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.

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 pleased to announce the launch of our new Resource Centre! 

This can be found at becollective.com/resources, and houses useful 'how-to' guides on getting started with Be Collective, whether you're a volunteer or volunteer manager. Soon, you'll be able to find video guides here too!

The Resource Centre sits alongside our Help Centre, which can be found at help.becollective.com and is the place to go for more detailed answers to any questions you have about Be Collective's suite of volunteer management tools.

As always, we're keen to hear from you on any additional resources you'd like to see. We're committed to providing you with the tools you need to make the most of Be Collective.

Great news! If you're a volunteer manager you can now search all member data fields within your group, including notes. This can be very useful in helping you identify suitable volunteers within your existing member list.

For instance, if your group provides lunch for your volunteers and you've entered dietary requirements in volunteers' notes, you can select open the Manage Volunteers tab of your group profile in Management mode, then open the Advanced Filter.

From here, you can select 'Notes' from the drop-down menu and enter, for instance, 'vegan' to return a list of all group members with 'vegan' in their notes.

If you'd like to look for any potential volunteers with an active Working with Children check, all you need to do is open the View drop-down menu (which reads 'View: Default') and select 'Working With Children/Vulnerable People Check'.

Say hello to heat maps (Be Collective Plus+ only)

If you're a Be Collective Plus+ user and you'd like a better idea of your volunteer activity, we have you covered with our new interactive maps! These can be found on the Reports tab of your Group management dashboard, and will give you a quick visual representation of the areas your opportunities and volunteers are situated.

If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear from you - please feel free to contact us at help@becollective.com.

Due to the current situation globally, here at Be Collective we are encouraging our volunteers, volunteer-involving organisations, volunteer resource centres, community groups, corporate and government partners to continue to support each other in these challenging times. 

As a business, we are taking steps to ensure we are implementing social distancing where possible and would recommend all organisations and volunteers follow suit.

You may wish to take this opportunity to tweak your volunteering opportunity listings so that anything that can be done remotely, is done remotely. That means calls, video conferences, collaborating on shared documents or starting group chats in WhatsApp. 

Remember, technology is your friend, use Be Collective to promote your cause, recruit volunteers, connect, and mobilise goodwill in your neighbourhood.

If you need support to adjust your volunteering opportunities or need some guidance on how you can start recruiting "virtual" or remote-based volunteers, reach out to us at hello@becollective.com or message us on Facebook.

Keep connecting with your community and keep up communication with your elderly or vulnerable neighbours.

Look after yourself and keep doing what you can, when you can. 

From Team Be Collective

Welcome to our Announcements feed! This is where we'll tell you about improvements we make to Be Collective, as we make them.

Our 'languages spoken' drop down menus for both volunteers and volunteer managers have been updated for ease of use. Official languages – English for Australia and the UK, English and Māori for New Zealand – are now listed first to save you some scrolling.

Sign Language has also been added to these menus.

We've also made some general stability improvements to enhance your experience on Be Collective. If you have any feedback on these changes or anything else on our platform, please feel free to contact us at help@becollective.com. Enjoy!