We had a very positive response to a recent change that was made to the hub Discussions feature a few weeks back. You can now send a copy to yourself when you create a new message in your hubs. Likewise, sending an email to the hub mailing list will also send you an “echo” email or a copy of the message.

This is nice because the sender is assured that their message was successfully delivered. In response to the positive feedback we’ve received, we took this concept a step further.

Now when you create a new hub Announcement,  you can choose to send a copy to yourself. This is especially important for those urgent announcement that you want to be 100% sure get delivered. Now, hub admins can test our SMS feature and see for yourself that text messages are being sent!

In addition to the hub Announcements changes, the originator of a new calendar event, existing calendar event, file upload, photo upload or Whiteboard creation will be included in the notification email that is sent out to the hub.

Event the smallest changes can go a long way towards enhancing your group communications.

As always we encourage you to leave a comment and use our Feedback & Support widget when logged into MemberHub.com to engage the MemberHub team.

Thanks!

One of the bigger challenges that small and new churches (and non-profits) face is the ability to have a shared calendar and shared contacts within the organization. Buying a Microsoft Exchange Server just isn’t in the budget. One of the more attractive features (not only because of it’s design) in MemberHub is the powerful calendar that’s found in each hub. You’ve always been able to subscribe to your hub calendars using desktop applications like Apple’s iCal, Mozzila’s Sunbird and more recent versions of Microsoft Outlook.

Below Each Hub Calendar Are Links

This week we deployed a change to calendar feeds in MemberHub that will allow you to subscribe to your hub calendars using a Google calendar. Why is this so powerful? 2 main reasons:

1. Synch you Google Calendar With Any of Your Hub Calendars

Imagine, any time that an event is added to your hub calendar, now it can show up in your Google Calendar. So many folks use Google calendar instead of client based software like iCal and Outloook. Now you have the ability to subscribe to your hub calendars. Here is the help for importing calendars into Google Calendar.

2. Embed Your Google Calendar Into Your Public Website

Imagine your organization has a general purpose hub where all it’s members can add events to the hub. Well if you want to make that calendar visible to anyone in the world, you can use your Google calendar to subscribe to the hub calendar and embed the Google calendar into a public accessible web page. Here is the help for embedding your Google calendar into web pages.

In the future we we hope to give our users the abiltity to embed hub calendars right into public web pages, just like Google calendar. This is a great step in that direction. There are many other benefits to synching hub calendars with Google calendars. Please leave a comment and share other ideas and advantages. Thanks!

The ability to add recurring events to a hub calendar has been a highly requested feature. We heard your requests and have designed a very elegant and powerful recurring event engine. We started with inspiration from both Outlook and Apple’s iCal programs and took the best of both worlds.

When you add a new event to a hub calendar there is a new drop-down.

Repeat Event Dropdown

You can choose to repeat an event daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. As you change the recurrence selection different options appear to help you set up even the most complicated of recurring event schedules.

Daily Recurring Event

Weekly Recurring Event

Monthly Recurring Event

Yearly Recurring Event

Try it out and let us know what you think. You’ll notice that event reminders cannot be set on recurring events. This functionality will be made available in coming weeks.