What Every Volunteer Manager Wants to See: Your Event is Full!

We're always excited to announce features that make your AngelPoints site more user-friendly, especially when the ideas come from our most knowledgeable users -- our clients. One such idea is a simple designation to let users know that an event is full without having to click through to the event's detail page. Thanks to your feedback, we've now added "event full" information to event listings to improve your volunteers' experience.

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



Motivating Employee Volunteerism During Tough Economic Times
AngelPoints is pleased to spread the word about a very timely research project by LBG Associates and the LBG Research Institute, and invites your company to participate. This study is designed to help companies make crucial decisions to bring their volunteer programs more in line with today’s economic realities -- and employees’ needs and desires -- by answering the following questions:

• Are employees more driven to volunteer during this recession, or are they so depressed that they are in a state of inertia?
• Are employees not using workday-based programs, such as skills-based, pro bono, or paid time off, for fear of losing their jobs?
• How are companies successfully motivating employees to volunteer during these tough times?

How can you help? Click here for details on how to participate in the study. Participation involves answering a short online survey and providing access to employees for their input.

See You at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service
To all of you who are attending the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco this week, welcome to our neighborhood. We look forward to an fantastic week of presentations and opportunities to meet with you, including our client gathering on Tuesday evening. We'd also like to wish good luck to all of our clients who will be presenting at the conference, and provide a special thank you to Anna Hennes of Cerner, who will be presenting about AngelPoints in the Technology for Managing Corporate Volunteer Programs panel on Tuesday morning.

Follow Us on Twitter
Do you like your news in small doses? AngelPoints is now on Twitter. Follow us for quick updates, resource links, and all the rest at http://twitter.com/angelpoints.

Client Awards and Congratulations!

AngelPoints would like to congratulate two of our clients, PG&E and Deloitte, who each have won a 2009 Bay Area Volunteer Award for service and dedication to their community, hosted by The Volunteer Center of San Francisco and San Mateo Counties.

PG&E has won the coveted Corporate Community Involvement Award for an outstanding community involvement program, as well as service, and Mark Edmunds of Deloitte has won the prized Corporate Community Champion Award, which recognizes the achievments and dedicated leadership of a single corporate officer.

Congratulations to both, as they continue to achieve great success using AngelPoints!

Motivating Employee Volunteerism During Tough Economic Times

We at AngelPoints are pleased to help spread the word about a very timely research project by LBG Associates and the LBG Research Institute and invite your company to participate:

MOTIVATING EMPLOYEE VOLUNTEERISM DURING TOUGH ECONOMIC TIMES

In these tighter times, many companies are viewing employee volunteerism as a cost-effective way to continue to make an impact in their communities.

But how motivated are employees to volunteer right now?

There’s an urgent need to help companies make crucial decisions about ways to bring their volunteer programs more in line with today’s economic realities -- and employees’ needs and desires. A new research study from LBG Associates and LBG Research Institute is designed to provide that help, by answering the following questions:

• Are employees more driven to volunteer during this recession, or are they so depressed that they are in a state of inertia?
• Are employees not using workday-based programs, such as skills-based, pro bono, or paid time off, for fear of losing their jobs?
• How are companies successfully motivating employees to volunteer during these tough times?

LBG’s new survey is unique in that it will include both the voice of the employee volunteer manager and the employee. By comparing research from both groups, this study will provide a much needed and robust view of today’s volunteering landscape.

How can you help? Participate and/or sponsor!

Participation involves answering a short online survey and providing access to employees for their input.

And LBG is offering highly affordable sponsorship levels! For more information, please call Linda Gornitsky at 203-325-3154.

OR

Sign up to participate and sponsor and receive the full study: https://app.e2ma.net/app2/survey/33143/7955/034825fd3b/1976341442/1807819/67170791/

Sign up to participate and receive the executive summary of the report: https://app.e2ma.net/app2/survey/33143/7953/02140d3192/1976341442/1807819/67170792/

Scheduled Maintenance and Other AngelPoints Updates

AngelPoints has a scheduled maintenance this Friday, June 5. AngelPoints client sites will be unavailable from 10:00 P.M. PDT - 2:00 A.M PDT for a database upgrade.

AngelPoints Training
We'd like to thank all of our clients who have joined us for live AngelPoints training webinars over the past couple of months. As a reminder, we offer beginning and advanced training sessions via GoToMeeting each month, and you can sign up for either session on the AngelPoints website:
http://www.angelpoints.com/index.php?page=events#training

There are two sessions coming up. The next advanced session is Wednesday, June 17 and the next beginner session is July 7.

We are also working on recording the different topics covered in these sessions and will add them to the Help site. Stay tuned for an announcement of availability.

User Data Imports
To create a more transparent data upload process and give you easier access to your data upload information and results, we have added a report for System Managers that shows:

• The status of all your imports (In Progress, Pending, Completed)
• File information including the date received, the file name and size, the number of users in the file, and the date the upload was completed
• Details about the upload, including errors, users added to the system, users modified, and users removed

To see this information, select Users > User Imports from the Manage tab.





Design Updates
If you have recently logged into AngelPoints, you will have noticed a few new design changes including new tab placement and a change to the design of call out boxes. There are a number of reasons we make changes to the user interface; chief among them are to accommodate client feedback, to make the site as usable and engaging as possible, and to incorporate new features. When such updates are associated with changes to existing features or workflow, we make every effort to alert you in tandem with -- or ahead of -- the launch.

State of the Product Call
Due to the timing of the National Conference on Volunteering and Service and other client initiatives that are taking place over the next couple of months, we are delaying the next State of the Product call until early August. We have many exciting updates to share with you and also look forward to introducing our new Vice President of Product, Stephane Giraudie. Please be on the lookout for your invitation in the coming weeks.

AngelPoints Ideas Bank
Your feedback and suggestions are extremely valuable in shaping the AngelPoints product direction. If you haven't visited the Ideas Bank in a while, please stop by, vote or comment on current ideas, and add your top wants and needs for the product to the list. The AngelPoints team is actively involved on the site and uses this forum to ask for more information and to give you the status on different ideas.

If you do not have a log on, contact Professional Services Manager Kate Derrick at kate AT angelpoints DOT com.

How to keep an event “Invisible”

You have an event coming up and you want it to be exclusive (at least initially) to one specific group. You want to be able to promote it to them, possibly add some of them to the roster yourself but do not want the general volunteer pool to be able to sign up for the event. In order to have access to both the promote and roster features you will have to publish the event.

Here is how to keep your event “Invisible” to all.

When creating the event, under Event Location, give it a zip code of 00000 before you publish it. Since the system bases what opportunities to display on the Home Page and Event Calendar by way of the end users zip code, the event will not appear for anyone (it will still appear within the Manage pages to any managers with access to the group it is assigned to).

By using the Promote feature you can then target your specific group and it will send an email to them with a direct link to the event so they will be able to see it and sign up for it. You can also click on the “View as a volunteer” link from within the event description after you have published, copy the URL from the browser and send that directly to users you want to have sign up.

Once the group you are focused on having sign up has done so, or you choose to open the event up for all to see, simply go back and edit the event description and put in the valid zip code.

Note: The “Driving Directions” link in the event will not function properly until you enter a valid zip code.