Chris Walker

GiftWorks Volunteers (and GiftWorks 2006 Update 4) are available!

After many weeks of designing, programming and testing, GiftWorks Volunteers is now available. You can download it from our Web site (http://www.missionresearch.com/giftworks_volunteers.html). We're quite proud of this release - it has really solid basic volunteer management capabilities, and is an excellent proof-of-concept for GiftWorks add-ins in general.

GiftWorks 2006 Update 4 was released simultaneously with GiftWorks Volunteers, and includes primarily some small bug fixes and support for the add-in architecture. Be on the lookout for more add-ins coming soon.

What's next? GiftWorks 2007, including support for an unlimited number of donor and donation records (via SQL Server), an update to the Volunteers module (adding full scheduling and online volunteer management) and lots more. We'll be meeting and setting the full roadmap for the next 6 months over the next couple of weeks. We look forward to continuing to serve our customers with ever-improving solutions.

GiftWorks Volunteers now in limited Beta

GiftWorks Volunteers has been released to a small, select group of organizations as part of our final testing cycle prior to release. The early results have been very good, and we look forward to a continued flow of helpful feedback.

If your organization is interested in previewing GiftWorks Volunteers, please send an email to gvbeta@missionresearch.com for consideration.

Giving Back

Today, my family and I leave for a week-long trip to rural western North Carolina to do some work in Appalachia: helping to improve the living conditions for some of the poor in that area. We particularly like this trip because it is inter-generational, meaning that not only are there a wide range of people and experiences that go along, but also that my daugthers (ages 6 and 3) get to come, too. While we are out building roofs and painting at shelters, the children go and take donated books to the local library, sing songs at an area retirement community and learn about service. Although it is not a typical, restful vacation, in many ways I return more recharged than I would from a more relaxing time and place.

Everybody have a great week!

Updates from far and wide

Since my last post, I've been back to New York City and to Seattle, as well as some time at home in Lancaster.

Work on GiftWorks Volunteers continues, and we'll be wrapping up in the next few days. Whoever said "the devil's in the details" was dead-on as far as software development is concerned. We're working through some final, but crucial, design issues and will have the software ready for public consumption soon.

Concurrent with GiftWorks Volunteers is GiftWorks 2006 Update 4, which will include some fixes as well as the infrastructure to support addins (of which Volunteers will be the first of many).

My travels took me to the National Conference on Volunteering and Service (Seattle) and then back to New York for the Association of Fundraising Professionals' Fundraising Day, as well as a meeting with the United Way of New York City. All of the events were superb, and I met bunches of people doing amazing things to improve our world. I'm excited to be a part of Mission Research and to be contributing, in whatever small way, to helping some of those people achieve their missions.

Nonprofit Boot Camp

I spent all day Saturday in New York City at the Craigslist Foundation's Nonprofit Boot Camp. This is an event designed to bring social entrepreneurs and nonprofits in startup mode together for a day for education, networking and general rallying of forces.

It was incredible to see (and feel) the amount of energy and passion everyone brought and shared throughout the day. The scheduled "Networking" time at the end of the day was so loud (from all the small talk) that you could barely hear the music the DJ was playing. One thing you could hear, though, was the Samba School for Social Justice, who marched through with a Carnaval-style parade a couple of times during the day and even got some of the boot campers to join in.

Overall, it was great to see all of the people and feel all of the positive energy they are pumping into their fledgling nonprofits. I was proud of Mission Research's sponsorship of the event, and look forward to the left coast version in San Francisco in August. More information is available at: http://craigslistfoundation.org/index.php?page=Bayarea.

Volunteer Center II: Small Decisions are a Big Deal

As we're getting down to brass tacks on the Volunteer Management add-in for GiftWorks, we're discussing several important features in great detail. Although the features in question are a relatively small piece of the whole project, they are pivotal to the ways in which the software will ultimately look, feel and work. When planning details of a software project, it's always amazing how seemingly little things can take up so much time and energy. Here at Mission Research, we strive hard to get things right, so we're taking the time to get feedback from customers and to get numerous perspectives from different people internally. We continue to be excited about this new product and look forward to bringing it out in the next several weeks.

Volunteer Center Sneak Peek

The Mission Research dev team is hard at work on what will be the first (of many) add-ins for GiftWorks: Volunteer Center. Volunteer Center will give GiftWorks the ability to track volunteers and jobs and log and track the performance and hours of those volunteers in those jobs - it's volunteer management.

