Kristina Ciari Tursi
In February, we shared our Technology Update 4.5, which included improvements to rosters, smarter and more dynamic site search functionality, and the option to schedule Practice Sessions and eLearning courses. With all of our technology updates, our goal is to continue to improve the experience for our leaders and members. Leading this work moving forward, we’re thrilled to welcome our new Technology Experience Manager, Devin Lampe, to the team. Looking ahead, we’re excited about forthcoming improvements to our UserVoice Feedback forum to help you better engage with our technology priorities and resources.
Before moving on to the updates, we want to thank everyone for their support and patience as we took the last six months to work through our technology staffing needs following the unexpected passing of Jeff Bowman, our Associate Director of Information Technology. He left big shoes to fill, and as part of an organizational realignment, we chose to backfill Jeff’s role with a combination of two positions: one person to oversee our organizational IT hardware and software systems (which we are still in the process of hiring), and another to oversee the technology experience for our members and volunteers.
Meet Devin Lampe, our New Technology Experience Manager
Devin comes to us with a unique blend of technology experience and passion for outdoor recreation. With a Bachelor of Business Administration and a Master of Information Systems from the University of Cincinnati, Devin has worked in the technology field since 2017. She’s served as a technical account manager and lead data consultant to unlock customer insights and drive business growth. In her most recent role, she focused on reinventing in-store retail media through digital experiences to support company expansion. And, she’s been doing all of this while volunteering as a Technology Consultant and Board Member for the Land Trust in Southwest Ohio, a nonprofit dedicated to “preserving the land we love in Southwest Ohio.”
In her free time, Devin enjoys trail running, hiking, kayaking, climbing, tennis/pickleball, and exploring local towns and neighborhoods with her husband and border collie-hound mix Kylo. Inspired by her east coast family roots, Devin took up sailing when she moved to Seattle in July 2023 and is now US Sailing Bareboat Certified and the proud owner of Naive Melody, a Catalina 36. She aspires to get into backpacking and outdoor climbing and is always looking for recommendations on new areas to explore.
As our new Technology Experience Manager, Devin will oversee ongoing maintenance and improvements for our website and be responsible for other community-serving technology, including our membership platform (CRM), e-learning platform, feedback systems, and more. She will work with the membership and publishing services team to incorporate member or volunteer needs and closely monitor all user feedback. To learn more about her role & responsibilities, as well as her connection to The Mountaineers mission, visit her staff bio.
UserVoice Feedback Process System Improvements
Following our “new” website launch back in 2014, we started utilizing UserVoice, a feedback software system designed to gather feedback from the community, prioritize features that matter, and innovate efficiently. In the years since, we’ve received - and completed! - hundreds of suggestions for improvements to the site. And, as a nonprofit, we always have more ideas than we have available resources.
We are committed to continuing to work through the suggested ideas in alignment with our Strategic Plan. In the coming weeks, we will be reviewing each idea and updated its status as outlined below. Some of the ideas are many years’ old at this point, and therefore may no longer be up to date with our current functionality. Our goal is to simplify the idea categorization process to provide more transparency into our priorities and limitations within our current technology resources. We hope this makes it easier for our community to find and engage with existing ideas, understand how we’re evaluating and prioritizing projects, and keep abreast of developments as they happen in real time.
To start, we have revamped the default display settings for ideas to hide completed and closed ideas and highlight new and upcoming ideas. In the coming weeks, we will be updating all existing ideas to alight with our new status type settings.
The status types that will be used moving forward are:
- New: Ideas that need to be reviewed by our team and prioritized. This is the default status for all new ideas submitted.
- Priority: Ideas that have been reviewed and are deemed to have a significant enough benefit to our organization to justify an in-depth review for future scheduling. This status indicates something that is “on deck” for development.
- Proposed: Ideas that have been raised, but for a multitude of reasons were not considered a priority to take action on in the near-term. These ideas will continue to be live for your consideration, and can be voted and commented on. They may ultimately become prioritized with community buy-in or strategic changes. If a proposed idea has limited activity for a given period, it may be closed.
- In Progress: Ideas that are underway and should be completed soon.
- Completed: Ideas that have been completed and incorporated into our technology offerings or processes.
- Closed: Ideas that do not fit or conflict with our mission or our strategic initiatives, or ideas that are untenable. This status also includes ideas that we no longer need or ideas that have gone stale.
As we are reviewing all open ideas, notifications may be sent for ideas submitted long ago. As a reminder, each member has 10 votes each to use on our technology forum. The max of 10 votes is set for you to prioritize the ideas you like the best and so that we can collectively understand which ideas will have the greatest impact on the most people. You can cast your vote by creating ideas, it takes one vote to create an idea, and you can use a vote to support an idea, assigning up to 3 votes for any idea. You will get your votes back when an idea is completed or closed. You can redistribute your votes at any time.
We appreciate your patience as we organize ourselves to better address current ideas and support new ideas in the future. We hope this evolution will enable us to be more responsive to urgent needs and offer more transparency into our shared technology resources.
LEARN MORE
Interested in learning more about our technology and infrastructure? You can read all of our related blogs on our Technology Blog. We especially encourage you to read How We Prioritize Technology Feedback and Projects, and then check out our feedback website to see what else we're working on.
