Making it easier to communicate with parents/guardians of children

Many of you are now using our child check-in system and this release brings a great new round of new features to make it even easier to work with groups of children and their guardians.
 

Emailing guardians

Rather than maintaining a copy of the parent's / guardian's email address on each children's record, you can now simply use the new option in Mailing which will allow you send a mail to your children's groups, but substitute the parents on the list.

When you get to the 'Select groups' stage, look out of the 'Substitute children' option on the right hand side.



 

Related Groups of Guardians

Often it's useful to have a group of all your parents/guardians in one place to make it easier to email them, or to give them access to restricted resources on the website.

One of the less well-known features in Insight allows you to link groups together, so that if you add someone to one group they will also get added to another. We have tweaked this feature, so that now you have the option to set up groups so that when you add a child to one group, the parents get added to another!

Head to the Members tab, Click Tasks > Account Management > Configure Related Groups to get started.

 

New Query Tasks

After running a query which returns some children (for example, all children that have a particular Consent Question set), there are two new query tasks which allow you to:

• Replace any children in the results with the first adult from the same family
• Replace any children in the results with all the adults from the same family

You can then perform all the usual tasks on that new group of adults, such as emailing them, giving them site log-ins or adding them to a specific group as a one-off action. Take a look at this screenshot:



 

Automatic setting of age category

There's always been a little bit of a disconnect between someone's date of birth, and the manual setting of whether someone is classed as an adult or not. We've plugged the gap and you can now set for your site the age at which your members should be classed as adults. Age category (whether someone is an Adult/Guardian or a Child / Youth) can be set automatically based on this. Of course, if someone hasn't supplied their date of birth, you can still manually set whether they are an adult or child - or there might occasionally be times when you need to override the automatic setting (for example a 17 year old who is a parent).

To get set up, you can go Site Settings > Users > Age Categories


 

And we've also...

• Made it much easier to create a new record for a child and add it to an existing family (click Tasks on the existing family page)
• Improved the display of the family members menu on the user record
• Made it easier to sort family members into your preferred order

We've written a step-by-step guide to help you get started with storing your children's details in Insight, and how to make use of these new features - click here to take a look...

 

Check-in now available for all our customers

Check-in has been in preview with a small number of customers for the last year, but from today it is now available for everyone. It's a very flexible system - you can use it for Child Check-in at a weekly event, or for delegates at your annual conference. You can use it if you just have one old laptop spare, or if you want, use it with tablets, phones, label printers and barcode scanners. Since it runs on the web, you can get started on just about any device right away! See the Check-in section on ShareInsight for more info.
 

Querying and deleting form responses

As part of our ongoing commitment to help you with your GDPR compliance, we've been busy making it easier for you to find and delete old form responses.

Forms are an easy way to gather data - but that's data that you need to look after in just the same way the GDPR requires you to look after all your other data.

We've added form responses to Query, so that you can find and delete (for example) all form responses that are over a year old, or to find all responses sent by a particular individual (providing they were logged in).

While we were at it, we've made form responses a bit easier to spot in the Site Manager. There's now a badge next to the form's title in the Documents listing which will tell you how many responses there are - and you can click it to go straight to the responses. In addition, the responses now form another tab in the document itself, so everything is in one place (they probably should have been there all along to be honest!).

 

Other improvements and bug fixes

We're always looking for ways to make things better and we fix bugs as quickly as we can after they are discovered. This time we've ironed out all these issues:

• Over time as we have expanded Query, some inconsistencies have crept in around what you can see, and what you can edit, depending on the permissions you have. We've done some work to tighten things up so that you can only do in Query the same things you would expect to be able to do in the Site Manager. So, for example, to be able to send a mailing to someone via Query, you have to have the Mailing permission over some group they're in. Or to give someone login access via Query, you have to have the necessary edit permission that would enable you to edit their record in Site Manager.
• The Social Bookmarking and Profile Editor modules can now be added to articles (previously they were only available to add to design templates or layouts).
• There is now an additional option in the Profile Editor to determine where logged-in users are redirected after updating their profile (this option already existed for new users registering via the component).
• When new user records are created (either by admins or by users themselves), privacy options - i.e. who can see their details - now default to the least permissive options (except for connections, where it is assumed name and email address can be shared).
• The spell checker in the document editor relied on a third party service which no longer operates. Since all main browsers now have their own built-in spell checkers, we have switched to using these instead.
• In the email confirmation of a payment group registration, if an admin had overridden the final amount, there would be a useful-sounding prompt to hover your mouse over the total for more information. Problem is, it didn't do anything, so we've removed it.
• When adding a new payment scheme to a payment group, the scheme's membership period now defaults to 'unlimited' rather than 1 month.
• After running a query, you can set the preferred correspondence type for mailing channels, but the SMS option was missing. 
• First and last name were too close together in read-only view of user record in the Web Office. We've added a space!
• A custom field of type 'link to member' on an event was impossible to set. We've fixed that.
• If you send a mailing to less than 100 people, you get the option to add other individuals to the mailing ad hoc. Unfortunately, selecting the extra user did nothing...well now it does!
• When editing a consent question, if you hit the 'Save' button while the editor was in Source mode, your changes weren't actually saved. We can't claim that was a useful feature so we've made it work as intended.
• Depending on your screen size, user records would sometimes be displayed in two columns but the right-hand column was off the edge of the screen. It now sticks to a single column in this scenario.

Coming up...

We have a number of exciting features already in the pipeline. Watch this space for....

• New finance features, including sending Gift Aid claims straight to HMRC from Insight
• Brand new My Area with new messaging features and mobile support
• Easy, low-cost, event bookings
• Expanded rota functionality, including enabling your members to arrange their own swaps and sign up to serve directly on the website
• More tools to help you with your GDPR compliance (OK, I know I said exciting...)