Share and Promote

Thanks a ton for the great feedback Rick! We really appreciate these kinds of thoughtful comments. I’ll address each one of your notes individually.

1. RSS Feed that is created (and properly formatted) that would enable us to syndicate our volunteer opportunities into feeds by type (ongoing and one-time). Would be great if this included an image. This would allow us to create an RSS Syndicated Feed to MailChimp that could be used to let people know about how they can volunteer and then route them to the volunteer management features of your plugin.

This is a good idea and something that we’ll add to our list of potential features. Unfortunately, the list of features is fairly long at this point and this is the first time someone has brought this up, but we’ll keep it since I’d imagine other folks would be interested in this.

2. Facebook Share – Specifically – I would like to see that it is implemented per the Facebook Developer Standards using Facebook Open Graph Mark-Up – https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/ so that it is formatted properly and if re-shared by a user it keeps the right format.

Social sharing is not a feature we plan to add in the near future since there are a tremendous amount of plugins that already exist to handle this. We use AddThis for many of our clients, but there are a ton of options just like their service.

3. List Subscription Option – Ability for people to join a “I’d like to volunteer” list when no opportunities are available. We be even better if this list is integrated with MailChimp so that we can segment them at the time of sign-up. I do realize I could do this now through a specific mailchimp form but it would be great if it was built this way from the start so that I don’t have to hack and stitch a solution.

This one is similar to my last comment in that we probably wouldn’t implement a separate form to add individuals to new email lists since there are already so many options to do that within the WordPress plugin repository. With so many different email providers such as Constant Contact, Mad Mimi, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, etc., it would be extremely time consuming to build a separate integration for each. That said, we have talked about possibly integrating the volunteer sign up form directly with popular providers, if only because that wouldn’t be easy for a website administrator to do with another plugin.

4. Lastly – have you guys ever thought about asking your plugin users to join a volunteer community so that any opportunities that are available by any one user is displayed centrally in a community that you host. This would allow us to “cross promote” our opportunities.

This is a very intriguing idea and one I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about. Down the road, if our usage grows large enough, this could be a very helpful way to allow nonprofits to promote their opportunities outside of their own websites. One potential hurdle I see would is that many times volunteer opportunities are location-based, so we would have to figure out a way to allow users to filter the results based on where they’re located. The second hurdle I see is that the website administrators would likely have to agree to send us data from their site, which I could see being concerning for some. That said, neither of those are a deal breaker.

Thanks again for your notes. We really appreciate it. Enjoy your weekend!

Jonathan
Wired Impact