GIVEGAB TO DONATE 5% OF REVENUES IN SUPPORT OF EARTH DAY AND NATIONAL VOLUNTEER WEEK

Social network for volunteers offering special introductory rate of $399/month for Premium services

ITHACA, NY – GiveGab, the social network for volunteers, announces that it will donate 5% of revenues to The Arbor Day Foundation for the first month of Premium services from those organizations who pre-register now through National Volunteer Week, April 21-27, 2013.

Established in 1974, National Volunteer Week focuses national attention on the impact and power of volunteerism and service as an integral aspect of our civic leadership. Earth Day, observed on April 22, now has more than 1 billion people each year taking action to protect the planet, making it the largest civic observance in the world.

Currently, Basic services offered on www.GiveGab.com are free to all subscribers and include creating a school, nonprofit or business profile, creating a personal volunteer profile, creating and promoting volunteer events, logging hours, compiling a volunteer resume and reporting of aggregate volunteer hours.

Premium services, scheduled to launch in the summer of 2013, will include:

• Enhanced reporting features, including the ability to “slice and dice” data
• Reports specifically designed for President’s Honor Roll, grant applications, etc.
• Upgraded dashboard for reporting & analytics
• Enhanced Impact page
• Premium level customer service & support

Charlie Mulligan, co-founder and CEO of GiveGab states, “Earth Day is widely credited for starting the environmental movement.  We at GiveGab support environmental and other worthwhile causes through the website, enabling volunteers to find volunteer opportunities more easily.”

To pre-register for Premium services and take advantage of a special $399/month introductory rate, please visit info.givegab.com/earth-day. There is no obligation to pre-register, and no credit card is required.   Upgrade to Premium services in summer, 2013 and 5% of the first month’s fee will be donated to The Arbor Day Foundation for their Gift Tree program.    

Contact

Linda Hall, Director of Marketing
Phone: 616-450-3181
linda@givegab.com

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About GiveGab

GiveGab, the social network for volunteers, is dedicated to helping volunteers and nonprofit organizations interact in local communities in order to fulfill its mission: More, happy volunteers.  GiveGab’s goal is to create a fun yet effective online environment that encourages real-world volunteer hours, donations, and social interactions. GiveGab helps volunteers find volunteer opportunities in their local communities, log volunteer hours, and create a volunteer resume. Volunteer managers at nonprofits, colleges/universities, businesses and clubs can create and manage events, programs, and opportunities, recruit volunteers, track volunteer hours and report their success.  For more information, visit www.givegab.com.

(Source: info.givegab.com)

GiveGab Funding Reaches $1.5 Million

ITHACA, N.Y., March 27, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — GiveGab, the social network for volunteers, announces it has closed on $1.5 million of Series A funding. The Ithaca-based volunteer management software provider will use the funding to expand the website’s capabilities and business development efforts, including the launch of premium offerings and enhanced volunteer management reporting. The financing was led by Cayuga Venture Fund of Ithaca, NY (www.cvf.biz), and also included New York City-based Great Oaks Venture Capital (www.greatoaksvc.com), Rand Capital SBIC of Buffalo, NY (www.randcapital.com) and Excell Partners of Rochester, NY (www.excellny.com). 

Charlie Mulligan, co-founder and CEO of GiveGab states, “Volunteering makes people happy. We are excited that Cayuga Venture Fund, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Rand Capital and Excell Partners have decided to work with us and provide the resources and connections we need to accomplish our mission: More, happy volunteers.”

Volunteering enriches people’s lives as well as the communities in which they live. GiveGab identified that matching volunteers with opportunities, and then administratively tracking their volunteer hours was very difficult. The software was developed to make the process of volunteering fun and easy, while helping to make the lives of volunteer managers easier. GiveGab is utilized by schools, nonprofits, and businesses that encourage people to volunteer in their communities.

“GiveGab has finally figured out how to meet the volunteer tracking, recruitment and profiling needs of both volunteer managers and their volunteers in a creative and fun social media networking platform that already has yielded an impressive following among colleges and universities and non-profit organizations,” said Jennifer Tegan, Partner at Cayuga Venture Fund. “We are excited to see this company grow and reach its full potential with this financing.”

Ben Lin, Managing Partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital states, “What LinkedIn has done for an individual’s professional career, GiveGab can do for their volunteering efforts. We are excited to be part of GiveGab’s success.”

