Contained in our release of version 3.87 of iCarol we have loads of enhancements across different areas. Stay tuned for more, and save the date for our next Enhancement Review Webinar tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, September 27 at 2pm Eastern (registration opening soon) to learn about all of them.
For today, though, we wanted to share one big and exciting upgrade to our Messaging services — several items that enhance and improve the experience for your Live Chat visitors who are using mobile devices, as well as tools that allow you to further configure the overall branding and appearance of your Live Chat service on your website.
What’s New?
Chat widget
Traditionally, your iCarol Live Chat invited someone to chat with you using an image embedded into one of your web pages that, when clicked, took the visitor to an iCarol-hosted registration page and the visitor held a chat conversation in an entirely different window outside of your website.
The option to have that workflow remains, however now you can choose to have your chat appear in what we’ve come to recognize as a more typical and modern chat workflow, by offering an icon and option to start a chat from the bottom right of your website as pictured here:
Once opened, the chat widget presents your optional pre-registration questions to the visitor. When those are entered and submitted by the visitor, the chat comes through to your iCarol Messaging queue as it has in the past. Then once the conversation is accepted by your volunteer, staff member or counselor, they’ll handle the conversation within iCarol as they always have, meanwhile the chat visitor will continue to use the widget. Perhaps best of all, this widget is even more mobile friendly to better accommodate your website visitors using devices such as smartphones or tablets to visit your website and begin a chat with your organization.
Chat Widget Configuration
Along with our new widget option is the ability to configure the widget to blend in with your website, matching your color scheme and branding. This includes:
Uploading a logo
Enabling Safe Exit and assigning the exit website
Setting background colors
Selecting font types and colors
We hope you and your website visitors enjoy these new options. We think that your website visitors will enjoy the ease of use and intuitive style of the chat widget, along with how nicely and seamlessly it blends into your site!
The new settings can be found within the Messaging module of your iCarol system and is accessibly by Admins and others with the appropriate security permissions. Please visit the iCarol Help Center to look through our new knowledge base article about these settings and tips on how to use them. If you need additional assistance, you are always welcome to reach out to our Support Team during their normal hours of operation by opening a ticket, sending an email, or starting a chat with them from the Help Center.
iCarol offers multiple ways for you to retrieve the data you put into your system. You can use our Statistics area to access dozens of available-on-demand charts and graphs that present information that our clients most commonly need to meet their reporting requirements. You can also apply numerous filters to these reports, drilling directly in to uncover the desired information. This area is a sufficient source of information for most of your basic reporting needs.
But, we understand that others may want or need to run cross tabulations, pivot tables, or otherwise customize their reporting experience a bit further. Our users can extract their raw data files for further analysis in external programs like Microsoft Access or Excel, or simply export the data for offline storage. These data tables contain every last detail about activities like your shifts, volunteer and staff profiles, the records in your resource database, and contact records including the data from contact record text entry fields, among other activities.
Our philosophy is this: The data you put into iCarol is YOUR data— we are simply the stewards of it by keeping it stored and protected for you, and so of course you should have access to it as needed. Many of our users choose to go to the Admin Tools area of iCarol to export this data on a regular basis. However, this does require taking a few steps to initiate the download, then waiting for the export to complete before you can begin your analysis.
We’ve created an enhancement to the Admin Tools export area: Scheduled Exports. Using this feature, our users can schedule an automatic export to occur. This export can be delivered in your iCarol system just as the manual exports, or you can set a path to a S/FTP that you’ve provided for this data to be delivered to.
Each iCarol customer is allotted one free monthly scheduled export to use in their system.
This feature is also available as a subscription — you may add on several scheduled exports to your iCarol system for a nominal monthly cost. When you subscribe to this feature, you may choose from multiple time frames for the scheduled exports to occur: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually. If you find yourself needing to export information on a repeat basis throughout your reporting cycles, having these files exported automatically is a convenient and time-saving solution.
