We are very excited to introduce the first of several releases that are focused on improving our transportation module!
We launched the new transportation module in Spring 2015, with the goal of providing transportation options capable and flexible enough to handle the needs of any camp, no matter how demanding. The concepts we put in place are powerful - and we will continue to build a rich suite of functionality around those ideas. We captured a tremendous amount of user feedback and have organized the resulting improvements into three major topics:
- Improvements to bus routing
- Improved reporting
- Customizing the transportation form
Today’s release addresses the first topic - improvements to bus routing. With our three route types (Central location, Defined stops and Door-to-door), we believe CampSite is able to handle bus routing for almost any scenario.
Here are the major improvements in today’s release that are now available:
- Transportation Dashboard refresh - We've redesigned the Transportation Dashboard to support upcoming improvements, including bus linking (detailed below).
- Bus and vehicle profile layout refresh - We've cleaned up and improved the layout for bus and vehicle profile pages, and standardized it across all bus and vehicle types.
- Link arriving and departing buses - You can now link an arriving bus to its departing counterpart (and vice-versa). Creating this link will allow for improved reporting capability as we roll out those improvements in our next several releases. You can create these links from the bus profile (via the 'Manage bus...' dialog). Once buses are linked, they will appear together on the Transportation Dashboard bus list below. We encourage users to create those bus links now for their existing buses.
- Door-to-door routing improvements - We've made significant improvements to the way door-to-door routes can be built and managed in CampSite. In the previous version of door-to-door routing, stops were set in the order that was calculated to be the quickest route by our Google Maps integration. This will still be the default behavior, but stops can now be manually reordered and saved, either on the Vehicle Wizard during the route creation process, or after the fact, from the Vehicle Profile. Stops for bus counselors can now be set to any position in the route. You can also clone a vehicle to the opposite direction - either reversing the stop order, or keeping it the same.
- Door-to-door Vehicle Wizard - The tool for selecting campers and bus counselors on the Door-to-door Vehicle Wizard has been improved, to allow for the selection or deselection of individual stops (the drawing tool remains available for selecting many campers at once).
- Enrollment option as transportation charge / discount criteria - We've added the ability to use the enrollment option selected as a new type of criteria for transportation charges and discounts (these can be set up from the relevant session group's management page).
We’re very excited for camps to start using this new functionality, and look forward to your feedback. (The next two rounds of improvements, addressing reporting and the transportation form, will be discussed in detail here when they are released).
Events and actions
One of our goals at CampSite is to help you operate your camp as a business more effectively. You may be familiar with tools like SalesForce that help organize and automate common business tasks. Today, we’re introducing events and actions, which will serve as key concepts in those efforts moving forward.
Events are, as you might expect, things that happen in CampSite. A parent submits a request for information. A staff member finishes their application.
Actions let you tie into these events, in order to automate common business functionality. In CampSite, actions can be set to occur either immediately after the event, or a specified number of days later. Today, on launch, we’re offering two action types we think will be incredibly useful: generating a task, and sending a saved e-mail.
An example:
- The Smith family submits a request for information to Camp Firewood.
- An action has been configured to immediately assign a task to the camp office manager to call the family and schedule a tour.
- Another action has been configured that will automatically send a follow up e-mail 14 days later to remind the family of your open house dates.
We’d love to get your feedback on what other events you’d like to be able to hook into, and what other actions should be available in order to automate common business processes at your camp.