"Search" function for a nonprofit/organization

Posted almost 4 years ago by Thelma Condon

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Thelma Condon

Unfortunately, the current search method is not an efficient way for our volunteers to quickly navigate to a nonprofit. Using "The Community Meal" as an example, virtually every nonprofit has "Community" in its description. While other commonly used search engines will return an exact match with the " " (quotation marks) requirement, I honestly don't know if people even know to use that anymore. If you type in The Community Meal Barrington IL (no quotation marks) on Google, the nonprofit is the first hit, followed by other returns that include "community meal" but not necessarily "Barrington IL". In other words, the search algorithm prioritizes an exact match, followed by "or" searches. 

I get your team used the "or" search to enable volunteers to locate nonprofits based on their (the volunteers) interests. However, the "Needs" search returns the same results and would cover a volunteer who is looking to help based on interests. We're saying there doesn't seem to be any other way to locate the nonprofit quickly and intuitively without some manipulation, i.e., using quotation marks or scrolling, etc. 

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Eli Poulos

Eli Poulos posted over 3 years ago Admin

Hi Thelma, 


Thanks for your patience here! I talked about the development team about this proposed change, and I'm afraid we won't be able to change the behavior of the Agency/nonprofit search bar. This is because the search looks at the agency name, who we are, and what we do fields, not just the title. In order to make sure we return all results that might be relevant, we can't change it to exclude nonprofits that include the word 'community', but not the word 'meal' when searching for 'the community meal'. 


I wish I had better news here, but every now and then we run into a technical barrier that keeps us from implementing a product suggestion. 


I hope you have a great day, and please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you need anything!

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Thelma Condon posted almost 4 years ago

Yes, this is what I'm asking for -

"...make it return anything that has an exact match to the whole search text, followed by anything that is a partial match..."


Hope this happens! Thanks for looking into it.


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Eli Poulos

Eli Poulos posted almost 4 years ago Admin

Hi Thelma, thanks for reaching out! The agency search works by looking for the text you search in a few different places, including the agency title and the "who we are" and "What we do" fields If any of these fields contain the text from the search, they will be returned in the results. Just so I'm clear, your request is to make it return anything that has an exact match to the whole search text, followed by anything that is a partial match, correct? 


I can see how this would be useful in searching for phrases that contain very common words like "community". I will add this to our list of enhancements to review with my team!



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