Special Guest : David Dejewski

[Music] welcome everyone welcome this is mike with SuiteDash i'm going to be your host today today we're going to have a little bit of a special episode of succeed with software i'm here with one of our community members we call them SuiteMates his name is dave dejewski what you're seeing here in front of you is the SuiteDash community it's a special place where our members our customers can gather and we can discuss different topics gather by niches like virtual assistant or coaching every week or two is where we announce what we call fresh on live so there's current and new features

Announced here and also um members like dave can post uh what dave posted here this very detailed and um intelligently put together post about the way he wants to set SuiteDash up and he's done a great job here and and created a mind map that we're going to look at shortly but really spurred on a nice conversation among the members something that uh when i saw it i thought yeah this is a great example of what we're trying to promote here in the community and it's in the a good way to educate other SuiteMates on how you can make a setup in SuiteDash and the planning that might be involved especially in a more advanced setup

That dave trying to put together here so welcome dave good to have you thank you for uh being on the podcast well thanks mike it's great to be here yeah it's kind of exciting to get direct access to you i mean i've watched a lot of your videos and i've gotten a lot of value from the stuff that you've already put together so getting on the show with you and been able to do this is a is a gift so thank you i appreciate that i'm not sure how value but look i'm a little bit stubborn in the way that i really want to keep con not control but just keep really in touch with the community and be available in the way that i want to hear what the people that are working boots on the ground what challenges they're facing how we can solve them and we pride ourselves on being a

Community driven software and this is a good example of that so um why don't you just kind of present your the challenges that you are having dave and and and the problems or the solutions that you're trying to achieve and maybe we can just look at your mind map as we go through that yield and you can describe that but you know take a look at this everyone i mean this is awesome look at this this is kind of a real planning mind at work but you know these kind of things if you take the time and it may not be this sophisticated it may be the back of the napkin or a legal pad but a good way to start is definitely trying to identify the flows that you need to happen and then go into even more detail and define okay these

Are the circles that i'm going to need create these are the pages these are the forms and then one by one as you create those and string them together you'll have a real solution but go ahead david and and start presenting uh i think it's about a you have a you're the president or uh one of the principals in a soccer youth soccer organization but tell us more about it yeah well i do a few things one i'm you know to make money i'm a management consultant so i work with clients and sponsors and things to help them figure out solutions to business problems but in the context of what we're looking at here i also volunteer for a 501c3 um soccer club and it's it's now a federation as we've

Just changed it this last year and uh covid 19 gave us an opportunity to kind of stand everybody down for a year and then start looking at some of the projects that we've always wanted to do but haven't had a really a great chance to do it because of the the operational tempo of things and you know the fact that you know i'm coaching for this club and i'm also uh trying to do the the admin stuff and and in in today's world i think we're seeing a decrease in volunteerism in some sectors we see you know increase in things like food donations and things like that but in other areas people are really suffering or they had been suffering throughout 2020 with this lockdown and some of the things that were happening to businesses and things and we were no

Exception to that rule so but it gave us an opportunity to breathe a little bit and then start thinking about how can we remake ourselves in a new image and that's what you see in front of you is the the first steps at that i should probably clarify to say that this was not really the first steps the first time i saw SuiteDash was during the black friday special and i saw this product as a moldable piece of clay so i i knew that i had some complex business processes that i had to try to automate because i wasn't getting the volunteers behind the scenes to do the the management and admin type stuff anymore and i thought that the software might give us a a boost in that area and help us automate some of things plus since we are a

501c3 and we are mission driven and not necessarily profit driven the mission is changing culture and changing the hearts and minds and you know bringing education to in this case parents and and coaches to to maximize their ability to take advantage of that 15-year development window in kids so and that's important i think as a relevant um starting point because these models and this software it exists only in context i mean it becomes whatever it is that you want it to be right so if we have a mission we're going to form our software around the achievement of that mission and in this case that's exactly what we're doing i