Contact

For further information, please contact:
Linda Hall, Director of Marketing
Phone: 616-450-3181
Email

About GiveGab

GiveGab, the social network for volunteers, is dedicated to helping volunteers and nonprofit organizations interact in local communities. GiveGab’s goal is to create a fun yet effective online environment that encourages real-world volunteer hours, donations, and social interactions. GiveGab helps volunteers find volunteer opportunities in their local community, log volunteer hours, and create a volunteer resume. Volunteer managers at nonprofits, colleges/universities, businesses and clubs can use it to create and manage events, programs, and opportunities, recruit volunteers, track volunteer hours and report their success. For more information, visitwww.givegab.com.

This press release was issued through eReleases® Press Release Distribution. For more information, visit http://www.ereleases.com.

(Source: Yahoo!)

New Feature! Promote an Organization and its Volunteer Opportunities!

Want to give members of your organization more volunteer opportunities? Want to showcase great organizations in your local community? You can with our new Promotion feature!

Promote an Organization From Your Own Organization’s Page

The first way you can promote another organization is to go to your organization’s About, Volunteer, or Admin page. Click on the “Promote Organization” or “Add Organization” button. 

Type the organization’s name in the text field, and choose from the suggested results. When you have the one you want click on “Promote”, and you are done!

Promote an Organization From Their Page

There is another way to promote an organization. Let’s say you are browsing the site and come across an exciting new organization that you want to show to your members? You can quickly add it by clicking the “Promote” button.

Check the boxes of the organizations and groups where you want to promote this organization, then click “Promote”. Simple!

Once an organization is promoted, its volunteer opportunities will appear on the promoting organization’s Volunteer page.

The promoted organization will also be showcased on the promoter’s About page.

This is a function for administrators of organizations to perform, but it will greatly affect members of their organization.

For example, an administrator at a university could promote some nonprofits in their local community. That would let all of the university’s student volunteers see those nonprofit’s volunteer opportunities, so they would have to spend less time searching.

For clarification, we are using the term “organization” to refer to nonprofits, universities, high schools, businesses, and clubs. Promoting is a way to expose your members to more great organizations and volunteer opportunities!

(Source: givegab.com)

The iOS Bug Has Been Slain!

We had an issue where users on iOS devices, iPads, iPods, and iPhones, were not able to log into GiveGab. That has been remedied. Sorry if it caused you any inconvenience.

In addition to this fix, nonprofit recommendations now load asynchronously in your dashboard, this should provide a snappier experience for new users. Some other minor bugs were squashed too.

Oh, and we threw in the ability for volunteer managers to log hours for their volunteers! 

The Gab - A New Way for Volunteers to Communicate

We’ve been talking about giving volunteers and volunteer managers a better way to communicate on GiveGab for some time now. We got around to it in Release 41, and it’s called “The Gab”. Volunteers who are used to other social networks will find it intuitive.

It is displayed right in the center of the dashboard when you log in, you really can’t miss it. Our newsfeed has been moved from this spot, and that now can be found in the upper right of the dashboard. Basically, The Gab is an aggregate feed of the comments and pictures posted on GiveGab. You will see posts that others make on their own walls, and posts that are made to the walls of nonprofits and communities you belong to. 

Create a post by clicking in the text area in the center of the dashboard. Type what you’d like and click “post”. It’s that simple. You can choose different sharing options to control who can see you post. You can also choose to upload a photo and comment on it.

Once your post has been made. Others can join in the discussion by commenting on it. Comments are displayed in a thread, so that the discussion can be viewed chronologically.

We have improved the way we display photos in The Gab. They are much larger than they were in the newsfeed. Other users can comment on these pics in the same way they would a standard comment. Take photos of your volunteer experiences and share them here for all to see.

Our development team has done a lot of tweaking to get The Gab to perform better. Comments are loaded asynchronously, this makes the page load faster and the comments get displayed with a soothing waterfall effect. You’ll have to log in and check it out to get the full effect.

This is our first go at this feature. We will be adding to it in each successive release. Let us know what you’d like to see by leaving feedback here. Thanks!

Release 41 - Just in time for the Holidays!

We’ve got an early Christmas present for our users! Release 41 is GiveGab’s most extensive site improvement so far. Here are just a few of the features in this release.

The Gab

We have drastically improved our wall/newsfeed, it is now called “The Gab”. You can read more about it in a separate post.

