Happy New Year! January 2020: 20 Latest Updates to CampusGroups
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Happy New Year! We hope you had a wonderful holiday!
As we gear up for the new semester, we're honored to invite you to join us for our first user conference this spring: CampusGroups Rendez-Vous, an exciting one-day event on Saturday, March 28th in Austin (coinciding with NASPA). CampusGroups administrators won't want to miss out on this fantastic meetup filled with discussions, hands-on learning and networking opportunities (not to mention food & fun in downtown Austin)! Learn more and register to join us.
Thanks for reading, and we wish you a very happy & prosperous new year!
The CampusGroups Team
Key Updates
1) Improved Completion Rule
We are now making it much easier to select a list of events that applies to a Completion Rule. Events can now be pulled up by a search and selected from there, making it much easier when you have hundreds (or thousands!) of past and future events.
2) Budgeting
Budget administrators are often students who are part of the finance committee. You will now be able to make them administrators of a particular budget without making them administrators of the platform. A new My Budgets menu will be displayed on their home page.
Learn more about Budgeting Tools on CampusGroups
3) Improvements to the Points System
Schools can now create their own Points strategy or choose to use the standard CampusGroups Points strategy. We also added the ability for administrators to manully give Points to users (with no need for Completion Rules).
Contact us for more information on Points
4) Workflow Updates
We recently added Notifications which will be sent when a workflow requires more information or is rejected. We also allow administrators to add a custom message for users to read when they receive the notification. We also added logic that resets the workflow only when needed, if users resubmit their information.
5) Revamped Forum
We revamped the entire Forum module to make it more user-friendly with a modern-looking design. Coming up in January 2020, we are going to be using the Forum for our Help Center and will also be sharing Release Notes, Features Requests and Roadmap on it.
The Forum is also a fantastic place for campuses to share guides, articles and discussion topics in their communities.
6) Event Templates
We have created a new dedicated space for event templates under your group management space and under Admin > Events, too. This will allow you to keep event templates and actual events separated.
7) Custom Fields
Custom fields are a very successful recent addition to CampusGroups. We are now adding them in more reports and API feeds (RSS). We recently added custom fields to RSS Users and RSS Groups. We also created new Custom Fields for Events and included them in the RSS Events feed. Finally, we added the ability to make these fields Read Only (which is useful when you would like to display data to students but don't want them to modify the value).
What else is new?
8) Now administrators and officers can upload Experiences for the students. Experiences help show what a student does outside the classroom (such as volunteering for a specific event) and are linked to the Co-Curricular Transcript.
9) A new API has been created to retrieve the same data you would obtain through the RSS Event Attendance API (except that it can target a specific user instead of a specific event). This is helpful when a school does not wish to store much data on their end.
10) You can now prevent anyone who is not a signed-in user from booking a meeting.
11) Great new capability: restrict access to RSVP for an event to only members who have earned a specific badge!
12) You can now allow someone without a CampusGroups account to verify an off-campus Service Hour that is not connected to a group. A verification email will be sent to the person who has to verify the service hours attended.
13) You can add custom fields to Budget Requests. These fields are now available on the report found at Admin > Money > Transactions.
14) We are now allowing event app managers to expire their app at a given date in the future.
15) Administrators can now send emails from their own account without being an officer of the group.
16) We made improvements to two event notification emails. More key details are now included when an event needs to be approved, and a custom message can be added when an event was denied to clarify the reason for denial.
17) Checklists now display a simple view event button to display only the events that apply to a Completion Rule in just one click.
18) Both students and administrators can now see the details of how a Badge was obtained.
19) For every survey that is created on the platform, officers or administrators can approve, deny or put the survey on hold. Now they have a way to filter the answers depending on this status (e.g., all the answers that have been approved, all denied, all on hold).
20) We improved the navigation between the Checklists view for students and the Checklist management area. This makes it much easier to go back and forth between the two views!
Interested in learning more about CampusGroups? Please do not hesitate to contact us for a demo to see how our solution can help your community connect, engage and succeed!
