We are pleased to announce the addition of Job Templates, Item Requests and few more new features to make volunteer management easier than ever with SwimTopia.
Job Templates
Job Templates makes creating volunteer jobs and shifts and sharing them between swim meets and other events a snap.
Copying a calendar event was previously the primary way to share jobs and shifts between events. Now, with Job Templates, the jobs and shifts for a meet can be saved as a stand-alone template. Job Templates can be created and edited independently. A Job Template can be applied, or imported into, any existing event.
You can save the jobs and shifts from previous season’s meets into a new Job Template. From any previous meet go to “Jobs” > “Job List” and you’ll see the option to “Save As Template”. It’s an easy way to get started using the new Job Template function.
When applying a Job Template to a meet that already has jobs defined, the new template is merged intelligently. It will only add those jobs or shifts that do not already exist. If you prefer, the option is available to completely replace all existing jobs, shifts and assignments with those in the template.
Please give Job Templates a try and let us know what you think! You can find them under the “Schedule” section of your team management interface.
Item Requests
We are also pleased to add another often requested feature: Item Requests. Item Requests makes it easy for teams to list items needed, such as food and drinks for concessions, alongside requests of time from volunteers.
Like Jobs and Shifts, Item Requests can be assigned point values. Fulfilling item requests can give busy parents more options to support their team and meet their volunteering obligations.
Item Requests are a new type of Job. Once an Item Request job is created, instead of defining a shift schedule for the job, you can list the items needed and the quantity and point values for each donation.
Enhanced Shift Conflict Detection
Schedule conflicts are automatically detected during registration.
As part of the above enhancements, conflicts between shifts assignments are now detected and prevented more proactively than before. Now when a parent is signing up for volunteer jobs during online team registration any jobs or shifts that would conflict with other selections are automatically disabled to avoid potential schedule conflicts.
Additionally, when administrators are assigning volunteers to jobs search results are automatically filtered to exclude anyone who has already committed to another job/shift at the same time.
Odds and Ends
While working on the above enhancements, we also improved the user interface to make it more intuitive and speedier. We improved things behind the scenes too. We added tracking to distinguish self-assigned from admin-assigned jobs, and we added protections to prevent overlapping changes when multiple people are editing the same data at the same time.
We put a lot of work into designing, building and testing these new features to make managing volunteers easier. We look forward to seeing these new features help teams reduce the time and effort required to setup and manage their volunteer programs. We hope the additional flexibility gives parents more options and opportunities to help their teams and coaches provide a positive, fun swimming experience for their kids.
These features, like most things in SwimTopia, were inspired by customer feedback and suggestions. Please let us know what you think and how we can make SwimTopia even better!
