Great news for volunteer managers - one of our most requested enhancements has just been released!

You can now include free text and hyperlinks in your application forms, for both group membership and opportunities, using the new Paragraph field in the Be Collective form builder.

Selecting this field opens a text editor within your form. This can be used to can add any text that doesn't fit into a question, such as an introduction or instructions on how to complete your application form.

You can also add a hyperlink to any text entered in the Paragraph field, so you can now easily direct volunteers to any external webpages or documents you'd like them to view before submitting their application.

More information on how to use our Paragraph field can be found in Be Collective's Help Centre here. You can also find out how to add a hyperlink here.

If you have have any questions about Be Collective's form building functionality, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

Be Collective's messaging and chat functionality will soon be improved to make it more clear when messages have been received within our platform. Another announcement will follow later this week when these improvements have been released.

What's changing?

All messages between a group and multiple users will release an email notification to all recipients. For example, a group owner/administrator sending a message to all group members, or all volunteers assigned to a specific opportunity.

This will not, however, override any individual recipient's customisable profile settings. If a recipient does not have email notifications activated for received messages, they will only receive an in-platform notification and the message to their Be Collective inbox.

We encourage you to check messages regularly to ensure you don't miss out on any communications from volunteers or organisations. Messages can be accessed easily through the message icon in the header bar.

In the coming months, we aim to better understand the needs of our users with a view to releasing new and improved communications tools later this year.

If you have have any questions about Be Collective's messaging functionality, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

We've made some improvements to the Opportunities table shown to volunteer managers, allowing you to see the status of opportunities easily from the table view. The table now includes the following fields:

• Application Status – this will show if the opportunity is open, closed or paused to new volunteer applications.

• Application Closed Date – this will show when the opportunity is/was set to be closed to volunteer applications.

To make room for these columns, we've removed the Credits column from this table. Credits can now be found by clicking Manage under an opportunity shown in the opportunities table – the number of credits offered is then shown in the opportunity preview on the right-hand side.

For more information on opening, closing and pausing opportunities to applications, please see our Help Centre article here.

Full service has been resumed, and we're delighted to announce that our new suite of scheduling and rostering features are live! Thanks you again for your patience.

If you'd like to learn more about our new features and how to use them, Be Collective's Help Centre is a great place to start - please click here for more details or get in touch with our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

Thank you for your patience while we've been offline this morning – now that we're back, we're delighted to announce that our new suite of scheduling and rostering features will be live soon!

Our developers are hard at work on the final stages of our software updates and while we're back online now, not all features are currently available. We recommend you don't make any changes to your profiles or Be Collective data until further notice.

If you'd like to learn more about our new features and how to use them, Be Collective's Help Centre is a great place to start - please click here for more details or get in touch with our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

Be Collective will be temporarily offline on the evening of 29 November (UK) / the morning of 30 November (AU & NZ).

This will allow our engineers to carry out essential maintenance before the launch of our exciting new scheduling and rostering features.

This outage is currently scheduled for:

United Kingdom: Sunday 29 November 9pm - Monday 30 November, 1am (GMT)
Australia: Monday 30 November, 8am - 12pm (AEDT)
New Zealand: Monday 30 November, 10am - 2pm (NZDT)

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this outage, and we'll endeavour to make sure full service is restored as soon as possible.

If you'd like to learn more about our new scheduling and rostering tools, please click here.

Be Collective is changing! Later this month we will be updating our platform with class-leading new features which make it easy to manage scheduling and rostering of your volunteers.

To learn more, please click here.

We're very excited to announce that Be Collective now offers the functionality for volunteer managers to create and issue certificates!

This expands on our previous Social Currency module (now called 'Rewards and Certificates') and is a great new way for Be Collective Plus+ groups to recognise the great work your volunteers do.

For more information on how to use our new certificates module, please see the following articles on the Be Collective Help Centre:

How do I create a certificate for my volunteers?

How do I issue a certificate to my volunteers?

At Be Collective, we're committed to providing you with a consistent Search experience across our platform, making it easier for volunteers to find opportunities that interest them.

First of all, we're working on our search algorithms but we won't send you to sleep by explaining how! What we can tell you is that we've recognised how many users enter location into the main search bar (as opposed to the location field on the the search page), and soon our search weighting will be adjusted to ensure these searches generate more appropriate lists of results.

In the meantime, we've added a 'Sort By' filter into the main search, allowing you to sort search results by Relevance, Distance and Newest.

Sharing opportunities with offline volunteers just got easier!

We've added a 'Print' button to all opportunities, and if you click it you'll be given the same set of printing options you'd see if printing a webpage (including 'Save as PDF' if enabled on your device), with the opportunity details cleanly and plainly formatted for easy reading.

The printable opportunity also includes the contact details provided in the opportunity, so volunteers can easily get in touch even if they're offline and unable to apply through Be Collective.