TOPIC:

[EDIT: This functionality has now been released in its initial form. - Steve]

I am going to be implementing functionality to allow roles that members have already taken to be confirmed later. The purpose of this thread is to allow our users to weigh in on this. The basics of the way this will be implemented are as follows:

1. There will be some sort of confirmation button on the agenda sign-up screen for roles that a member has already taken. This button will only show for the roles that a member has already taken.

2. Role confirmations will have a global expiration setting associated with them--confirmations will have a limited "lifetime", because people also frequently have a limited memory of the commitments they have made. Thus, for a club that only meets once per month, the club may want to set the expiry duration to 14 days, to ensure that members confirm their meeting roles at least twice between meetings. Essentially, this provides added reinforcement and a memory aide to members to ensure that they actually complete the meeting roles that they signed up for.

3. The TM / VPE etc. will be able to send agenda emails just to unconfirmed roles, if desired. There will be a new recipient selection in the recipients drop-down.

4. When I implement the email response links functionality (in the near future), this confirmation feature will become even more useful.

Here are some sample screen snips of this functionality:

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Another possible way to implement the confirm button is to put small icon only buttons in the corner of the photo/name cell. This would save some vertical space on the sign up screen at the expense of potentially obscuring a corner of a photo. However, since most peoples faces are round or oval, the corners are usually pretty empty anyway.

This only exists in development code at the moment. There is plenty of room to discuss and beat this up.

1. I could imagine some sort of indication on the meeting sign-up sheet to indicate whether a role has been confirmed or not.
2. I could imagine some sort of report maybe being added for unconfirmed roles.
3. A new type of notification could be implemented for this perhaps.

What else?

Hi Steve, This sounds like an excellent feature! I'd be happy to help test and/or discuss functionality (I've done business analysis and testing, and I'm currently VPE for my club, so I use the agenda a lot!
Sue

THIS IS AWESOME!!
It will be SOOOOOOOO helpful for all clubs using FTH.

We'd love even a simple green checkmark by the names of folks who have confirmed...

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

I know this complicates it a bit as it would require saving unique keys, processing them at email send and the proving inbound access with those keys, but one-click confirmation functionality in the emails sent to users would highly increase the participation of a feature like this.

What I mean is: while you and I sit at our comptuers and do things on them all day (like logging into our club websites and doing things), many members are non-technical or spend ther days in the field away from computers. Yeah, the ones who write their names on the sign up sheet.

What if they could (perhaps on their smart phone) click the uniquely keyed confirmation link in the Agenda Email they receive weekly to confirm attendance without being asked to login when they do it?

Just a though.

Keep on keeping on sir!

-Nick Smith, ACB, ALB, CCNA, MCSE, MCITP, Aspiring PHP Programmer
Area Director, District 47, Division B, Area 23
Plantation Toastmasters
South Florida

Remember this term: "email response links"... The savvy reader will look back over some of my other posts and realize that I have been dropping occasional hints...

Be patient everyone... Like a fine wine, "I will serve no code before its time."

Ok, I have implemented an initial version of this functionality.

1. There is a new setting for Role Confirmation Expry in days, in the Agenda Global Settings:


2. In addition to the buttons you see for roles that you have signed up for, you also will get a visual indication of roles that other members have signed up for and confirmed... the first role below is a role that I have taken or been assigned but I have not yet confirmed it. The second role below is a role that someone else has taken and confirmed. (I do not see the indicator for other members roles if they have not confirmed them.) In both cases, if I hover my mouse over the role, it tells me when the role was last confirmed.

So, where I am going with this, then?
Some of that is dependent on the feedback I get on this. Here are my thoughts, though, now:

1. I could add functionality to allow sending agenda emails to Unconfirmed roles.

2. Maybe put a check mark or other indicator on the meeting sign up sheet for roles that have already been both filled and confirmed.

3. Currently, I am not "auto-confirming" roles that are "bulk-assigned" via the agenda editor. However, roles that a member takes on the sign-up screen are automatically also set to confirmed. The reason for this is the difference in "reliability" between someone else assigning you a role vs you taking it yourself.

4. You can click the confirm button more than once. It "resets the clock" if you are using the expirations feature.

5. A new type of notification could be implemented to send out notifications when someone confirms a role--I am still no the fence with this... maybe it could contribute to too many notifications?

Let me know what you think and what would be useful.

Not sure if this is related, but I noticed in the Agenda email that if a role is available it looks like a shortcode of some sort is sneaking through (screenshot is attached).

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-Nick Smith, ACB, ALB, CCNA, MCSE, MCITP, Aspiring PHP Programmer
Area Director, District 47, Division B, Area 23
Plantation Toastmasters plantation.toastmastersclubs.org/
South Florida

I've just noticed that if I confirm a "keyworded" role, such as Toastmaster, the confirmation doesn't propagate to the other instance(s).

I'm also seeing the "shortcode" that nic632 mentions.

Ok, I fixed the "short code" thing... it is a place holder for email response links... that is the next thing on my "docket".

The propagation issue is a bit more tricky... let me look into that a bit more.

Jane,

I think I have the propagation corrected now for the keyworded roles... For example, take a look a the Gen Eval role in:

brian.toastmastersclubs.org/agenda-00798877.html

Can you confirm that it works correctly now?

Yes, it's working correctly now. Thanks.

You can now send an agenda email to Unconfirmed Roles (look in the recipients drop-down)... I had to wait until i got this functionality up and running, but it is up, so the new recipient has now also been enabled.

This should allow you to start to get some benefit from this new feature.

Shouldn't this option be part of the VPE's followup responsibility to insure the member is committed to the role? And in return the VPE adds the "confirm" to the agenda?


