Hi!

We're almost coming up on a year of Service Square, so to keep costs low and allow us to keep running the basic, fundamental features of Service Square, we've examined and weighed the costs and benefits of our features. The features we've decided to remove to keep our costs low for the rest of the platform are as follows. Please note that we've only removed features with the lowest number of users relative to the rest of the platform.

We've added a new system to allow verified charities to have an automatic removal process featuring their CharID number. This system functions similarly to the add-an-opportunity system for verified charities and will do instant removals granted that the website is not too busy.

In addition, we've simplified the process on both ends for unverified charities looking to remove their opportunity. Instead of the previous loose email and manual verification process needed to remove the opportunity, they can now submit a simple form that we will review in determining whether the opportunity should be removed.

Charities that list an opportunity while unverified and then get verified will be able to delete their opportunity using the fully automated and instantaneous method. Your verification carries to all previously active content.

Use cases:

Hey everyone! Bryce here, Service Square's CTO. I'm super excited to announce that as of this post's release, we are and are ! This means that we've completed testing on all of our initial features (don't worry, we have plenty more features to come) and sorted out any bugs (not gonna lie; there were a lot!) Nothing has really changed due to this, but you will notice that the beta warnings listed at the top of the website are now all removed. In addition, the site should run more efficiently on your end.

We've also improved the appearance and functionality of some parts of our site.

Excited to announce another improvement for charities joining Service Square: our Volunteer Management System (VMS)!

Charities on our platform can now access our VMS. This is a database used to collect and organize information about your upcoming volunteers.

This is the last planned brand-new feature in our beta series. Except for additions caused by user feedback, smaller improvements to current structures, or bug fixes, we will not have any new developmental changes until we are out of beta. Our focus will be switching to marketing as we work to grow our presence in and around Williamsburg with new charities and regular users on the platform.

SSVMS is powered by Airtable.

I've been hard at work over the past week getting a brand new piece of Service Square built from the ground up! Introducing our newest program, Service Discovery!

Service Discovery allows you to find out about charities and causes you didn't know about before! Charities and volunteers can use the site to connect in all new ways!

There are plenty more updates to come to increase connections and build service! As with everything in the Service Square ecosystem, this is just the beginning. Once we begin gaining more sustainable numbers of users, improvements will be made to our existing services. For now, we plan to focus on building all new features.

Subscribe to your local Service Square's text message updates on your local page. We will then text customized messages about local Service Opportunities to this number. That's all, super simple!

Even better, Service Ping is set up to work for a variety of other features, such as contacting our team or getting certain questions answered automatically.

Note this feature only works for cities with a Service Square chapter set up. SMS and data rates may apply. Text STOP at any time to stop receiving messages. Automatic responses are powered by a language analysis AI model and may not be useful or correct at times. Powered by our partner Gloo.

-In addition, we wanted to let you know that we've made a couple of small modifications to spacing and coloring across the site to improve accessibility and usability.

We've added a field to Service Square Opportunities that allows charities to specify the opportunity type. Charities can now choose if their opportunity listings are for volunteers, attendees, or both.

We have added a new status page. This will keep users updated when parts of Service Square are dealing with maintenance or an outage. In addition, future scheduled maintenance will be listed on the site.

The page is accessible at status.servicesquare.org, but it is also linked at the bottom of every page across our site.

We have added compatibility for instant opportunity submission. This feature is in at this time, so there may be issues that exist.

This feature is unusable until our Charity Squared program is active.

We've made a few changes based on alpha user feedback:

We've modified our donation service on the site. The new service charges no processing fees and allows us to take donations without users leaving www.servicesquare.org.

(https://www.servicesquare.org/support-us)

We modified the look of the opportunities landing page to be more user-friendly and appealing.