Would uh also say that what you're seeing is not some super dave who stepped in and just started flowing this stuff out i mean i ran into a lot of walls before i got to this point i started with the software like i said during the black friday special i thought that i'm a reasonably intelligent person i could probably just get in and configure it and make it work the way i wanted it to and i failed uh you know probably a half dozen to a dozen times i i tried to do x by using a b and c and i tried to do x doing you know using some other method and i just wasn't getting the picture i wasn't getting the definitions the definitions right i wasn't understanding the

Difference between an intake form and a you know on-demand form and you know how that all worked and i had to kind of figure some of that stuff out so i i figured some of that stuff out by the seat of my pants on a fly and i realized that i was really trying to cut a path through the jungle and i wasn't able to see where i was going and what progress i had made behind me or what i had tasks in front of me and i needed a map and that is where this thing comes from i started just i think you should not feel bad about that experience i think that's a it's somewhat of a common experience with SuiteDash and we we try our best to simplify that there's more work to do of course and i think that's why we're here today

Even to uh try to illuminate your experience and maybe cut a path even uh for other people you know the webinars we try to do that there and we try to do that in other places but uh real really glad that it's starting to come together for you in fact a lot of the uh five star reviews a lot of the really good reviews that we have in on captera and g2 etc you'd be surprised how many of them say there is a learning curve they qualify yeah there is a learning curve in but but once you get past that then i really the light bulbs come on and then you realize i can make this do almost anything i want it to do and that's that's how we try to build it so i don't want to under i don't want to understate the

Value of the learning curve itself the the the journey that we go on to try to understand uh our own business to the level of specificity that the software forces us to understand it is it it's not it's it's like like creating a business plan in some ways right yeah and and then some businesses out there start and they don't really have a business plan if you force them to force them to sit down and really map it out yeah they learn a lot and i think you everyone will learn a lot by creating a map like this and really understanding what their processes are well the other thing is you know i have this uh i don't even hear that indian parable where you have all those uh it there's an elephant in the middle and there's all these blind people

Standing around the elephant and they all have their hands outstretched they're feeling different parts of the elephant and they're all asked to describe what they're feeling and you know the person that's feeling the leg is describing basically a tree and the person who's feeling the trunk is describing a snake and you know and on like that every different part of your business every part of that elephant is uh rightly described in different ways and you know a document like this what it does is it helps to clarify one perspective and as long as we're reaching out and we're grabbing the other context you know people can say and they can point at this uh this square here or this circle here and say you know the marketing manager for example i i've i've defined my objects

In this diagram as hexagons purple hexagons that that have anything to do with marketing and communications and the in this case the communication campaign features that are built into uh SuiteDash and so my marketing communications person is going to have a big interest in when those campaigns get started what kind of content is in those campaigns and my marketing communications director can now look at this and say okay i'm looking for the purple hexagons and i see you ever all the places where i exist and i have to have input into this process and in that way what we've done is we've used a diagram like this to generate or to enable us to have a conversation with our organization and with people like you i mean you've

Got a perspective from inside that is just so deep and so rich having developed this software for you and i we had for your listening audience we had we had a brief uh discussion yesterday where we were able to sort of you know i don't know dry run make sure we had technology working and all that kind of stuff so we could do what we have to do today but um my god i learned so much from you in that conversation and i think we were able to have an exchange of ideas simply because we had something that we could both point to and and talk about so that's that's my uh i'm gonna stop talking about that now just get into it well thank you thank you so let's go to the diagram and i think we can use this as uh to guide our conversation and okay what i see here uh just as a

Zoomed out is that you have uh parents you have coaches you have volunteers you have donors and some of this is still to be defined right but what i see at the beginning is essentially a funnel right so we we want to let's start up here but let's also understand as we start that we have the challenge of serving these different roles or um you know functionalities that however it works in your organization yep let's zoom in and start at the top and and let's get your thoughts about how this is starting what your requirements are and just go step by step and we'll try to equate these these steps to uh the functionality in SuiteDash so that everyone knows where we are and what items we

