New Technology Support System

It's been several months since we launched our new website, and we remain incredibly energized by the community's support of our new home and the positive impact this is having on our organization.

Although our new platform is great in many ways, there are still challenges, particularly related to course and activity management. I am pleased to tell you that we have a plan in place for accelerating fixes and improvements and better capturing and prioritizing feedback.  We've made good progress, but we still have a lot we're working to solve, and your feedback is critical for getting the new system to where we all want it to be.

Please read on for an explanation of our issue handling and feedback process.

How is my request or issue handled?

• Tickets or help questions can be initiated two ways – emailing info@mountaineers.org or you can sign in and click on the   or ? at the bottom right corner of the web site. You must sign in to see the ? on the web site.  When you click on the ? a box will pop up

Fill out the Send us a message box and your issue has been submitted! When you submit an issue you will get an immediate email and within 48 hours a member services representative will respond. Keep the email you receive and check back in with member services to see your status. If you call with an issue, member services will create a ticket for you so that your issue can be managed in our system and we can track its outcome.

How can I offer feedback and suggestions for improvements to the website?

We love ideas and feedback. Feedback, ideas, or suggestions for improvement can be provided three ways:

• Log in, go feedback.mountaineers.org and submit your idea
• Email feedback@mountaineers.org
• Log in. Click the ? in the lower right hand side of your screen.  Fill out the Send us a message in the ? to submit an issue the  Help us decide what to add next will post an idea to our forum. 

Only Leaders will have access to the private leader forum.  Everyone has access to the general feedback forum.

Resources

We have 2 full time staff people dedicated to Member Services and we have increased staffing to handle technology requests and provide training for volunteers.

We also have an allocated budget to work through bugs and error messages monthly and a budget to work on website improvements and enhancements annually. However, the reality is that our resources are limited and although we are on par with the IT budgets of other nonprofits, compared to a private company such as Facebook or google or resources are quite small. As such we must prioritize suggestions for improvement. Not every suggestion will be completed and some may be completed but on an extended timeline.

How are website improvements or enhancements prioritized?

We meet as a staff and then with our board Technology Advisory Committee to prioritize our improvement work for the year. To come up with an initial list of priorities we look at all the requests we have received and then assign them a priority value similar to high, medium, low and then rank order the top projects. When we prioritize we consider the following criteria:

• Impact to volunteers
• Number of people impacted
• Amount of revenue affected
• Amount of expense reduction, increased efficiency, and/ or increase accuracy
• Ease and cost to implement

We also make available our high level improvement work plan HERE. So you can see our plan for the year. You may find your suggestion is already in the pipeline for this year.

But I feel that my suggested enhancement is more important than the ones you have on the work plan. What do I do now?

If you feel that one of your suggested enhancements should knock down something else on our improvement work plan, then it may be discussed with the Board Technology Advisory Committee. To be considered for discussion your idea must pop to the top of the list in our feedback forum www.feedback.mountaineers.org, meaning it must garner a lot of votes from other members. The committee will only discuss the top 10 ideas that are not currently captured in our work plan to see if one of these priority ideas should bump out a currently planned project. If you love your idea then try and find other Mountaineers who love it and will vote for it. The higher the number of votes the more likely it will pop into the top 10 for consideration.

How can I track the status of my feedback?

Your feedback will always be available at feedback.mountaineers.org and you can check back to see if the status has changed or if others have voted or commented on your ideas. Mountaineers staff will change status of ideas as the move from for consideration to planned to in progress to closed.

How does voting work?

You have 10 votes per forum. We only give 10 votes so that you can prioritize the ideas you like the best and so that we can see the ideas that are the most important. You can cast your vote in two ways. First by creating ideas; it takes one vote to create an idea. Second, you can use a vote to support an idea. You can assign 1-3 votes to any idea. You will get your votes back when an idea is given a closed status. You can redistribute your votes at any time.