In a previous article we outlined exactly how product development works for us a social enterprise, discussing where ideas come from and how they come to fruition.

Most of these ideas are driven by users themselves, often via our Feature Request form. We love how invested our users are in the software and we rely on these great ideas and valuable feedback to keep pushing Upshot forwards. As you can imagine, as a social enterprise, balancing our limited funds and resources, against all the great suggestions that come our way is a real challenge! Our roadmap has to meet the needs of the majority of our users. That’s why we love it when the Upshot community gets really hands on with developing new features. Here are some of the ways that happens: 

• Sharing feedback, ideas and user stories via our Support channels, the feature request form, our user surveys and direct conversations with Upshot team members.
• Giving time and resources to test new features before they are published across the live system. With thanks to Sport for Confidence, Player’s Coalition, FC Groningen and OSCAR for being part of our working group looking at developing the register page.
• Either partly or fully funding new features for the benefit of all Upshot users.   

We have always committed to making all new features available to all users. However, sometimes a particular new tool is of real importance to a specific organisation or group of users. By contributing to or even fully covering the costs of the development, we can prioritise a new idea by investing into dedicated developer time.  

In the last 12 months there have been some great examples of Upshot community members collaborating on features with us, to the benefit of all system users. Thanks so much to these amazing partners for making these solutions happen: 

Survey Branding & Tags 

Funded by The Eredivisie there have been two developments with surveys; one to help surveys feel more personal and branded for participants of the Upshot organisation sending them and the second to help organise and streamline an organisation's survey library, saving valuable time.  

Branding:  

• The colour block can now be customised to the organisation's preferred colour, rather than the Upshot green.
• Users can add a custom image to the top of the survey when creating, for instance referencing an event the survey relates to. 

Tags: 

• Survey tags can now be used on new and existing surveys to help organise an organisations survey library. Examples could include categorising surveys into particular groups relevant to a project or team or indicating current or archived surveys. 

Limit users’ ability to export reports 

The Warren of Hull needed to limit what users on their account could export in relation to attendee information. With a desire to keep the same account structure the existing enhanced privacy features available did not meet their use case and so they funded a development that allows organisations to limit the information individual users can export. This can be amended for any existing users by following the steps here. 

Irish Mapping Data 

Part-funded by The Movember Foundation and Our Generation, this development allowed Irish postcode, and associated, Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) data to be added to the system.

Allowing organisations based in Ireland, or working cross border with the British Isles, to benefit from reporting information around ‘Electoral Divisions’ as well as the ability to utilise the Map Report for their attendees and locations. 

Restrict access to the Attendee sign-up form waiting list 

A key requirement for Flintshire Adult Community Learning was that only certain users should be able to manage the Attendee sign-up form waiting list, when new submissions are received. Thanks to their support it is now possible for organisations to restrict user access to responses from specific Attendee sign-up forms. More on this can be found here.

What next?   

The process continues! We already have a couple more of these collaborative projects in the pipeline and you’ll see them live on your account very soon.  

To keep up to date, don’t forget to click on What’s New on the system and look out for Product Corner in our quarterly newsletter which goes to users. If you would like to subscribe to the newsletter, click HERE.  

For the coming year we have several ideas that organisations can choose to play a role in bringing to life.   

• Check out the new public roadmap which shows the developments we are targeting for this coming year.
• Submit a feature request if there’s a future development you would like to see
• Or alternatively contact us at support@upshot.org.uk for an initial conversation.