Following on from our announcement a few days ago and in preparation for our launch of the new services, I'd like to introduce some of the new features that can be accessed by all users together with showing you some of the benefits this might bring you.

What are Questions, Ideas and Articles

There are three ways to add content to our community site and the way you choose will denote what the response you might receive back.  All 3 ways will be visible to all users of the site together with ourselves so anything you add will be instantly available for all to see and respond to.

Questions can be submitted by any user within our community and is a way of users creating a self service environment for the software.  Asking a question about a particular problem within the Financial or Gift Aid Manager will be fully available for other users and ourselves to respond to.

Creating a central point for questions (and answers) greatly increases the efficiency of the support as the answers to frequently asked questions can be found quicker. 

When asking a question our system will search through all questions already submitted and bring up ones which may already hold your answer.

Users can also submit questions relating to wider issues affecting charities in general - these questions can be added to the Knowledge Base forums.

As our users are the best testers and offer the best experience over using the software then we think they are in the best position to request changes or improvements to our services or software.  Therefore, users can submit an Idea to the community and other users can vote on whether they like the proposal.  The more votes an idea gets the more likely we will look at implementing the idea.

If you have something of interest to share with the community then create an article in the relevant area.  Other users can vote on how useful they found the article.  Articles can be created to provide best practice to using our software or any other topic of interest within the charity sector e.g. fundraising, financial experience etc.

Using the Home Page Search

At the top of the home page is a large search box that can be used to find related content on the search criteria you enter.  It works very similar to how Google works.  Type in a word or phrase and click on search and content with those search terms will be displayed.

In the event there are no results for the search then we will give you the option of what you want to do.

Click on the relevant option to move forward with your request.

Related Topics

The worst kind of community support is where there are hundreds of the same question and all unanswered.  The topic suggester will hopefully reduce the number of duplicated questions and ideas by searching through all content while you are typing your request.

It's our subtle way of informing you that someone has already requested this question or idea so please refer to this for your answer or to vote.

How Voting works

All topics within our community support and knowledge base can have a vote against it.  The only difference being the context of the vote.

In a Question users can vote to say "they would like this question answered also", an Idea users can vote to say "I like this" and with Articles users are able to inform the community that this articles is "Helpful and of interest"

Users can cast votes by clicking the vote icon.