Exciting news! Be Collective is now available as three tiered product plans, each designed to address the needs and budgets of different sized organisations across the community, charity, government, education, and private sectors.

Product plans are available now in Australia and New Zealand, and will be released in the United Kingdom soon.

Why has Be Collective introduced new product plans? 

After analysing how Be Collective is used by numerous organisations of all sizes, we recognised the need for an new, more affordable plan with more functionality.

Our new plans are:

• Be Collective Standard: free access to Be Collective for smaller-sized groups, which only require access to our standard suite of tools.
• Be Collective Plus: for any group which needs a range of additional features to better manage volunteer programs at an affordable price.
• Be Collective Pro: for organisations requiring full functionality, customisation, innovative engagement and evidence-based reporting.

All three plans are available now to all new and existing Be Collective groups. Volunteer access to Be Collective remains unaffected by this change.

To learn more about what each of our plans include and how to subscribe, please see the Help Centre article linked below:

Be Collective's product plans and pricing

I'm an existing Be Collective group owner - what happens to my group?

If your group has no paid subscription, you now have an ongoing subscription to our Be Collective Standard plan, which remains free! To learn more about the features available to you as a Standard subscriber, please see the Help Centre article linked below:

What features do Be Collective's plans include?

If your group has an existing subscription to our deprecated Be Collective Plus+ plan, your subscription been migrated automatically to our Be Collective Pro plan at no additional cost. This ensures you experience no loss of functionality or access to data.

For details on how to upgrade or manage your subscription, please see the Help Centre article linked below:

How do I subscribe to a Be Collective plan?

If you have have any questions or feedback on Be Collective's subscription plans, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

We're excited to announce the latest enhancement to our custom fields feature, which now allows you to export your group's custom fields data!

How do I export custom fields data?

As a Be Collective group manager, you can export your group's data through the Reports and Exports tab of your group management page, under Export data.

Simply select the Custom fields export type then click Download data to export your custom fields data in CSV format, which can be opened as a spreadsheet for analysis.

Long-time Be Collective users will notice we've also improved the entire data export interface, making the export process quicker and more intuitive. We've also added links to relevant Help Centre articles for each export type so you can easily learn more about what each export file contains.

More information on how to export your group's data can be found in Be Collective's Help Centre here.

If you have have any questions or feedback on Be Collective's custom fields functionality, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

We're excited to announce that we've already enhanced our new custom fields feature with a data import wizard! This makes bulk uploads of data for your existing members to your group's custom fields quick and easy.

How do I upload custom fields data?

An upload template file is provided for your convenience with your group's custom fields and members already included. To begin, simply download this template, add the data you'd like to import, save as a CSV file and upload this file in the first step of the import wizard.

The second step of the import wizard gives you the opportunity to match the columns in your data file to your custom fields. This is particularly useful if you choose to upload your own data (for instance, an exported file from another platform) Any columns that match the names of your custom fields are matched automatically.

Once you've matched your file columns, you can then verify your data. This allows you to correct any errors immediately instead of updating and re-uploading your data file. Once you've verified your data, all you need to do is click 'Next' to upload it!

More information on how to upload data to your custom fields can be found in Be Collective's Help Centre here.

If you have have any questions or feedback on Be Collective's custom fields functionality, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

We're very excited to announce that Be Collective now offers the functionality for volunteer managers to create custom fields for their members!

This is a great new way for Be Collective Plus+ groups to capture and store more data on your members. With custom fields, it's now easier than even for volunteer managers to:

• match volunteers to opportunities
• complete induction processes
• manage vaccination details

And so much more! If you manage a Be Collective Plus+ group, you can create as many custom fields as you like across nine field types from text to dropdown menus, all tailored to the needs of your organisation.

To learn more about using custom fields, please see the following articles in our Help Centre:

How do I set up custom fields?

How do I enter data in my group's custom fields?

If you have have any questions or feedback on Be Collective's custom fields functionality, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

Great news for volunteer resource centres, and any group with lots of partners - Be Collective's partnerships table is now searchable!

Searching the table is easy - you'll now see a search box above each tab of the table, which you can use to search the partners in the open tab of the table by group name.

The Group and Request Date columns in all tabs of the Partnerships table can also be sorted by clicking on the column header.

More information on how to search your group's partners can be found in Be Collective's Help Centre here.

If you have have any questions or feedback on Be Collective's partnerships functionality, please contact our friendly support team at help@becollective.com.

Be Collective's messenger has recently been updated to make it more clear when you're sending messages to more than one recipient.

When you're in a conversation with any set of Be Collective users, a Group chat icon is now shown above the chat box. This appears in the following scenarios:

- a conversation with more than one Be Collective user
- a conversation with all members of a Be Collective group
- a conversation with all volunteers assigned to an opportunity

The text box also shows exactly who your message will be going to, e.g. 'Write a message to The Community Gardens group ...'; 'Write a message to Sara and Amie ...'

This can be a helpful prompt if you're in a conversation with all of your group members and would like to reply to only one member in that conversation. In such cases, you can start a new conversation with that group member only, instead of posting in the group chat and messaging everybody!

More information on how to use Be Collective Messenger can be found in Be Collective's Help Centre here.

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

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.