Alumni Spaces

Product updates from Alumni Spaces

[alumnispaces]

3.48 - Turkey Edition

There’s a lot in this update - everything from some UI updates to some new features for clients. All before we enjoyed Thanksgiving with our families and thankful for such great clients.

Fix for the embedded map so it loads to show the entire United States by default

Fixes for Clemson's theme

Better spacing around social media icons

Improved header font sizes

Better grid alignment for People lists on the About page

Better layout and behavior for MAA sites with little-to-no content - AKA a skinny Maidstone (Additional changes for this will be included in December)

Better admin-side management for Alumni.Fund custom fields - we’re making it easier to delete fields

Added OU Forms and better Typeform functionality for Oklahoma

Added labelling for social share buttons on content

We have transitioned everything from using “Activities” to “Events” to make it easier to understand. Using “Activities” instead of “Events” has been confusing for users.

Updated our Eventbrite integration to add support and messaging for their business changes that require everyone to select a plan

MAA link color fixes - hyperlinks remain black instead of gold, making it easier to read

Fixed the homepage slider behavior to hide arrows and stop cycling if there is only one post featured. This affects Wainscott, Sutton and Maidstone themes.

Better width layout for featured images on Maidstone

Added public Activity submission form for UNC

Fixed full size image display behavior for galleries in the Maidstone theme

Fixed UNC slider title display behavior for really long words on mobile

Updated all custom domain DNS records to use standardized ALIAS records rather than CNAMEs

Added shortcodes for mass-publishing of content with dynamic group names and more

[alumnispaces]

3.47 - Tiger Edition

This release included a few enhancements and housekeeping items to improve display and functionality.

MAA Default Images for News Updates and Activities

If a user doesn’t upload an image for a News Updates or an Activity, a default Mizzou image will show up instead of the previously generic images.

Ability to customize join button link and text

This was specifically made for MURA, but we made it more global so we can now customize the URL and label for the membership buttons on a per-group basis for both FSU and MAA. This is available for Administrators only and can be customized in the Config tab under Site Settings.

Better assignment of Intercom users based on Staging vs Production

This is internal for Alumni Spaces so we have fewer test users in our user management.

Sutton theme improvements 

Majorly improved mobile navigation and mobile support for logo

Equal height of page descriptions on the homepage

Some changes to Maidstone for specific groups

Adapted all-caps in some circumstances

Better support for image galleries

[alumnispaces]

3.46 Patch 3

This release contains a number of things to support the FSUAA network launch and a few fixes around the product:

Alumni.Fund

We fixed how Alumni.Fund reports were showing up on content admin pages because of an error with how SVG images were displayed. We also fixed how the scroll position appears when donating a custom amount on Alumni.Fund.

Wainscott Theme Updates

Full width footer bar

Added support for uploading a custom logo

Fixed the homepage so the Slider lines up with the left and right sides of the Pages section

Fixed pagination numbers of the /events and /news sections so Pagination only shows up if there are actually additional pages to go to.

Fixed the "see all" buttons for the Events and News sections so they line up correctly

Aspen Theme Updates

Aspen can now display four required Pages on the homepage. (Shout-out to the Charlotte FSU group!)

Network Login Screen

We changed the network login screen to hide the email/password unless someone clicks on the "work in the network office?" link at the bottom of the login module.

FSU Default Images

FSU now has some beautiful images in the Media Library from the alumni association. We mean beautiful.

MAA Activity Submission Form

The form has been added to Maidstone and is all ready for activities to be added!

OU Logos

We fixed the issue the OU logos were having in Firefox.

[alumnispaces]

3.45 - Medici Edition

We’ve been busy in August and early September making a lot of updates!

This update includes items for the University of Oklahoma Alumni Association memberships and new themes for the Mizzou Alumni Association and the Florida State University Alumni Association networks.

Activity Updates

When you're publishing an event, the Venue selector now uses Google Venues instead of Foursquare. The list looks better, results are more predictable and it means that Event location maps will now show the Venue and its information rather than just an address and pin.

Design updates

We added a hover state to MAA sub-navigation links, improved the link color legibility for MAA sites and fixed the oval profile images on the Maidstone About pages.

Alumni.Fund Updates

Tons of Alumni.Fund updates to get OUAA up and running with memberships!

-We defined network membership levels and prices, with the ability to restrict or empower groups to override/customize them

-Networks now have the ability to add custom text/HTML to Alumni.Fund receipts

-You can now turn Alumni.Fund receipts off altogether if your system will be handling receipting

-Unlimited BCCs - if you want to receive a copy of each Alumni.Fund receipt sent, we can BCC as many email addresses as you like

-Define deposit accounts for the network

-The Alumni.Fund Vault API now supports data for all aspects of memberships and is fully documented

-We re-engineered Alumni.Fund to use secure hosted fields from Braintree (Benefits include improved security, ensured PCI compliance into 2018 and faster, more consistent processing)

-Added the ability to add custom fields to the Alumni.Fund flow - Site Editors can now create their own text, checkbox or dropdown fields in the "Custom Fields" tab of the Alumni.Fund metabox

New Themes

We’ve launched two new themes!

