Dear HarmonySite administrator,
As you know, whenever we have a free moment, we're always hard at work improving HarmonySite. Many of our improvements come from your requests, whilst others are dreamt up by a team of monkeys we keep in the back room.
Here's what we have for you in the latest round...
1. Announcements/Reminders. There's a new system for special announcements or reminders for your members. Such announcements appear at the top of the main Members page whenever any member logs in. They can also be emailed out to all members with one click. They can be optionally set to "expire", which means they automatically disappear from the Members page after a certain date. Otherwise you can manually hide or delete them.
2. Positions can be associated with "external" email addresses. As you probably already know, each "position" (president, secretary, webmaster, etc) can optionally have its own email address (e.g. president@mygroup.com). Up until now, all such email addresses had to be connected to your group's domain name (e.g. mygroup.com). Over the years we've seen that many of the groups signing up for a HarmonySite website already have a primary email address - with an external provider, such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc - that they use for group enquiries (e.g. mygroupname@gmail.com). Even though it's easy and more professional to replace this with an email address that is connected to your own domain name, such as info@mygroup.com, we understand that many groups don't want to abandon their old email address. So we've made it possible to associate that email address with a HarmonySite "position". That way it can be displayed throughout the public-facing part of your HarmonySite without any changes or inconvenience. Simply add or update any "position" and you'll see the new option.
3. Branded emails are now mobile-friendly. As you are no doubt aware by now, it's possible to send out "branded" emails from your website - emails that have your logo and colour scheme. These emails are now mobile-friendly, meaning that they will look nicer when viewed on a mobile phone.
4. Sponsors can now have "Sponsorship Levels". You may not be aware, but it's possible to keep the details of your group's sponsors in your "member" database ("member" database is not a very good description of this database - it can be used to hold members, suppliers, supporters, donors, venues - just about anything - and of course, sponsors). When adding or updating a member record, you'll find a "Sponsor" tab, where you can store the details of the business providing the sponsorship. When updating the corresponding "membership" record, you don't mark them as a "member", but instead mark them as a "sponsor". They will then appear on your site's "Our Sponsors" page. This functionality has been in place for years. What's new is that you can now specify their "sponsorship level" (e.g. "Gold Sponsor", "Partner", etc). This is entirely optional. Look for the field called "Sponsorship level" when updating a membership record. Just under the list of options, there's a link to add/update/delete said options.
5. When using the "New member wizard" to add a new member to the system, the final step in the process now contains a handy new button: "Create another new member".
6. There's a new field for each song in the Song Library: "Ignore assessments submitted before [DATE]". This is for the "Assessment/Qualification/Performance-Readiness" system. Perhaps many of your members have qualified on a certain song, but you want them all to RE-qualify, regardless of their existing status on that song. So you would then put today's date into that new field for the song, and the system would ignore any assessments for that song for any member, meaning that - as of today - NO-ONE has qualified on that song.
7. There's a new field for each song in the Song Library: "Lyricist" (similar to "Arranger" and "Composer").
All of these are available and active in your HarmonySite right now. Enjoy!
As usual, please let the other administrators (and possibly members) of your group know.
Cheers,
Mark Virtue
HarmonySite
Australia
+61 2 8005 4277 (Australian number)
In North America, call: 1-415-651-7009 (San Francisco number)
Skype name: mvirtue
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