Are discussing yeah okay um you on your side um first of all let me just set this up you've already explained exactly what this is it's it's basically it's a funnel it's the place where everybody starts regardless of what your desired role in the organization is or will be we have to get you in first so we need to get your name your email address really and that's that's pretty much it we've got to set some um we got to set some stuff behind you to tag you properly as a prospect in this case by putting you in the prospect circle so that uh we know how to treat you and what to serve you in your step one of your journey with us and so that's what the prospect circle assignment is mike if you can right next to the start button

There there's a little dot and if you were to click that dot what that'll do is open up the actual landing page that houses so what yep so what that is that's that's our actual uh home page right and what i've done here is simply tied that button that says find your community to the intake form so if you were to click on that it'll take you right it'll take you into the intake form if you you know if you weren't signed in and all that stuff and then you could provide uh you could say i need a new account you could provide your name your email and yeah and i think it's worth pointing out that this intake form i think you you intentionally designed it to be low friction right and this yes this funnel is intended to be low friction

To just get them started in your process so putting a 25 question form as the very first thing to do is going to be a a deal killer killer for most people absolutely and if you you're absolutely right i mean if anybody that's in the marketing business knows that every single form or every data field that you add to that first form is resistance for your uh prospects and so you want us i mean if you could get away with just a simple email that would be fine but i have a welcome message that says hello so and so and i want them to feel like it's been personalized for them which is why i ask for their for their first and last name but um you might click on the button that's

Right next to the intake form and it will open the notes and you'll see yep right there those are the data fields in the notes that i've just attached that intake form very simple very low friction get them in send the welcome email alert the registrar that we've got somebody coming through and this this serves a couple of purposes one you're just putting them on notice which is what you want to do anyway for the registrar and then two you give the registrar something to follow up with if you have somebody that just sort of disappears off the radar down the road so you know after we start getting people in that helps us to capture more business by going out and saying uh you know the registrar has now on the part of her workflow where she can go in and reach back out to folks so then we send them to a

Prospect start page and that's where we start defining the relationship and assigning all the circles and that's that's the funnel total right there very simple uh i think it's worth clarifying here that we have three roles for our external users we call in SuiteDash a lead a prospect and a client and those carry along with them some permissions um and you say a prospect circle here so just to clarify that this could still be a you could set this role as a client um and if we were to rename this circle to make it a little uh less confusing with that nomenclature of our role i think we would call this like a a pre-sorted pre-sorted prospect somebody

That we're going to bring into this start page and here is where we're going to start sorting them into the circles that are more defined by their role meaning coach or parent etc yeah for sure yeah i don't want the listeners to get confused with the role here this is really a circle and the circle is going to be the definition of or the circle is going to define which start page they're going to land on based on their circle affiliation right and i actually use the prospect role in in the system to and that's also really powerful you could still use the role and still use a circle uh to to to direct them direct to direct their experience yeah and for me it was just easier to keep them together so that you

Know i we do have leads but i would say in my in my world in my context of the club if someone has come to my webpage and they've been willing to submit some of their information they've already taken the first step towards us and that tells me that you know i classify that as a prospect whereas somebody who's just breezing by or somebody that we pick up and put into our system they would probably more as a lead you know until we figure out what their intentions are and then we would convert them to a prospect and then to a in our case we changed you know i'm gonna pause for one second i'm gonna say i feel like i i left a big piece out of your for your listeners i have spent a lot of time in

The translation section of SuiteDash and you know the nomenclature that is common to my culture i had to go in and i had to change the names of all that stuff just so that it made sense so we didn't have this kind of confusing conversation you know i might call it lead prospect and member as opposed to lead prospect and client or you know i couldn't i was so confused i started looking at this i'm like a staff member you know is my coach as a volunteer is that a staff member or is that a a member or are they both and you know how do i how do i manage that and i settled on a new sort of organizationally unique um taxonomy