Maidstone was designed for the Mizzou Alumni Association.

Wainscott was designed for the Florida State University Alumni Association.

[alumnispaces]

New Support Site!

We launched a brand new Support Site to help walk you through any questions you might have about using your alumni group website. It’s complete with step-by-step instructions, gifs and videos!

Always feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any questions or ideas on how we can make your website better and life easier! 

[alumnispaces]

Symphony Internal and External Group Names

We’re all about organization and anything we can do to help simplify a good workflow, which is why we’re excited to introduce Internal Group Names for our Symphony clients and alumni association staff members.

We’re introducing Internal Group Names so you can have a different internal naming convention separate from what your groups identify with externally.

The Internal Name field is only visible to network users, local Editors and Authors will never see it.  

Internal names will show up in Reporting lists and on the Group Detail page in Reporting.

The "Group Name" field (External Group Name) will still be what shows up on the public facing website and for all of the labels that local users will see.

So go ahead, get wild and create some awesome internal names! 

[alumnispaces]

Symphony Notifications and Slack Integration

We always say that one of the greatest benefits of Alumni Spaces to alumni association staff is our commitment to “slay the email monster” by centralizing communication from local leaders. Our Symphony product does a great job of automating a lot of tasks, but sometimes a question or activity needs some extra attention.

Those flagged for staff member attention items have always appeared on the Symphony Dashboard/front page, but now we’re making it easier to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in your network. We’re putting you in control with options for what to be notified about and then combining all your notifications into “digest” style emails, so you get one useful summary as frequently as you like.

You can choose to get a notification about:

All Published Content

Published Activities

Notes added to Activities

An Activity is Flagged for Review

You can even decide if you would like to hear about everything in your network or just the groups “assigned” to you, then tell us if you want to get a unified summary of these events hourly, daily or weekly.

And because everyone deserves modern solutions to their problems, we’ve also added the ability to receive these notifications in your favorite Slack channel!

This is just for network-level Symphony users for right now, but we’ll add similar notifications for group leaders soon. To find your notification options, just log into your site and go to Users > Your Profile:

[alumnispaces]

3.35 Release - Hammerstein

This release has a number of customizations for our new Oklahoma network and some great updates for everyone else too.

Alumni.Fund links - When you enable Alumni.Fund for a post, we'll automatically add a button to the content so visitors can easily get to your payment page. (You can always change this in the Alumni.Fund settings for your post.)

Cleaner Settings - We've removed the Integrations tabs in Site Settings. For most people, it's been retired for awhile so you probably won't notice. Everything that used to live here has been moved to Widgets and the Eventbrite publisher.

New maps - We've majorly upgraded the display of location maps on Events. Now, if there is a Google location for your event's venue, people can easily get directions or send the directions to their phone.

Lots of theme improvements - Better responsiveness for Columbia, post thumbnails on Columbia, new widget locations on all themes and a lot of responsiveness improvements.

Better comparisons for reporting - Now when viewing Activity data, you can chose to view the increase/decrease compared to either the previous period or the previous year.

Easier registration - Registration of new sites is a bit clearer with better domain validation.

[alumnispaces]

Boomer Sooner!

We’re excited to welcome the University of Oklahoma Alumni Association to the Alumni Spaces family!

“One of the cornerstones of alumni relations is ensuring members of the Sooner family across the country and world have access to the latest information, university highlights and news, and support opportunities available. We feel our partnership with Alumni Spaces will allow the OU Alumni Association to provide a platform to our local clubs and affinity groups that will do just that. One of the biggest challenges in ensuring alumni feel connected to their alma mater cutting through the noise of information traffic in today’s connected environment, and after vetting numerous companies from across the country, it became readily apparent Alumni Spaces was best equipped to assist us in doing so. In the end, the decision to use the Alumni Spaces platform was not only the best decision for our association, but for our alumni as well,” said Bill Moakley, director of communications for the University of Oklahoma Alumni Association. 

Trivia fact: The president of the University of Oklahoma is a former U.S. Senator AND Governor. Pretty impressive!

You can read the full press release here.

[alumnispaces]

3.1- Celcius Edition

Just as the temperature drops for Autumn, we’ve released the latest batch of updates. It’s a mix of improvements and fixes for everyone - odds n’ ends and upgrades for you.

Everyone

Add tables to any content! Many groups post football/basketball schedules or score results throughout the season - this is a lot easier now that you can create tables anywhere. Just click the new Table button in the editor.

