site.

This Help site will soon replace the AngelPoints Support wiki, so please update your bookmarks. AngelPoints Help provides explanatory and step-by-step information for all your common and not-so-common AngelPoints tasks. We are also working to build out a compendium of FAQs, Troubleshooting Tips, Best Practices and Examples, and other customer requests over the coming quarter, so stay tuned for more to come on the new Help site.



We've also launched a new website and this blog to keep you better informed about AngelPoints news and product updates as well as best practices in the CSR and volunteerism fields. You may also want to check out our Resources page, where you can find links for more information about
Your feedback about the new Help site, website, and blog is important to us, and suggestions are welcome by emailing marketing AT angelpoints DOT com.

First Wave of New Icons Released
A big thank you to all the users in our beta program who've helped us fine tune the icons used throughout AngelPoints. The first set has been released to better identify event types. Our next round will include icons for actions such as editing, finding an event, adding or removing oneself from the roster, checking weather, and checking driving directions. Following are the new icons that you will see on AngelPoints starting now:

















Enhancements to the CRA Module

For AngelPoints clients using the CRA module, there are two new enhancements.
First, Flexible Opportunities and Recurring Events can now be marked as CRA eligible events. Second, the fields LMI, Employee Role, and Financial Activity are now all site configurable and can be removed from the CRA Details page. By default, these fields are all displayed; to remove them from your site, please contact your Account Manager.

More Intuitive Search for Flexible Opportunities
AngelPoints has released a number of improvements to make searching for Flexible Opportunities more intuitive. Because these are significant changes to the user experience, we'd like to prepare you for these enhancements.

First, the option to Search for Flexible Opportunities has been removed from the Home navigation bar. Users can now simply click Search for Events, and the Search for Events page will list both Scheduled Events and Flexible Opportunities on the same page, separated by tabs. In addition, the link to Flexible Opportunities in the Quick Links box has been updated to display the Search for Events page with the Flexible Opportunities tab foremost.




Users also now have the option to search for Flexible Opportunities by zip code, causes, and skill as well as by date.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Validating Hours Just Got Easier, Other Updates from AngelPoints

AngelPoints' redesigned Validate Activity Hours page now makes it easier for you to find and approve hours for your volunteers. Date search options have been moved to the top of the page, an option to search by groups has also been added, and new tabs make it easier and faster for you to manage Pending, Approved, and Denied hours.

Additional improvements indicate a reordering of the columns to be more intuitive and an indication of which hours were volunteered by Friends and Family. We also now display where the organization came from (whether it was from the IRS database, was a Write-In, or came from another source).


Site Configurable? No, this feature is now enabled for all AngelPoints clients.



Event Reminders and Follow-Up Emails - You're in Control
Managers now have the capability to specify whether they'd like to send event reminders and event follow-up emails for each event they manage.

Site Configurable? Yes, please contact your Account Manager if you are interested in turning on this feature.

Events Report Download Now Includes Event Manager Email Addresses
We'd like to thank one of our AngelPoints users for using the Ideas Portal to suggest that we add event manager email addresses to the downloadable Events Report. This idea has now been added!

Site Configurable? No, this feature is now enabled for all AngelPoints clients.

Note: The product changes described in this post apply only to AngelPoints Version 2. If a feature is listed as site configurable, please contact your account manager to enable it for your site.