Tech Update 3.1 - Feedback Improvements, Gift Memberships

Since the 3.0 update in mid-February to bring Mountaineers Programs and Publishing under one roof, we have continued to make many improvements to our website. The two biggest ones are committee-aggregated feedback and an improved gift membership process. Read on to learn more.

Feedback

• Committee admins are now able to review feedback from all of their committee’s activities in one place. And branch admins can review feedback for any of the activity committees in their branch. Look for the "View Committee Feedback" button on the right-hand side of your committee's web page. You can find your committees all listed on your My Profile page.
  
  
• We updated and added to the questions on our feedback survey forms to help us capture better information about how well we're meeting the needs of our members and guests. We re-worded the  "answers" to the multiple choice  questions to provide for a better middle ground. Learn more and view all the updated feedback surveys on our Feedback Surveys page and our How To: Giving and Receiving Feedback blog post.

Membership

• We added a whole new feature for purchasing and redeeming gift memberships on our website. It's a completely streamlined and automated process that takes the pain out of giving and receiving the gift of a Mountaineers membership. This new feature also saves a lot of staff time that was previously spent on processing gift memberships. Learn more on our Give a Gift Membership page.
  
  
• Because we are 501(c)(3) nonprofit, membership dues may be matched by employers. We improved the shopping cart and checkout pages to reflect this and made it easier for you to let us know that your employer may match your annual membership dues - we now have the ability for you to let us know who they are so we can reach out to them. For help or to learn more, contact our Development Team at development@mountaineers.org.
  
  
• When a youth turns 18, we automatically move them from their family membership to their own new adult membership. We also send an email to them with an invitation to join for a longer period at a significantly discounted cost.

Activities, Courses & Events

• We added a "Review" link to each individual on an activity roster so that leaders may review their group's activity history and participation notes directly from the roster. Viewing participation notes is helpful for trip planning, ensuring safety during a trip, as well as positive group dynamics.
  
  
• We fixed roster date/time sorting for courses, activities, events, and lodge stays. These were all sorting as if the column contained text; now these rosters are sorting as if the column contains the date/time data that it really contains.
  
  
• When changing the route/place for an existing activity, the start and end map points are changed to those of the new route/place, in addition to the mileage, elevation gain, and difficulty. This should make it easier to change where you're going when the need arises.
  
  
• We added Earned Badges for Leader and Instructors to activity templates for lectures, field trips, clinics, and seminars. These are the defaults for assigning credit when closing an activity, and now we have one set of defaults for leaders and instructors and one for participants. This will save leaders time when closing activities and makes it easier for instructors to keep up their credentials by teaching.
  
  
• Learn more about the features above, scheduling and managing activities, and all things Mountaineers on our Schedule & Manage pages.
  
  
• We improved the search filter toggles and search results display for faceted searches on mobile devices. It should be quicker and easier to get the results for any of our websites searches: Find Activities, Find Courses, Clinics & Seminars, View Trip Reports, and the site-wide search.

Committee Rosters

• When adding leaders to a committee roster and/or editing existing records, admins may now choose whether to assign the leader badge set the committee's details. This works identically for instructors too, but we do not yet have many instructor badges. Learn more about managing committee rosters.
  

• When removing a leader or instructor from a committee, the system now sets the badge expiration date to yesterday's date. Thais way the badge will be removed from their profile immediately.
  
  
• The committee roster page and its download now have a Last Activity Led column that contains the date of the most recent activity that the leader led for the committee. This will help keeping your committee's leader list up-to-date by making it much easier to find inactive leaders.
  

Infrastructure

• Earlier this year we integrated our publishing division, Mountaineers Books, into our website along with a new universal header so we're all "under one roof". This included some changes to the navigation for The Mountaineers "programs" header menus. We improved on that by ensuring that the headers do not switch between "The Mountaineers" and "Mountaineers Books" when viewing content for a much less jarring experience. The respective sets of menus display when you mouse over "The Mountaineers" and "Mountaineers Books" in the header for a snappier experience and quicker access to what you need.
  
  
• We changed our map platform to mapbox. We did this because mapbox provides  a better outdoor layer of information available on the maps displayed on our activities, Routes & Places, trip reports, and events.  It also gives us a significant cost savings over our prior map platform provider.
  
  
• We migrated our email platform from local on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers at our Seattle Program Center and Books Office & Warehouse to Microsoft Office 365 in "the cloud." Our email servers were aging and in need of replacement, and our email system was in need of an upgrade. Because Microsoft provides the O365 email system for free to nonprofits, we are also enjoying a significant cost savings over new servers along with the cool new, up-to-date email system.