Delete post confirmation - any time you delete content, you’ll see a popup asking you to confirm. I know, popups are very 2001, but most people never delete content and we’ve had a lot of cases where it was done accidentally. We’re hoping this popup is a force for good in the world.

We’ve fixed a number of use cases around social login and registration - you can now register a site using capital letters (AwEsOmE!), invite new editors to sites using social login and if you ever need help, our team can now see what social network you used to register. 

Symphony 

Activity detail pages will now show a map of where an activity is taking place.

Anywhere you see a a number indicating activities for your review, you can now click it to see the drilldown list of those activities. Or any time you’re looking at a drilldown report, you can now say “only show me things marked for my review.”

Activities reports now have a significant number of new columns available to make visible. Just click the Gear icon above any activities list and checkout the “Columns Visibility” menu to toggle more data.

[alumnispaces]

Alumni Spaces 3.0 Release - Oppenheimer Edition

We're really excited to release our biggest update ever - v3.0 brings a new site theme, default images, improved layouts/styles, new integrations and major leaps in data portability.

Aspen Theme: The internet of 2016 is bigger, bolder and more visual than ever before and Aspen brings a beautiful minimal design to alumni groups. Accented with school colors, featuring a large homepage content slider and expanded featured images, Aspen is our most advanced theme while appearing the most straightforward. Its balance between flexible capabilities and straightforward presentation make it a beautiful modern layout for any alumni group.

New images and image galleries: Clicking images within your content now has a snazzy new effect - the image is pulled out and shown up close on the screen with its caption below. The presentation is cleaner, faster and more consistent across all themes. Thanks to @terrymun for the awesome Medium-inspired Fluidbox.js.

More obvious widgets: Widgets let you customize various parts of your site by moving around your group's description, important links or contact info while also adding custom text or HTML anywhere. But default content wasn't always obvious and it felt a little mysterious why default widgets would popup even if you swore that you'd removed them. So, we've rebuilt the way we handle widgets, making it all much more obvious. Now, you'll see default widgets when editing your site's appearance and removing them will actual remove them.

New Social Icons Widget: Speaking of widgets, we've added a new one for displaying social links. Add this new widget anywhere and you'll see a grid of icons for all your connected social profiles.

YouTube Channels: Instead of linking to a YouTube user, YouTube icons now link to a channel URL.

Slicker Social Broadcaster: The Social Broadcaster has been updated with bigger, better buttons that work faster than ever. And we've added LinkedIn publishing so you can now share your content to your LinkedIn profile or group with just one click.

Typeform Integration: Typeform is the greatest way to make forms for your site. We've tested dozens of tools and we've never found anything as powerful or beautiful as Typeform. Now, if your group uses Typeform, you can add your forms into your content directly from the Alumni Spaces content editor. If you haven't used Typeform, give it a try - they have a free tier but use this link and if you upgrade to a paid plan, you'll get 10% off for life!

Default images: Aspen is the first theme that has thumbnail images for Pages like About, News and Events, so we've added the ability to specify a featured image on those pages. Since every theme looks better with great images, we've also added default News and Activity images - if you do not add a featured image for a piece of content, we scan the content for any images you've inserted. If there aren't any, we use a high-quality default image for that post to make sure every bit of content has an image to go with it. Also note that the recommended size for featured images is now >1200px wide.

Symphony Updates:

CSV, XLSX and PDF Export: Symphony Reporting tables can now be exported to CSV or Excel files as well as PDF. The output PDF isn't as sexy as we'd like it to be but we have big plans for it soon.

Column Selection: Now you can pick and choose what columns you want to see in the tables throughout Symphony. This is a first step toward making reports more flexible and customized for your needs. In an upcoming release, we'll be adding more columns to chose from and a way to save your default preferences.

Improved Activity Type Chart: the Activity Type bar chart on the Overview page is now faster, easier to read/understand and features PNG export. Bonus: if you need to customize this graph for anything, you can also click to edit it in Plot.ly - an intuitive yet powerful cloud editor.

New network landing page: With the recent release of Alumni Spaces Satellite, we've redesigned the landing page for Symphony networks to prominently feature the interactive group map and login links.

[alumnispaces]

Introducing Alumni Spaces Satellite.

Alumni Spaces believes strongly in the power of local groups. Online communities are an incredibly important facet of any modern organization and the tools offered by digital networks have revolutionized every business, team and industry. When it comes to alumni organizations, online engagement serves to drive offline action.

Local groups of alumni coming together for networking events, bbqs, baseball games, fundraisers or volunteer events are what drive alumni to meet and support each other.  As these bonds become stronger, a cycle is built back to their alma mater - strong local groups result in alumni connecting each other to employment, friends and resources and make not only  alumni, but also their alma mater more successful.

That is a lot of ethos to simply reinforce the notion that geography and local groups continue to form the core of alumni engagement. And now, we’re making it a little easier for our Symphony clients to showcase their local groups and provide an easier way for alumni everywhere to find and engage with their local groups.

