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'.

Following some feedback from our volunteer managers, we've made some improvements to the partnerships panel in group management mode.

Now, volunteer managers can see not only the groups they're partnered with; they can also see contact details for each partner group, the number of opportunities the group has and the number of opportunities they've endorsed for you.

You can also toggle on or off automatic opportunity endorsement for each partner from the partnerships panel, without visiting the profile for each partner group.

Please note, the public view of your partnerships in your group profile remains unchanged - the view above is shown only to group managers, in group management mode.

Great news for volunteers - testimonials from volunteer managers are now included on your social record. Now, anyone you share your social CV with can now see the glowing reviews you earn for your volunteering!

All you need to do is select the opportunities you'd like to include on your social record when you export it from the social record tab of your profile, and any testimonials attached to these opportunities will automatically be included.

'Work from anywhere' opportunities, including virtual & online opportunities which you can do from your computer at home, are now much easier to find on Be Collective!

All you need to do is click on 'Find an opportunity' in the menu, then check the 'Work from anywhere' box under the Location field before you search.

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

Improved invitation forms

For volunteer managers, we've expanded the forms we provide for entering new volunteers' details when you're invite them to join Be Collective. In addition to name and email address, you can now enter phone numbers, dates of birth, emergency contact details, notes and more.

We'd love to hear your feedback! Please feel free to contact us at help@becollective.com.

Some of our users have requested a 'country of birth' field as part of the application form builder, and we've delivered! This can be found on the 'commonly used fields' section of our form builder.

We'd love to hear from you if you have any feedback - please feel free to get in touch at help@becollective.com.

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!