Which uh changed the company uh uh what it what do you call that the company um role i um guess i changed that to member right because our family family and or company that's what i changed it to family and oh you can you've got it right there yeah yeah go take a look real quick and just show just show the translation i'm glad i gave you permission to get in there be and we set all that up before we started talking because yeah we set up all those this up so i could access dave's account and and and talk about these things in real time so yeah so you'll see that this is the translation interface which is um sneak peek due for a little bit of an upgrade coming up

Soon but i think if you'll type in client here oh yep you'll see it right here yeah look at all the changes that's additional family company info and then if we go to the um make sure i'm gonna find this in the right way the roles group i think is where you probably found this dave's renamed client to member and this is more appropriate for his culture as he says so this is 100 doable and translations don't doesn't always mean it's going to be another language it just means that you want to say it a different way that's what's that's what dave's referring to here yeah and it helps when i'm communicating or i'm trying to onboard staff or

I'm trying to onboard members into this portal if they see the words they're already used to in their the vocabulary that they're used to being called and they see things that are labeled appropriately i mean one of the buttons in there i i defined just because i was having a little bit of fun i defined it as i said instead of submit i said pass or something like that because it's a soccer club right so have a little bit of fun with it and that way hopefully i've got members who as they're coming through the onboarding process they might be smiling a little bit you know that's that's that's the objective there it's in here somewhere it's bringing up all the words past password but yeah this is how this is how this works so let's get back to you we can jump back to your uh mind map here okay so i've defined the funnel for you um

I mean the the initial and i've showed you the start page that we started on it's just a simple in this case it was only i could have gone a different way i could have embedded that form on and i will in fact because i have several different web pages so that new website that you saw is one of the it's part of the new rollout for the new federation versus the club so we've you know i went to the courthouse and i filed a bunch of trademark stuff and we changed the names around that kind of thing so it's part of the new package that's rolling out but i could have just as easily just embedded this form on you know one of my sports management platforms as register here or something like that and they would have started the process anywhere you can embed an html form or html you would be able to do that so in

In summary at the beginning here so you you have the intake form on the website you configure that intake form to add them to a circle and then send a welcome email to the prospect you're sending your what we call portal invitation portal access invitation uh straightaway and also an additional email that sends out to your registrar and lets them know that somebody has started this into the funnel and then as part of the intake form you're assigning uh this circle and then you created a portal page that you set as a start page for this circle process correct and so they'll land there as soon as they set their password they'll land there directly actually now is a good time mike i the the um

I originally had problems with this transition step because the way you know i was using one of the older versions of this and one of the things that i had done uh when i set this up when people submitted their name email and you know their family circle name or whatever it was um they would they would get a um a submission success message that was automatically generated by SuiteDash and it just said submission received and it was very generic it was very you know what do i do now is the thought that kept coming to my mind if i'm uh if i'm a new member am i supposed to check my email because there's nothing there that told me i could do that but you showed me a trick uh yesterday and then today again on how to go in and configure that so that it transitions easily

From that first submission into the prospect start page could you right right so here we're here in that intake form and this is the intake form that dave was referring to and now i'm in the link slash embed settings for this form where you can get the direct link you can get the embed code but and you can also configure this form completely even down to the colors and how it presents but one of the things you can do it there's a success message here but you can also disable this success message and set a redirect so many of our customers will redirect to say a success page on the website that they fully customize and give further instructions or we have some customers who will redirect to their custom url their login url so not

Only the email is received by the customer but they they understand that the next step is it's going to happen here in the portal and there's of course other creative ways to do that but once you've once you know about this option i think that there's unlimited options associated with that yeah honestly i would have been happy just getting that one tip from you i was i was very excited to see that that problem was solved um great that's a great feature all right okay well so let's see let's let's hit the mind map and see where we are okay and then um uh just to just to to pass along how all this is configured i just did a little summary there but let's look at an intake form and just look at the options so so what dave's done here is he's set as a