To add your free monthly scheduled export, log into iCarol and navigate to the Help area to read our detailed Help Articles with step-by-step instructions (simply search for “Scheduled Export”).
And, if you want to save even more time and have more exports automatically delivered on a recurring basis, open a case with the Support Team to get started!
In December of 2016, iCarol announced a suite of enhancements for Contact Forms and Messaging. These enhancements include the following benefits:
Greater Productivity
Faster completion of forms
Faster onboarding of new volunteers and staff
Quicker geographic suggestions
Widen your volunteer pool
Improved accessibility
User friendly interface
Improved Connection to Help Seekers
Faster delivery of chat and text messages
Better Documentation
Report form opens with chat or text conversation
Quicker, more accurate referrals
Improves outcomes
Streamlined, powerful resource search tools
For more information about the enhancements, please refer to the Help page in iCarol, by clicking Help in the left hand menu. There are two documents and a training webinar available in the “New” section of the Help page with information about the enhancements.
It is our goal to upgrade all clients to the new version of the Contact Form and Messaging by the end of 2017. Therefore, this upgrade is mandatory, and all clients will be upgraded. We began this work by sending out a survey to iCarol Admins which asked which quarter they would like to be upgraded in. We used the responses to this survey to begin scheduling clients for the upgrade. Those who did not respond to the survey have also been scheduled for the upgrade. The timing of the upgrade for each client is based on the features they are using in their Contact Forms. Not all features are available in the new version of the Contact Form yet, but these features will be added throughout the year.
iCarol staff will be in close communication with clients who are being upgraded, and will provide all the information needed to successfully complete the upgrade. Timely responses from clients throughout the upgrade process would be greatly appreciated so the upgrade can proceed in an efficient and effective manner. Clients will be informed of when the upgrade will occur, and if the timing does not work for them, they can request to be rescheduled for a later date. Please be aware, we will do our best to re-schedule clients to a time they request, but we cannot guarantee this. We must balance the requests with the availability of iCarol staff to complete the upgrade.
For those not using Messaging, and therefore only upgrading Contact Forms, and those using Messaging with Messaging portals (please note, Contact Forms not related to Messaging will also be upgraded at the same time), the upgrade process will proceed as follows:
1. During each month in 2017, iCarol will send an email to all clients scheduled to be upgraded the next month.
2. A case will be created by iCarol staff to track the upgrade process.
3. A member of the iCarol Support team will respond to the case and provide the following information:
a. Which week the client is scheduled for the upgrade
b. Where to find information about the enhancements
c. Which forms, if any, are ineligible for the upgrade, due to special features which may not be available in the new version of the Contact Form yet
d. Information about adding demo forms to the client system
4. A member of the iCarol Support team will add demo forms to the client system. These demo forms will be copies of the client’s Contact Forms, upgraded to the new version of the Contact Forms.
5. A member of the iCarol Support team will respond to the case when the demo forms are added. The demo forms will allow clients to preview and play with the new version of the Contact Forms prior to completing the upgrade. They can also be used to train staff and volunteers on the new version of the Contact Form.
6. A week prior to the upgrade week, a member of the iCarol Support Team will respond to the case with the exact date the upgrade will be completed.
7. On the day of the upgrade, the upgrade will be completed, and the demo forms will be deleted. A member of the iCarol Support team will respond to the case to indicate the upgrade is complete. If there were Contact Forms not eligible to be upgraded, iCarol staff will reach out later in the year to schedule the upgrade of these forms.
For those using Messaging without Messaging portals, the upgrade process will be a little different. Please note, Contact Forms not related to Messaging will also be upgraded as the same time. The upgrade process will proceed as follows:
1. During each month in 2017, iCarol will send an email to all clients scheduled to be upgraded the next month.
2. A case will be created by iCarol staff to track the upgrade process.
3. A member of the iCarol Support team will respond to the case and provide the following information:
a. Which week the client is scheduled for the upgrade
b. Where to find information about the enhancements
c. A detailed list of steps to upgrade to Messaging portals
d. Specific questions that the client will need to answer so the iCarol Support team member can begin setting up Messaging portals. Please note, the process cannot continue until these questions are answered, so it is very important that a timely response be sent.
