When it comes time for a vote, you’ll know immediately how many “yea”s it needs to pass! In this particular example, 73 Brothers are present. To pass a vote, you’ll need 37 affirmative votes. If Associate Members are also allowed to vote on this issue, you’ll need 41 of the 81 total members present to pass the vote. Need a two-thirds majority or other ratio? Change the minimum percentage required to pass and the display will update immediately.

We hope this makes the secretary’s job easier during meetings, so everyone can finish sooner. Let us know what you think!

The most exciting part of this new feature is exporting mailing labels. Both members mailing addresses and parent mailing addresses can be exported. There are two format types for exporting mailing addresses: CSV and PDF. CSV files can be used with Microsoft Word or another word processor for a mail merge. PDF files are formatted to print on Avery 5160 or 8160 address labels. Sending out printed newsletters just got a whole lot easier!

Member contact information can be exported in two formats: CSV and vCard. CSV files are useful for importing contacts into Microsoft Outlook, GMail, or any other program that accepts CSV imports (which is most of them). Furthermore, you can open up a CSV file in Microsoft Excel, or another spreadsheet program, and have a local copy of your entire group’s directory. vCard format can be used for Apple’s OS X Address Book.

Exporting custom profile fields is helpful when you need a list of every members student id number, big brother, initiation number, or another piece of data that your group considers important. This data is exported to a CSV file that can be opened in Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet program.

Several groups asked for the capability to collect information specific to their group on users’ profiles. Some wanted to record big sisters, initiation scroll numbers, or just general hobbies and interests. Alumni asked if we could include information about their spouses and/or children on the site. Since this data varies from group to group, we wanted to allow organizations to pick what sorts of additional questions would be added.

Group administrators now have an additional link on the admin screen for the site. Click on “Custom Profile Questions” to edit the questions asked of your members. If you’ve used the Respondable feature you’ll be right at home here, as the question types and formatting options are the same.

Once you’ve added additional questions, direct your users to their profile page at https://profile.gozuus.com/me and tell them to click on the menu link for your group’s site. (Send out an e-mail to your GoZuus list!) They’ll now see the additional questions and can respond to them there.

As members fill in this information, it will begin to appear on their individual profile pages. All members of your group will be able to look up this additional information about other users. (Don’t worry: if a member belongs to multiple groups, members of those other groups can’t see profile information that is specific to your organization.)

We’ll be adding options for private questions, as well as allowing administrators to export this data very soon. If you have ideas or questions, or want to vote to bump either of these ideas up on the priority list, please let us know in the comments!

I started off by making a list of what we didn’t like:

1. Profile editor was under the shell of a group site
   When a member belongs to more than one site, their profile is actually shared. Having the editor under the shell of any one group site make this unclear.
2. Cumbersome to edit data
   Each line of information required a click to edit, a click to save, and two server requests. This could be much simpler.
3. No good place for group-specific profile info
   We’d like to allow each group to add their own additional profile questions, but there was no good place to add these questions.
4. Parent contact information was buried
   Many users didn’t know this existed, and therefore didn’t fill it out.
5. Illogical parent contact separation
   Parent e-mail addresses had their own separate page, but parent mailing addresses were supposed to be entered on your profile. Many users also only provided a home address, assuming we would know this was their parent’s address too.
6. Inconvenient e-mail update flow
   To prevent users from missing messages, we needed to ensure that you could never remove a verified primary e-mail address without providing a new one in its place.

Many of these were minor issues, but we knew we could do better. We started off with a brand new profile editing site at https://profile.gozuus.com. We gave it a different look, so that users would know it was external to their GoZuus group site. We made it faster to edit, cleanly separated parent contact information onto a new page, and provided a separate profile page for each group to which you belong. Here’s what it looks like now:

Watch for more enhancements to this feature and the user directory in coming months! As always, if you have suggestions please let us know!

This didn’t sound too difficult, so I decided to tackle the idea one afternoon last week. You’ll now see two new options: “anonymous and hidden” and “anonymous, but publish the answers”. Choosing either option will remove names from all responses, and the second choice will allow all members to see what others have said. Careful though – once you mark a respondable as anonymous, you cannot change it back!

While I was making updates, I also added an option to reassign the owner of a respondable. This brings the permissions system more in line with that of e-mail lists and statistics. By reassigning a respondable, you give access to a different member for viewing responses. You can even reassign a respondable to a member who would otherwise not have permission to create one.

Now that GoZuus is launched, we hope to make small improvements like this on a weekly basis. If you’ve got an idea for a quick change that would make your life easier, please let us know! Tweet your idea to @gozuus, or post it on our Facebook page!

First, select a target email list. This can be a list consisting of group members, alumni, or parents. Next, you’ll have the option to choose a news story to use as the basis for this newsletter. If you choose a news story, the content for this newsletter will be pulled from the news story, and you’ll have the option of using a picture from the news story as the picture for this newsletter. If you don’t choose a news story, you can upload your own photo and type your own content.

On the following page, select a photo and input some text. Generally 1-2 paragraphs is a good amount of content for a short newsletter. On this page, you can optionally choose additional news stories to include in your newsletter.

The hard part is over! Now, just review the newsletter and select one of the templates on the right hand side. The preview updates in real time to show you what your newsletter looks like with the different templates. After you’ve selected your favorite template, click send newsletter and you’re done!

The first thing you’ll notice is that we’re now including Attendance, Balance, and Work Hour tracking by default. Limitations in the Points system prevented it from being used for such a wide array of purposes, but now you can access everything from one standardized interface. We made several changes to make this possible.

Easier Updates
With the original system, entries could only be made by typing in values for each individual. If you needed to assign one work hour to each member in the chapter, the ’1′ key on your keyboard was bound to wear out quickly. The new assignment page provides options to streamline this data entry process.

First, you can choose to either update (add/subtract) or replace (overwrite) values. Then, select which members are visible and enter a default value for each new record.

If your data is already in a spreadsheet, updates are even faster. You can now upload a CSV file, or even paste data from Microsoft® Excel® into the site. GoZuus will automatically identify which columns contain a name or e-mail address, and will prompt you to confirm the data before saving. Header and summary rows are automatically ignored, and you can even export from QuickBooks® and paste directly into GoZuus!

Currency and Decimal Support
One frequent request was to provide an interface for listing account balances. We’ve added support for currency symbols and decimal points to make this possible. All records are now stored with decimal information, so you can also assign 1.5 hours for tasks.

It is worth mentioning that each statistic now has detailed permissions as well. You can choose which groups of members can assign updates as well as who can see reports for other members. For example, work hour reports might be visible to everyone in the group, while each member can only see their own account balance.

Attendance and Tags
Several groups expressed interest in tracking attendance on the site, and we’re pleased to now support that as well. The default Attendance statistic has tags for “Present”, “Excused” and “Unexcused” absences, and “Tardy” records. We’re planning to integrate excuses into the calendar shortly, but for now it should be plenty easy to call roll right from the assignment page on your GoZuus site.

Better Reports
Lastly, what good is all this data if you can’t generate meaningful reports? Administrators (or all members if permission is granted) can view reports by user, or by update or event. You can use this to print a list of all current account balances, or see the attendance records from any given meeting. Reports can be reset at the beginning of each semester if desired, or can track a running lifetime total.

We’re thrilled to be offering this new functionality, and would like to thank our beta groups for providing great feedback to help drive this development. We hope you enjoy these new features, and can’t want to see what other great uses you come up with for them!