The Volunteer Center will allow you to add a volunteer profile to donors in your database, creating volunteers whose availability, skills and job history you can track. Additionally, you can create and track jobs (which can be grouped by projects). Volunteer Center will have a "matchup" facility to find available volunteers who are good fits for open jobs and vice versa. You will be able to run smartlists and reports including volunteer information, send thank you letters to volunteers for recent service and more.

Other features include screening volunteers, reviewing performance when jobs are completed, logging of (and reporting on) volunteer hours, and tracking of volunteer and job managers. Volunteer Center will let you track and manage volunteers and jobs in the same easy ways you already know how to track donors and donations in GiftWorks.

We plan on having a beta version available near the end of May and Volunteer Center will be released in mid- to late-June.

Below are some screenshots to give you an idea of how VC will look and work. Click on each image for a larger view.

This is a view of a volunteer profile. One can easily see screening, skills, current and past job information for this volunteer.

Here is the screen for editing a Job. You can assign a manager for the job, choose the skills required (or desired) for those filling the job, how many volunteers are needed for the job, and set the schedule for the job. Once all this information is set, it's easy to use the job match to find existing volunteers who meet the requirements for this job.

This screen shows a simple job match, coming from the volunteer side (what are jobs that this volunteer might fit?). Volunteer Center will let you look for jobs for volunteers or volunteers for jobs, and allows you to control the stringency of the matching, so that you can find people who are partial matches (based on skill or availability) or, if you need exact matches, you can do that too.

There's a lot more to Volunteer Center, but we wanted to give you a preview from the trenches. We're excited to get our first add-in out there and to start meeting more of the needs of more of our customers. We look forward to your usage and feedback.

The Product Group is Jumpin'

Ah, Spring...when thoughts turn to a whole bunch of new (and improved) products. Here at MR, we've got many irons in the fire, and it's an exciting time.

Volunteer Center is well under way and will be available next month. Update 4 (a free update) is a pre-requisite for Volunteer Center (as well as for any theoretical future add-ins) and will also include some minor fixes. The SQL Server version of GiftWorks (code name: Gabriel) is still in closed beta, but we're looking at expanding that out over the summer. Our initial Online Services for GiftWorks are getting some testing, both internal and external. And, last but not least, planning for the next major release of GiftWorks (probably in January, 2007) is getting underway.

Your feedback and input is a key component in our decisions about what and how we build our products, so keep it coming!

The Crossroads

We're at several crossroads here at Mission Research. The company's growing, sales are growing, user base is growing, product's growing...all good things, but all bringing new challenges as they move to new levels.

As we grow the company, we're getting to the point where some of the ol' nudge, wink, secret handshake shorthand ways of doing things aren't adequate, and certainly aren't easy to communicate to new hires, so we're working hard at (re-)organizing to grow smarter.

As sales and the user base grow, our support needs and the ways in which we keep track of and contact our customers are growing and changing. Again, a lot of the things that worked with 50 or 100 customers need to be formalized and standardized as we approach 2,000. A nice problem to have, to be sure, but full of challenges.

Finally, we're developing the first major add-on for GiftWorks (Volunteer Center), a significant update, online services to be used in conjunction with GiftWorks, GiftWorks 2007 (major release), and a few other projects (and products) about which more information will be available soon. Huge undertakings all, and I'm going to be overseeing Product Management which will be pretty monstrous. With more and more customers and more and more products (and projects), we need oversight to make sure everything is moving in the right direction and at the right rate (and arriving at its destination on time). I'm looking forward to the challenge and to helping Mission Research move to the next level.

There's training afoot!

When we created GiftWorks, one of the problems we saw with the existing software in the space was that it was very difficult to use, not at all intuitive, and to make matters worse, the manufacturers were charging their customers hundreds, or even thousands of dollars for training on how to use the monstrosities. Especially given the high turnover rates among NPO staff (average stay: 18 months), these added costs really mushroom the price of those companies' products.

GiftWorks was designed to be easy to learn and use, with intuitive paths through common tasks. One of the core tenets was that it should not require training.

Why, then, is it that Mission Research is now offering classes on how to use GiftWorks?

Well, GiftWorks is easy-to-use software, and you can figure out most of what you need to do just by poking around the software and clicking on the obvious buttons and links and trying things out. What we have found, though, is that it is important to help our customers understand how it is we envisioned people using the many features of GiftWorks. So, starting today, there are a variety of classes available on how to use some of the more complex features of GiftWorks (like Importing and QuickBooks Integratino) and on best practices for using GiftWorks to improve how your organization contacts and stays in contact with your donors.

More information on the classes that are available and a sign-up form are available on our web site HERE.