Sept 13 – Important Updates on Support and Portal

The following information was communicated via the existing Google Group and is documented here for redundancy.

Hi everyone,

With apologies for the delay in getting this information out to you. It was our intent to publish this information on Wednesday, however when we made the Support Ticket system and the Support Forum tools live we discovered that they weren’t permitting registration and it took us an extra couple of days to iron that out. We understandably didn’t want to release a support resource to you that no one could log into.

That said I wanted to take a minute to make everyone following this group aware of a few important updates, as well as bring you up to speed on improvements to how Special Olympics Ontario plans to support the Membership Portal moving forward. For the sake of clarity I’ll be dividing this message into sections.

A WORD OF THANKS

To begin I’d like to thank everyone for their dedication to Special Olympics Ontario and for your patience and cooperation with the transition to the new membership system.To those of you participating in this group, your passion for your work is clear, and your feedback has been important in guiding what we do. In particular I’d like to thank MaryAnn Cervin-Lawry for setting up this group and providing a forum for group support, your work has been immense and SOO greatly appreciates the time you’ve dedicated to supporting others.

All that said, given the constraints on both time and human resources, we’ve been developing resources to better assist us in supporting users across the province. We’ve heard from many who have indicated that a group forum is invaluable, however, we have also heard from many who have found the quantity of information at times overwhelming. With that in mind SOO is instituting the following systems to address these concerns.

NEW SUPPORT SITE

Over the summer Special Olympics Ontario has been working on launching our new Support Site (located at https://www1.specialolympicsontario.com/support). This site is complimentary to our newly launched Resource Library and creates a space for members to find help and receive support for all things Special Olympics. It has a feature set that will be able to be expanded over time, allowing for the creation of a flexible FAQ, Knowledgebase and Staff support system that should improve both responsiveness and the tracking of requests across the province.

As of today, we are asking that all questions for support or inquiry with respect to the Membership system be directed through the Support Site so that they can be ticketed, tracked and stored on that platform. This should result in answers being answered in a common fashion across the province.

MEMBERSHIP PORTAL SUPPORT

With the introduction of the support site, we have focused the launch on support for the Membership Portal. You will notice on the main page a link that will take you directly to Portal Support. For ease the direct link to Portal Support is: https://www1.specialolympicsontario.com/support/membership-portal/

This page contains a number of important resources that will address many of the questions and concerns raised in this group over the last while. From this page you will find:

PORTAL USER FORUMS – This set of forums will act as the Official Support Forum for the Membership Portal and will contain regular updates from staff including: System Status / Updates, General Questions and Answers, the ability to report Bugs, Feedback on Reporting, Requests and Suggestions, tips for new users and a weekly tip sheet for Community Administrators. You will continue to have the ability to follow and subscribe to threads that interest you, however individual users will have slightly finer grain control over what they choose to follow and not follow which should alleviate some of the concerns with respect to the crush of information. Moderation of the groups will fall to Special Olympics Ontario. The new system will allow us to ensure that commonly asked questions are identified and documented accordingly. The system will also allow us to transfer commonly asked questions to FAQ libraries and to the knowledgebase which will be readily searchable. IMPORTANT NOTE: Moving forward Special Olympics Ontario will no longer be monitoring or responding to questions through this Google Group.

PORTAL USER GUIDES – user documentation for the portal based on user role and function has been prepared by Farkhanda and her team. We have noted the concerns around the length of the documentation. With that in mind, while currently the longer forms of the documents are available, we are working to subdivide and reformat the documentation so as to make it easier to search and locate the specific functions or role related instructions you need. We expect to complete this work over the next two weeks, however updates to the User Guides will be happening in real time, so you will be able to follow these updates as they become available. This section also already includes instructions on how to manage sessions (which many have asked for).

PORTAL FAQS – Frequently Asked Questions are currently located in this section, which is entirely searchable from the Support System. We expect that over time the FAQ’s will expand, our ability to quickly move answers from the Forums, and from the Ticketing system into the FAQ’s is a significant benefit of the new system. We would invite you all to submit suggestions for items to be included, we expect that the organization of the FAQ’s will change as their number increases.

TRAINING / WEBINARS – Many of you have requested additional training for specific function which has at times been provided by staff both in the field and remotely from the Provincial Office. At present we have made available the general overview of the Portal as an introduction webinar. We expect over the next while to record additional training pieces to assist users with key functions (i.e. sessions). For those of you looking for step by step guidance please see my note below about the Program Leaders Portal.

