December 2011 Newsletter
Happy International Volunteers Day!
To all of you who work each day to make your communities and the world a better place, YourVolunteers thanks you. We are constantly impressed by the work that so many of you do which is why we are continuing to build upon our system to help you to help others. After asking for suggestions that would make our system better, we’ve received a lot of great responses that are now on our work lists. Please keep those suggestions coming, and read down below where we descibe one of the upcoming changes involving volunteer availability.
Sincerely,
John Wagoner
President
New Service: GiftingWishes.com
YourVolunteers collaborated with NPcatalyst in Reno, NV to create a new service that allows nonprofits to create an online wish list for free and then receive donations for those items directly. The setup process is simple and donors send funds directly to your organization via Google Checkout. Donors receive the satisfaction of knowing exactly how their money will be used. Just this morning, the new service received a fantastic review from the Southern Arizona Nonprofits blog. You can read more about GiftingWishes.com on its website.
New Feature: Add a YourVolunteers Button to Your Website
Want something that gets more noticed than a text link? You can now add a YourVolunteers button to your website. After logging in as an administrator, go to the new Button Gallery to get the HTML code to paste onto your website.
New Blog Post: Be Kind to your Virtual Volunteers, for a Nerd May be Somebody’s Husband
On this International Volunteers Day, we should not forget about those volunteers that you may not see, but still contribute nonetheless. This blog post details the experiences, good and bad, of a virtual volunteer and how you can best structure the relationship that you have with them. The blog post is available here.
Coming Soon: Volunteer Availability Changes
One of the most powerful features of YourVolunteers, and one that differentiates our system from other ones that are online, is the fact that volunteers can enter their availability and administrators can see who is available for an assignment a particular task. However, many of you have told us that you would like to see this step eliminated. If we eliminate the step, we’d get suggestions asking us to add an extra step where volunteers enter their availability. What we’ll be doing is making the step optional. Those organizations that do not choose to use the availability feature will then have volunteers simply routed to the calendar or list of all shifts to build their schedules. We’ll have the new process up and running before our next newsletter.
Coming Soon: Ala Carte Pricing
We’ve received numerous suggestions that $59 per month is too much for some organizations to pay but they would really like to use some of the features of the Deluxe Packages. For example, some organizations do not mind the ads on each page, but would like to send schedules by email. We’ll be adding ala carte pricing to our service before the next newsletter. Thank you for the suggestion.
