Users & User Groups

Posted about 6 years ago by Chris Luebbe

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Chris Luebbe

Users should be able to easily search for and join user groups, or at least see which user groups they are members of from their (account/profile) drop down menu and profile page.
Team leaders should be able to add users (in their teams) to user groups.

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4 Comments

Nina Rogers posted about 6 years ago Admin

Chris, thanks for providing this additional information! I'll update the product suggest card I created to share with my team!

Best,

Nina

0 Votes

Chris Luebbe posted about 6 years ago

Hi, Nina,

Thanks for your responses! I think I didn't realize users could see their user groups because I'm not a member of any so I don't have the "My User Groups" item in my profile dropdown. The main reason behind my request about user groups is to increase the likelihood that volunteers will be in the appropriate user groups, especially in terms of having their volunteer hours counted towards the appropriate user groups for tracking and reporting purposes. For example, if a team is created by Bank of America and users are added to the team but are not also put in the Bank of America user group for the opportunity shift, then their volunteer hours will not be included in the Bank of America user group. So when we run quarterly and annual reports which include our top 10 groups (by total volunteer hours), there is a risk of the hours not including all of the actual hours logged by Bank of America volunteers. This is related to the issue I raised about being able to filter users by team, which would then allow easy importing of entire teams/groups of users into the appropriate user group (although, unless I am not understanding how the time-tracking system works, which is entirely possible, there would still need to be an additional step of making sure that the team members were all affiliated with the appropriate user group for the shift itself, i.e. even if someone were (already) a member of the Bank of America user group, they could be added to the Bank of America team but not include that user group affiliation in which case their hours would not count towards the Bank of America user group.)

0 Votes

Nina Rogers posted about 6 years ago Admin

One more thing that I just thought of: If we had a "Request to Join" button, the current person responsible for approving that request would be a site manager. That wouldn't always be appropriate, since a site manager might not know if someone belongs to a particular group. We don't currently have a "user group manager" type of designation that would meet this need, so that is another issue to consider. As I mentioned earlier, if you can give me more details on the value of this idea to your site and your community, that will help me persuade our development team to further consider everything that would be involved in this enhancement. Thanks!

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Nina Rogers posted about 6 years ago Admin

Hi, Chris,

Users can currently select "My User Groups" from their profile dropdown and view their user groups. I can bring up the idea of a "Request to Join" button for user groups, but I don't know if an automatic join feature would go through. I think the idea behind our current design is that some user groups consist only of specially qualified volunteers (such as tax preparers) or employees of a company, and there needs to be a way to prevent a volunteer from joining a group they shouldn't be in. There could be a similar issue with teams, where a team leader adds someone to a group (such as an employee group) they shouldn't technically be in. Having people in the wrong user groups could result in inaccurate records, impact reports, etc.

A "request to join" button might solve the problem of individual volunteers, though it could be a challenge in the case where a team leader wants to add a volunteer to a user group. I will bring this up with my team to see what ideas they have. Of course, if you have further ideas and/or could provide more details about why these features would be helpful, that will help me better articulate the argument for these as enhancements.

Thanks!

Nina

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