4. Once the answers to the specific questions noted above are received, the iCarol Support team member will begin to set-up Messaging portals in the client system. Once completed, they will respond to the case with instructions on the next step in the process which the client will need to take, which is to assign Vols-Staff member to Portal Programs.
5. Client assigns Vols-Staff to Portal Programs, and responds to the case to let the iCarol Support team member know they have completed the task. Again, the process cannot proceed until the iCarol Support team member receives confirmation that this task is complete.
6. Once confirmation of the task outlined above has been received, the iCarol Support team member will complete the set-up of Messaging portals.
7. The iCarol Support team member will respond to the case and provide instructions on next steps, which include:
a. Setting up Shifts for Portal Programs
b. Updating website with new URL(s) for Messaging
c. Editing Standard Messages
This response will also include which week the upgrade process will be completed in, and information about adding demo forms to the client system.
8. A member of the iCarol Support team will add demo forms to the client system. These demo forms will be copies of the client’s Contact Forms, upgraded to the new version of the Contact Form.
9. A member of the iCarol Support team will respond to the case when the demo forms are added. The demo forms will allow clients to preview and play with the new version of the Contact Form prior to completing the upgrade. They can also be used to train staff and volunteers on the new version of the Contact Form. If there are Contact Forms that are ineligible to be upgraded at this time, these will be noted in this response.
10. A week prior to the upgrade week, a member of the iCarol Support Team will respond to the case with the exact date the upgrade will be completed.
11. On the day of the upgrade, the upgrade will be completed, and the demo forms will be deleted. A member of the iCarol Support team will respond to the case to indicate the upgrade is complete.
If there were Contact Forms not eligible to be upgraded, iCarol staff will reach out later in the year to schedule the upgrade of these forms. If there are any questions about the upgrade process, please feel free to submit a case to the iCarol Support Team via the online case management system, accessed by clicking Help in the left hand menu in your iCarol system.
In our most recent release we added an enhancement that many may find useful — you can now add your organization’s logo to the top of call reports when they are generated into PDFs.
Creating a PDF of a call report form is useful for a number of reasons. Forms that are made into PDFs can be easily saved, printed, or emailed if needed. You can also conduct an advanced search of your call reports in iCarol, and then generate the resulting forms into a single PDF. This can be useful if you’d like to print or save a number of forms together at one time.
In instances where you may be saving or printing and then sending these forms to a third party, having your organization’s logo on that PDF can be extremely helpful in easily identifying the source of the PDF and attributing ownership to your service. When your funders and collaborators receive the PDF they can easily identify it as being from you. This also adds a professional touch to your form and an element of branding.
This enhancement is available to all iCarol subscribers and can be set up by anyone with Admin permissions. Here are the steps you take to enable this enhancement:
To upload your logo:
Log into iCarol as an Admin
Click on “Admin Tools” from the left menu
From the Setup tab, click on “upload your agency’s logo and mission statement”
From the new page that opens, add your logo to the bottom section by following step 1 and step 2 to browse for and upload a logo
From there, you can decide individually which of your call report forms should have the logo appear when a PDF is made of that type of call report form, using the following steps:
Log into iCarol as an Admin, or an account with Call Report editing permissions
Click on “Calls” from the left menu
Click on “Manage Call Report Forms”
Click on “Edit this form” from under the Call Report version
Click on “Overall settings for this call report form” from the top of the page
Click on the setting “Put the Org’s logo at the top of each page on PDF’s of the call report” from under the “Other Features” section
Click “Save Settings”
Once these simple steps are complete, any PDFs generated from the selected call report form will include your logo in the upper left of the document.