Dashboard Changes

In order to make room for The Gab, we made some changes to the dashboard. The left navigation is now anchored underneath the header, so that it follows you as you scroll down to read older posts. Also, the right column has gone on a diet to provide more room to display conversations in the center column.

Increased Privacy Options

Users now have more control over their privacy settings. They can control who can see their Wall, who can see their Profile, and who sees their posts in The Gab. They can choose to let everyone have access, or they can set it to be completely private. They can also choose to only share with friends, or people within their “shared” network. “Shared” is a term we use to refer to the network made up of a user’s friends, plus the nonprofits and communities that they are a member of. These settings can be accessed from the “Edit Profile” link in the drop down menu in the right of the header.

Log Hours for Managed Volunteers

Now administrators of communities can log volunteer hours for their members. Hours can be logged for active members GiveGab, and also for volunteers that have not joined GiveGab, but have been added as contacts in the member management panel. This is a bulk process, so hours can be logged to multiple volunteers at once. An email notification is sent out to notify volunteers that they have hours added to their profiles on GiveGab. We will be adding this management feature to nonprofit pages in our next release.

Add Events to Your Calendars

Easily add an event to your iCal, Google, Live, or Yahoo! calendars. Never forget about a volunteer opportunity you signed up for.

Email Reminder to Log Hours

Keeping track of hours is important to nonprofit organizations. So we have added a reminder email that goes out to volunteers the day after an event. Log your volunteer hours!

Other Improvements and Fixes

-Prep work has been done so that we can give communities the ability to create and manage events and programs. This is coming in a future release.

-Inbox loading speed has been increased through some performance tweaking and pagination.

-Volunteers are notified by email and inbox message when they have been added to a nonprofit, community, or group.

-University and college community admins can change the roles of their members, e.g., current student can be changed to alumni. 

-Members of university and college communities can change their role without having to unjoin/rejoin.

-Flash message display time has been reduced to 5 seconds. This is enough time to read the message, but not long enough to be annoying.

-We have added a new newsfeed story. You will now see who your friends have become friends with. Hopefully it will make you aware that another potential friend has joined the site.

-Numerous performance improvements around The Gab.

A total of 77 user stories and bugs are wrapped up in this release. Awesome work Team!

Release 40 - Blasting out of the 30s!!!

Seems like not long ago we were blogging about good old Release 39. Wait, it wasn’t that long ago. That’s because our development team has been cranking out code to create our latest release. Here’s a few of the things that have been added to GiveGab.

Better Dashboard Shortcuts

The Dashboard received some further modifications. Last release we added shortcuts to the organizations you belong to. This week we improved upon those shortcuts by adding buttons for different actions. These buttons are mainly for admins right now, but we will be adding more later. What kind of steps would you like to take from your Dashboard? Let us know here - https://getsatisfaction.com/iyouvo/

Inbox Improvements

We made some long needed changes to the inbox that make managing your messages much better. The inbox now has filter so you can see your sent and deleted messages. We have also added checkboxes to each message, so that users can select a bunch of messages and perform an action on them, like bulk deletion.

Add and Remove Volunteers

Admins now have more control over who is part of their community, group or nonprofit. The can add a single user to their organization and manage them. This user can be a GiveGab member, or even someone who hasn’t joined the site yet. In the latter case, an invite is sent out to this person asking them to join. In the former case, smart user detection is used to search the database of members in order to suggest people they might want to add to their organization. Admins also have the ability to remove a member from their organization.

Sign-In

A more inviting sign-up page has been added.

Reminder to Add Causes

In order to improve our nonprofit recommendations, we added a prompt to remind volunteer managers to add causes to their nonprofits.

Location Based Sorting

Nonprofit directory can be sorted by location, instead of alphabetically. This was a request from volunteers who are looking for a place to help out that’s within walking or biking distance.

Proud Partners

Other Improvements and Fixes:

-Added some copy to the member management panel in order to clarify things. Also added some color to the privacy drop-down, so users can see what mode it is set to more quickly.

-We omitted articles like “the” in areas where we alphabetically sort items.

-Importing a member to a group also adds that member to that groups parent community.

-We now notify you if one of your non-GiveGab contacts joins the site.

-Minor SEO improvements, including a better description of the site on our landing page.

-Unsubscribe links are in our emails! 

A total of 56 stories and bugs were included in this release. Way to go Devs!