Sparked Blog

If you’ve got a customer account on Sparked, you’ll be familiar with your Team Page, which is where you can see your team members, recent activities, and your overall progress as a team. We’ve recently made an update to the page in order to accomodate very large teams with 1000s of members. The old design simply showed all members in a grid. The new design uses a more compressed format and shows more data at a higher summary level. It’s got:

• Recent thanks from nonprofits on the left
• Participation percentage
• Sumup of value for all teams
• Sumup of value for your team
• Recent activity feed
• Captain’s profile
• Featured member list
• Team rank (for the month prior)

In the screenshot, you can see one of the team pages from our awesome customer, Teradata.

And, for a limited time, if you want to access the old team page, just add a “s” to the word “team” in the web address. Ie: /teams/293993

Thanks to the hard work of Chad & Jordan, we’ve got a brand spankin’ new Challenge closing system. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you know that nonprofits sometimes fail to close their challenges – and it’s via the closing system that volunteers get thanked and awards… After a bunch of research, we discovered that many challenge requesters simply never saw the “Admin Panel” at the top of their challenge pages, or the instructions in their welcome email, or the email reminders that go out every 5 days after a challenge closes.

Try what we might, some challenge requesters weren’t closing their challenges (~20% of them). Since we consider “closing the loop” with volunteers to be one of the very most important things that happens on Sparked, we thought this was a problem worth of a lot of time investment.

The result is a brand new challenge closing system that is front and center each time a requester interacts with their challenge. It displays all options in the same space that the requester uses to post followups. The new UI looks great and we hope will improve the closing percentage. Here are a few screenshots.

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Just in time for the holidays, Sparked customers will find a nice dataviz treat in their reporting tab. Screenshot pictured here (using dummy data for a fake team). Now you can see great looking data about each of your teams – with easy to read performance metrics. You can see at-a-glance, top performers, top skills, top causes, participation rates, and global impact. And you can slice and dice the data according to time period and team. There are a lot of other reports available too! This is just the beginning.

It’s like Hanukkah today – another new feature just rolled out thanks to the late night work of Jordan S… and a few weeks of work from Audrey and Doug. We’ve got a brand new ThumbsUp email that goes out when you get ThumbsUp. It feels better than ever to appreciate someone else’s volunteer work… and to be appreciated right back. Awesome.

We just rolled out a new email template for our “Challenge of the Week” system… where you get a skills/interests matched challenge in your email inbox. Check out the snazzy new design. Thanks to Doug, Audrey, Boris, and Jordan for bringing it all together.

Yesterday, thanks to the hard work of Senior Engineer, Jordan Snodgrass, we rolled out a brand new team page. It’s got some great upfront stats on how much good your team is generating in terms of dollars, numbers of nonprofits helped, and then some other stats about the quality and quantity of your combined work. You’ve also got a re-formatted thanks feed on the left and a photo-friendly listing of all of your teammates at center. It’s a great new way to feel teamy on Sparked.

If you’re wondering why *you* don’t see a team tab when you login, it’s because the Team feature is what you get when you purchase a paid Sparked account. It’s the linchpin of our corporate Employee Volunteering Solution, which you can read about here: http://www.sparked.com/content/corp.

Attention searchaholics — today is your lucky day!  Here at Sparked HQ we’re always trying to make it as easy as possible for you to volunteer, and for nonprofits to get the help they need. That’s where our Find page comes in — originally designed to help you browse for challenges that suit your interests and skills.  As the number of nonprofits using Sparked (now in the thousands) has increased, though, we looked for a way to allow you to be able to find all the available challenges that might interest you, without making the page too complicated or difficult to use. Enter: the new, super-snazzy and oh-so-simple to use search bar (pictured).

Take it for a spin by typing in a particular cause, skill, place or other search term, and let us know what you think.

Hi all. It’s been a couple of weeks since my last product update. The reason is two-fold. #1, I just had a baby! So have been out of the office and then back in, but doing a lot of catchup, so haven’t had a chance to blog about new features. And #2, the team has been working mostly on back-end administrative and reporting tools for the past several weeks. All of that said, we did get a couple of important updates out last week.

Primarily, the stats have been showing us that some people were confused on the home page with our two equally weighted options (nonprofits & volunteers). So, we’ve weighted the volunteer option much more heavily… and then also rejiggered all of the pre-signin pages. Let us know what you think!