June, 2017 Release Notes

As Spider Man was told: "With great power comes great responsibility".   With this release, we are giving great power (increased flexibility of use) to the rules under which you can administratively grant a Volunteer, Volunteer Leader, or Partner Staff Profile / License to a contact. To make this flexibility possible, administrators have the responsibility of understanding and communicating to their staff the ramifications of granting profiles without being forced by HOC to fill in certain fields in the contact record.

HandsOn Connect was originially designed to 'persuade' admin users to follow certain best practices of what info was 'required' to make someone a volunteer or partner staff.   However, as the HandsOn Connect user base has widened - best practices that were created for volunteer centers, may not apply to newer HandsOn Connect users, including international customers  (who for example, don't necessarily use states and zip codes).

In HOC 3 we've made it possible for system administrators to define what information is or isn't required when registering on the site, and so with this release, we've also removed most of the back-end validations that forced you to fill out certain contact fields before granting a license / profile.

We recommend that all administrators read about these changes, and make your staff  aware that HOC will no longer 'police' certain validation rules. The decision of whether or not to require an address, phone number or age (amongst other fields), is now up your administrative users -- and not forced or validated in order to administratively grant access to a volunteer or to the partner and VL portals.  Here are the details:

Changes in Validations for granting Volunteer or Volunteer Leader profile to a contact (HOC-869)

Previously, in order to grant a contact a profile/license for Volunteer or Volunteer Leader, the following fields HAD to be populated in the contact record. Failure to fill in these fields presented you with a validation error:

  • Email
  • Date of Birth (Birthdate)
  • Volunteer Type: this field had to have the value of "Volunteer"
  • Must provide at least one phone number
  • Home Street
  • Home State
  • Home City
  • Home Zip (if "Home is selected as Primary Address?"
  • or:
  • Other Street
  • Other State
  • Other City
  • Other Zip (if "Business is selected as "Primary Address?"

Going forward, the only requirement for granting these profiles will be that the contact must have:

  • Email Address.

That's it!

Contact records themselves still require a Last Name and an Account Name.

Be aware of the following if you grant volunteer or VL profiles without certain fields:

1)  If you do not enter a birthdate -- the contact will be considered 'ageless' and be able to sign up for any volunteer opportunity, regardless of age restrictions associated with that opportunity.   On the positive side though, you no longer have to fill in 'artificial' calculated birthdates if you don't wish to.  

Be sure your staff is aware of this - and they will no longer get a validation warning if the birthdate field is left blank when administratively granting a license to a volunteer or VL.

2) If your contact doesn't have a phone number, then emails where the primary phone number is shared will not have any phone information.    

If desired, you can update the page layout for contacts and remove the requirement for the fields:

  • Primary Address?
  • Primary Phone?

Or you can give them a default value.  

If the primary phone? field is not populated however, the primary phone field (used in connection records), will not be populated automatically. We recommend you always  set a value for primary phone?  when creating a contact.  (Or better yet, set a default value for it to save you time).

Changes in Validations for granting Partner Staff profile to a contact (HOC-869)

Previously, in order to grant a contact a profile/license for Partner Staff, the following fields HAD to be populated in the contact record. Failure to fill in these fields presented you with a validation error:

  • Email
  • Must provide at least one phone number
  • Home Street
  • Home State
  • Home City
  • Home Zip (if "Home is selected as Primary Address?"
  • or:
  • Other Street
  • Other State
  • Other City
  • Other Zip (if "Business is selected as "Primary Address?"

And

the following organization fields for the partner organization had to be populated:

  • Status = Active Partner
  • Mission Statement
  • Population Served
  • Primary Contact (lookup)
  • Primary Contact (First Name)
  • Primary Contact (Email)

Going forward, the only requirement for granting these profiles will be that the contact must have:

  • Email Address.

and the organization record must have:

  • Status = Active Partner
  • Primary Contact (lookup)
  • Primary Contact (First Name)
  • Primary Contact (Email)

Be aware that if you do not provide a phone number for your partner staff contact, then emails sent to volunteers giving contact info for opportunities coordinated by that contact, will not have any a phone number included.

One validation that is still in place is the rule that in order to make an organization an 'active partner', you have to populate a value in the field "Impact Area".

If your organization does not wish to require an impact areas for your partner organizations - you can turn this validation off yourself!   Go to Accounts / Validation Rules   and disable the validation rule:  ImpactAreaRequired

Bug Fix: Multiple Waitlist emails beings sent (HOCAVV-967)

Emails notifying waitlisted volunteers (and connected team captains) of space becoming available in full projects that now had space available - were being sent way too often.  Every time another space opened up, another email was sent - which resulted in a lot of emails being sent when, for example, a team removed itself itself from a full opportunity.

This bug has been corrected.  Emails will now only be sent once, when a full project has available space. And will not be sent again until  1) the project once again becomes full, and 2) Space once again becomes available. 

 

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