Alumni Spaces Satellite.

Many alumni organizations have maps of their groups. We noticed that they tend to be a manually created custom Google Map, ill-designed for especially large or small (mobile) screens or seldom-updated. Some try to showcase their global networks and show a view of the entire world only to have the cluster in their home state get lost in one small corner and make the map as a whole feel sparse. And many others feature links to dead sites, old contact info or leave off social media entirely.

We leveraged the benefits of Symphony to create a scalable and dynamic modern solution for creating global alumni network maps. Since all Symphony groups have an easy-to-use website with social links, a group description and a location, we’ve eliminated all the manual effort needed. When a group updates any contact or social information on their site, it is reflected on your map in real-time.

While the main focus of our map is on the United States, the reach of your network is showcased with continental maps, keeping the global reach at hand without losing perspective closer to home.

Best of all, Alumni Spaces Satellite is responsive and designed to fit into any website. By simply adding one line of code to your website, the map is added and ready to go. Its design fits into a browser of any size and when viewed on a phone, it shifts into a smaller version with a focus on finding groups nearest you.

Special thanks on this project to Zak Lampert, the technical lead on building out this great new tool that we’re excited to roll out to the 500,000+ alumni we serve daily.

[alumnispaces]

Introducing Alumni.Fund Receipts

We launched Alumni.Fund, the world's most modern payment platform for alumni, to our clients earlier this year. We’ve recently added our most requested feature - automatic receipt emails. Now, whenever a payment is processed, a beautiful, responsive and informative receipt using natural language is sent immediately.

Our default receipt is a clean design focused on clear transaction information in plain English that also facilitates easy social sharing to spread help the word about your cause. Our Symphony clients have the ability to customize these templates using school colors, logos, promotional text or social sharing options. We help our clients have an easy, enjoyable experience and continue the donor cycle rather than just plain notifications or having to fill out long, complicated forms to make a gift.

We drew inspiration for this receipt format from a variety of sources that deliver powerful, beautiful receipts. This is just a small part of what Alumni.Fund can deliver for any organization - if your group is processing payments of any kind and needs a more modern approach, send us a note and we’ll get you started. Or, sign up for our email newsletter to follow our progress as we grow the Alumni.Fund platform.

[alumnispaces]

2.6.8 Release - Alumni.Fund Reports, Google Login and More

Everyone’s site are now running the shiniest, newest version of Alumni Spaces!  

Google Login - We’ve supported Facebook and LinkedIn registration/login for a little over a year and after a few requests, we’ve decided to also support Google accounts.

New Emails - Transactional emails like new user invites, password resets and contact form notifications are now using SendGrid and will arrive faster, look better and be easier for us to improve in the future.

Alumni.Fund Reports - We have big plans for Alumni.Fund (thanks to your feedback!) and the ways you’ll be able to see all the data about how, when and from whom you are raising money. The first report (others are in development) shows a funds graph to the admin screen for each News Update or Activity with Alumni.Fund enabled showing how much and when you’ve raised money, like this one:

[alumnispaces]

The Triumphant Return of Eventbrite

We’re launching an update today that fixes our Eventbrite integration and a handful of other things that needed mending:

Eventbrite- rebuilt from the ground up, we now use Eventbrite’s oAuth API so you just need to log into Eventbrite and you’re on your way.  If your group isn’t using Eventbrite yet, it’s the easiest way to start selling tickets and managing RSVPs- now all it takes is one click from your Alumni Spaces admin.

Columbia Theme Improvements: Images are going to look better everywhere on sites using the Columbia theme, especially on the homepage. Images that used to take up half the screen have now been held in place, the typography on the site has been updated to improve legibility and colors have been tidied up a bit.

Springfield Theme Logos: Logos in the header of sites using the Springfield theme will start looking a lot better.

Alumni.Fund Payment Options: Originally, groups using Alumni.Fund to collect donations had to provide their checking info but now you have a choice - we can pay you via ACH transfer to your checking account, or you can chose to be paid via PayPal.

[alumnispaces]

Congrats to the Yale Club of New Hampshire!

As a fun way to announce Alumni.Fund, our new payments processing platform, we deemed December “31 Days of Alumni Fun(d).” We said we’d match up to $500 and waive processing fees for the group that raised the most money on Alumni.Fund and the Yale Club of New Hampshire were the lucky winners. Go Bulldogs!

Thanks to all who participated and if you missed our fun alumni volunteer themed gifs, you can still check them out.

[alumnispaces]

Eventbrite Integration Outage

We’re having some integration issues with Eventbrite’s v3 API which are causing some groups to see an error when syncing their events. We’re working on a fix and are going to disable the feature while we work on it. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and will let you know when it’s back up.

-Andrew