As you may have noticed, we’ve closed the consultant directory on the current Idealist site to new registrations, and are gradually removing consultant profiles as their memberships expire. We recognize the important role that consultants play in the nonprofit sector, and hope to better serve their specific needs with new tools in i3. We have some cool things planned for release at launch and will continue to develop new features to address the needs of consultants.
On i3, if you offer consulting services you’ll be able to include that information in your personal profile rather than paying for a membership as a company. You’ll be able to mark yourself as “looking for clients” and describe the services you’re offering. Organizations can then search for consultants and directly contact you if you offer the service they’re looking for.
For consultants who post jobs on behalf of organizations, we’ll encourage you to get your clients to register on the site (or register for them)! We hope to have as much transparency as possible about the members of our community and the opportunities they have available.
We know these solutions may not cover all the consultants out there, so we won’t stop brainstorming new features that we can roll out after the launch of i3. We hope to create an appropriate and productive space for all types of consultants on Idealist.
Consultants – let us know what you think.We need your input and ideas!
Here is a short demo from Joanna showing how event posting and RSVP will work on i3 – including setting a maximum capacity for guests, and what happens when the capacity is reached.
What do you think?
To watch in full screen, go here and click the on the button in the bottom right.
This post comes to you from Elise, manager of Idealist’s Community Support Team.
Over 400,000 Idealist users subscriber to email alerts, so we’re excited about the changes we’ve made to email alerts in i3, based on your requests and suggestions.
First of all, instead of setting up alerts through your Control Panel, you will be able to create them on the spot, while you’re searching. This means a couple things:
- Any fields that you can use to filter your search results will also apply in the results sent to you by email, from location and keywords to salary range and education requirements
- Alerts are a lot easier to create: all you have to do is click a button when you see search results you like, name the alert, and presto – new opportunities in your inbox!
The actual email messages will also make it easier to manage your alerts. With just a click, you’ll be able to:
- Run the search on the live site
- Cancel the alert
- Modify the alert criteria
Is there anything else you’d like to see change with our new and improved email alerts?
It’s been a while since we’ve given you a general progress report on i3 development. These are some things we’ve completed in the last several weeks:- Created a revised, more intuitive posting flow for jobs, volunteer opportunities and other types of listings – you can save drafts of listings before you publish them (you asked for it!) and choose how long you want a job to stay listed.
- Decided to limit the amount of time an unedited listing will remain on the site (six months for volunteer and internships, a year for programs and resources.)
- Added all sorts of fun features for events: you can invite people to your event, set a maximum capacity for event rsvp’s, and message all of your guests.
- Made it easier to become an administrator of your organization’s page.
- Nearly done with the new and improved interface for our fairs.
I’ll be presenting a session on our process for re-building Idealist at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, to be held April 8-10 in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference is for “nonprofit leaders, IT innovators, communications gurus, fundraising superstars amongst other nonprofit staff looking to learn the latest trends, practical how-tos, and IT solutions to optimize their organization’s technology to further their missions to create more social good in the world.”
During my workshop, I’ll share stories about re-building Idealist, and we’ll talk about how technology can drive change in other parts of nonprofit organizations as well. It should be fun!
Registration for the conference is open, so take a look. And, if you do attend, please come find me and say hello! I look like this (on a good day):
Attendees at last year's Youth Action Fair
If you’ve ever posted a volunteer opportunity on Idealist, you may have noticed that you can designate your opportunity as appropriate for a variety of age groups (seniors, kids, teens, adults), and seekers can filter their search results accordingly.
If a volunteer opportunity is marked as being for kids or teens we take the extra safety measure of reviewing the listing before it is published on the site.
We have noticed a couple of problems with this system. First, many posters select all age group options, seemingly without much thought to whether the opportunity is actually appropriate for that age group. Second, they often don’t notice the note telling them their listing may take longer to appear on the site, and become annoyed by the delay.
On i3 we’d like to find a solution that allows volunteer opportunities for kids and teens to be designated in a way that’s more useful for young people and their parents and teachers. For example, in order to have a listing tagged as being for kids or teens, posters might be required to provide a couple of sentences explaining what in particular makes it a good opportunity for a young person. We don’t just want to show opportunities that young people can participate in, but rather the ones that would be especially appropriate or appealing to a kid or teen.
So, what makes a good volunteer experience for a young person? Working alongside peers? Doing something hands-on? Something that can be done virtually or from home?
We’re especially interested in hearing from young people, parents and teachers. What do you look for in a kid or teen-specific volunteer opportunity?
It’s no secret that some of Idealist’s most loyal users are job seekers. When I meet someone who is looking for a nonprofit job and I tell them I work for Idealist, the usual response is something like, “I’m on there all day, every day!” I wanted to see what I could learn from the people who have such a “personal” relationship with the site, so I sat down with some job seekers to observe how they interact with Idealist, and other sites, as they conduct their job search.
One observation that has been pretty consistent among the participants is that when they open a job listing, the very first thing that they do is scroll all the way to the bottom to read the qualifications, required experience and salary information. Basically, they want to know if it’s even worth their time to keep reading. Job seekers seem to agree that they are more likely to decide to apply if they are confident that it is the right fit for them in terms of experience level and salary. However, the amount of information that employers offer in these areas varies quite a bit.
On i3 we’re planning on adding two new fields to the job posting. One is a drop down menu to select the “Professional Level” of the job:
We’ll also have two options for listing salary. You can display a salary range using this nifty tool with sliders, or you can enter a specific salary or wage (or neither, if you prefer not to include salary info):
Here are some questions for the HR Managers and job posters out there:
- Do you usually include a salary or salary range in your job listing? Why or why not?
- How much information do you usually provide about the experience level and qualifications you are looking for? Do you find that you get better qualified applicants when you include more information?
- Do you think these fields would encourage job posters to include more detailed information in their listings? Would you use them?
- Do you have suggestions for other helpful fields?
Remember the user testing we said we’d be conducting soon? You can now sign up here to participate as a volunteer website tester in our NYC office. Just fill out the quick survey, and I’ll get back to you soon to set up a testing session.
Also, we just purchased Morae, usability testing software which allows you to record video, audio and screencasts of testing sessions. Has anyone used Morae before? Any tips?
One of the things that people often tell us they wish they could do on Idealist is bookmark, or save a list of job or volunteer opportunities that they’re interested in. Naturally, this was one of the first things to go on the list when we were deciding what features to include in i3. Check out this quick preview.
To watch this in full screen, you can go here.