ASK A QUESTION – If you require support or have a question that is either very specific to your community or may require more detailed conversation with staff, the Ask a Question feature allows you to create a support ticket for follow up by staff. This system allows us to better track questions as they come in, and more importantly allows a broader group of staff to leverage the knowledge resources created by many to quickly respond to answers in a common fashion across the province. Creating a support account will also allow you to track the progress of tickets.

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The above resources represent some of the primary support resources for the Portal. In addition we would like to draw your attention to two very important resources that will make day to day use of the portal significantly easier.

GET INVOLVED – This site is located at https://www1.specialolympicsontario.com/get-involved/ and should serve as the primary registration link for all new and returning athletes, coaches, volunteers, families, group home administrators. In effect it is the front facing site that will handle all Portal functions for the general user across the province. We would remind everyone to ensure that you ARE NOT directing individuals and new people to the naked portal site (portal.specialolympics.ca) but rather are sending them to the Ontario specific Get-Involved site. The site offers step by step instructions and guidance for every user (both existing members and new ones) on how to create their portal account, find programs, register for programs and manage their accounts. It will also have direct links to be able to submit requests to change portal email addresses or request the creation of Family or Group Home accounts.

PROGRAM LEADERS PORTAL – COMING SOON – This site is currently under construction and will be located at https://www1.specialolympicsontario.com/portal/ in a similar fashion to the Get Involved Site, the Program Leaders Portal will be a direct replacement for the naked national portal site for all Coaches, Team Managers, Athlete & Volunteer Coordinators, Community Coordinators and Data Administrators across the province. In a similar fashion to the Get Involved Site, it will guide every leadership user in a step by step fashion through the standard functions of the portal. It will act as both a dynamic and “living” user manual / webinar with instructions based on what your role is and what you are trying to do. In a similar fashion to the get involved site, instructions will appear on the left while the portal entry screen will appear on the right.

Both of these tools are responsive and should scale to different device sizes. We are currently in the process of completing and testing the Program Leaders Portal and we expect that it will launch within the next two weeks.

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PORTAL UPDATES

REPORTING – Many of you have already realized that Membership Report 13 has been updated. This is the first of several significant updates that are being brought online that address specific concerns brought forward both here and across the province. We believe that the new report addresses many of our concerns and we are pleased to see that it provides the ability to filter by Status as well as exposes several fields that are highly useful for communities and clubs. Please be aware that you now have the ability to filter by status but you will still be unable to filter for Suspended or Terminated members.

HEAD COACH / TEAM MANAGER APPROVALS – A key request of Special Olympics Ontario was the ability for Clubs to be able to approve their own enrollments (freeing Data Administrators of that responsibility). In effect this would mean that teams would (quite rightly) be able to manage their membership provided that the member was already a registered member of Special Olympics. We are pleased to announce that this update is now in final testing and should be rolling to the live environment at some point in the next couple of weeks.

TEAM LEVEL SESSION MANAGEMENT – Along with the above, teams will also have the ability to create the next round of sessions and manage the athletes within their clubs. This too will drastically decrease the workload on data administrators and allow teams to define their own sessions and set their seasons on a yearly basis. (please note that the instructions for teams will be rolled into the Program Leaders Portal so that functionally it will become a step by step process).

USER REGISTRATION / INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS – There will be a few important changes coming to the user registration experience in the portal over the next two updates. We expect these to be live by October. More information will be circulated and the guidance systems (Get Involved) will be adjusted accordingly. In effect what you can expect to see is significant streamlining of the onboarding process for the creation of new portal accounts, new registrations and the matching of existing members. This should drastically simplify getting people into the system.

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Thank you very much for bearing with this update, we know its long but we hope that its a positive one. IAs everyone transitions over to the Support Site to receive help and feedback on Portal related questions, we’d like to remind you all once again that Special Olympics Ontario staff (including Farkhanda) will no longer be regularly monitoring or responding to questions through this group and will be transferring to the new system.

UNSUBSCRIBE INSTRUCTIONS: I know MaryAnn has made these instructions available previously and they are also available as a link at the bottom of this message for those of you who receive these updates by email. But just in case, if you do not wish to receive messages from the Google Group you can unsubscribe by sending an email (it can be blank) to activesoc-portal-users-group-ontario+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com

Thank you again for your time and energy in supporting Special Olympics Ontario as we move to full adoption of the new Membership Portal.

Yours in Sport,

James Noronha
Program Director
Special Olympics Ontario