Don

Donald wrote:

Shouldn't this option be part of the VPE's followup responsibility to insure the member is committed to the role? And in return the VPE adds the "confirm" to the agenda?

Don

Different clubs do this differently--what I am doing is providing a tool that the VPE can use. My view is that the only really reliable "confirm" is the one that the member provides. As I have just started with this feature, bear with me... there is more to come on this.

I do realize that my view of this may not match with others... I may be inclined to put a "Confirm" check box in the editor for each role.

Keep in mind that I consider Role Confirmations to be strictly a communication tool, and only useful for future meetings that have not yet occurred.

If someone actually took a role in a past meeting, whether or not they had confirmed the role is kind of a moot point. Therefore, while I may be inclined to put some sort of indication on the meeting sign-up sheet (future meetings) for people that have confirmed their roles, I really do not plan to do any kind of historical reports that show which roles were confirmed... I do not see the value in that. (maybe someone can convince me though)

From my perspective, the real value of this feature is to enable proper follow-up via email or in person for members that have not yet confirmed their meeting roles for future meetings.

This past/future distinction is something that comes up quite a bit when dealing with meeting information and how to present it.

I just logged in as Administrator today to do Membership Management, and spotted two new Support items to read - one being this one. As was stated in Steve's first posting in this thread:
" Role confirmations will have a global expiration setting associated with them--confirmations will have a limited "lifetime", because people also frequently have a limited memory of the commitments they have made. Thus, for a club that only meets once per month, the club may want to set the expiry duration to 14 days, to ensure that members confirm their meeting roles at least twice between meetings. Essentially, this provides added reinforcement and a memory aide to members to ensure that they actually complete the meeting roles that they signed up for."

My club meets 1st & 3rd Mondays, so some months there are 2 weeks between meeting; and in those with 5th Mondays there are 3 weeks. What is your recommended interval: 7 days?
And once we set an interval, will it remain at the value we set (7 days for example) or do we have to reset that interval value because FTH retains your default of 365 ?

And if they don't reconfirm,does the VPE need to email/telephone them to either release the role or reconfirm? Or can they be contacted through FTH with a generic message like "<Somebody> please confirm that you will be attending the <Same date> meeting and still planning to perform the <Some role>" where all the <Some> fields are borrowed from the dropdowns or signed up data.?

(We usually have oral sign-up at end of a meeting to fill roles for the next meeting (and maybe speaking roles at the one after that) - speakers are more likely to sign-up on-line as well at meetings; VPE then updates the next agenda within 2-7 days, and recontacts everyone by email (just 2 days before the agenda is to be "closed" to updates and printed on the day of the meeting asking members to fill in empty roles, asking speakers to fill in speech details or to confirm they aren't cancelling. So how to I explain this feature to the VPE as well as all members (ie, the reason for confirming weekly (if a 7 day interval is picked)?).

desplainestoastmasters wrote:

My club meets 1st & 3rd Mondays, so some months there are 2 weeks between meeting; and in those with 5th Mondays there are 3 weeks. What is your recommended interval: 7 days?

Yes, i would probably recommend 7 or 14 days, if you choose to use this expiration functionality. If you do not want the reinforcement from the expiration, then just set the expry to a large number. (like 999)

desplainestoastmasters wrote:

And once we set an interval, will it remain at the value we set (7 days for example) or do we have to reset that interval value because FTH retains your default of 365 ?

You should never have to reset the number of days for the expry. If you set 7 days, it should stay 7 days. What is changing is the number of days between the date that a role was confirmed (once confirmed) and today's date. Once that exceeds 7 days (for example), the role would show as not confirmed again. If the confirm button is clicked again, the stored date is reset to today's date and the cycle repeats. So, what is actually stored when a member clicks the button is a *date*, specifically the date that the button was clicked.

BTW, I did consider using # of meetings instead of # of days, but days is just simpler to implement... However, it could still be changed if enough people want # meetings instead of # days.

Regarding the rest of your post, keep in mind that this is early stage of this feature... more aspects of it will get fleshed out soon. Stay tuned!

Here is a glimpse of a revision to this feature I am currently working on:

Ok, I just noticed something.... the button should only show for sign-up roles.

Thank you for these role confirmation updates... this is totally fabulous and will make meeting preparation, communicationa nd confirmation so much easier for my clubs.

I appreciate you and this work...

HipHipHooray for STEVE THE TECHIE!!!

Ok, I have made a change so that role confirmations are only used for roles meeting the following criteria:

1. They are roles in future meetings.
2. They are roles marked as sign-up roles.
3. The are roles for which a member has been assigned or has taken the role.

Roles taken by members on the sign-up screen are also automatically marked as confirmed.

In addition, roles that are confirmed may have an expiration associated with them as determined by the role confirmation expry setting. Successively clicking the confirmation button on the sign-up screen resets the expiration (pushes it further out).

I have now also added a confirmation checkbox to the appropriate roles in the agenda editor dialog for those clubs that primarily assign roles. However, this checkbox works a little bit different given that the roles are assigned by someone other than the member:

A. Roles assigned in the agenda editor dialog are *not* also automatically confirmed. You have to assign the role, click the save button, then click the confirm checkbox after it appears after the save.

B. Since check boxes work differently than buttons, to "reset" the confirmation date in the agenda editor screen, you have to uncheck the checkbox, save, then check the checkbox again, and click save. (Yeah it is a bit more cumbersome than a button, but that is why a button is used on the sign-up screen.)

I am wondering if there should a master on/off setting for this role confirmation functionality... Maybe not every club wants to use it?

Any thoughts on this?

Roles taken by members on the sign-up screen are also automatically marked as confirmed.

If someone signs up for a role 5 weeks in advance I do not feel it should be auto confirmed. Signed up with in a week of meeting, yes auto confirm.

-Brian