Prospect and this is in a different account so just just understand that i'm just showing this for example he set his circle right here he scrolled down and he said yes i do want to send the portal access invitation immediately and then he decided uh i think he was not using this but he is has added this extra email notification which you can add or or remove right so you can just say at any time you can add an additional email notification to go out to anyone you want uh even the person completing the form if that if that works in your use case and this is the one he's sending to his registrar yeah yep that's exactly right that's not email this is the send portal access

Invitation and now they land on a start page and on this start page is where you provide i'm guessing buttons or links to move out to other portal pages exactly well yeah so what we want to do now is we want to understand what relationship that they want to have and i i'll give you two business examples for this in in the one that we're looking at for this soccer club this non-profit when someone comes to my organization i don't know who they are they they're a parent they might want to coach they might want to be a donor they might want to sponsor a team they might just want to volunteer because they either want to get some volunteer hours we offer what's called student service learning for kids uh or they might you know just be an adult who hasn't wants to contribute because our

Mission is cool um so we've got to sort them and we've got to figure out how am i going to treat each one of these people as they come through and that's where i want them to make that i want them to declare to me by pushing a button in this case you know who they are and what their role looks like in my in my management consulting business uh we might be doing capital formation we might be doing capital structuring we might be doing uh establishing a fund creating pitch book that kind of thing every single one of those roles for those types of prospective clients has a whole different workflow associated with it and what kept coming up in for me was any one of my clients is defined by the

Client role might be more than one of those roles so they might come in and they but whatever they start with is usually their number one concern so in this case if we start i think with the let's take the look at the left branch there mike it says onboarding apparent um if you come in and you say okay i'm a parent the forum that prospect form has five buttons on it and if you click i'm a button i'm a parent what i had done and my i know you're gonna correct me on this because you're much better at this particular i i i put a form together i wanted the triggering actions after the form so i wanted to be able to sign them to circles and send out the emails and do all that kind of stuff with the with the automated

Workflow but i didn't know how to trigger that or allow the the end user the new new perspective member to do that and so i created this form which had a really simple piece of information how many kids do you have that's basically the whole thing on that forum that's it there's nothing else on there they put in a number one two through ten and it then takes them to the parent onboarding flow as natural course i didn't care what they put on that form necessarily i will use that information of course but i mike had a better way mike so just to clarify what's happening here is uh so this is the start page then on this page dave is embedded or has used buttons to

Click and go to another portal page right so when they click i am a parent button it takes them to a portal page this is the portal page and on this page is embedded what we call a crm update form and this is intended for people who are already in the account or already have an account and we're going to either add or update data associated with that person but one of the other primary functionalities which dave alludes to is that you can now use that form when submitted to access all of the trigger actions functionality which includes changing circles changing email marketing list uh creating project profiles assigning flows etc so on this page he embedded a very simple form how

Many kids do you have and when submitted of course we do did get that small piece of information but the real functionality of the form is to trigger all those actions that he needed which are assign the flow change take them out of the prospect circle add them to the parent circle add them to the convert to member circle um so number of kids yes that's a good solution just something very small and innocuous but what we typically recommend is maybe some sort of uh policy language or something like okay well you've you're here you are interested in being a parent and here's a few things that we ask that you agree to or or any small amount of language and then use the form field would be something

Like i agree like a check box i agree submit so then you get that kind of a formality and a little bit of policy out of the way you also get the advantage of of making this trigger happen and it seems really natural and then you can move on move them on into your funnel so that was that was the suggestion i think that's something that dave might implement oh i i absolutely that was a brilliant idea i mean i can start the culture walk right there i can start talking about you know i'm ready to have some fun agree or not agree you know something along there you go yeah i mean and then they click it and then it's like boom now now all of a sudden they're in the parent circle and the parent circle has you know things that are associated with it they get they get parent folders which automatically will

Load in their account and inside those folders i can have uh the documents that like i have um oh concussion awareness kind of stuff and you know things that you can use at home to have a better conversation with your kid and the way home from a game those kinds of things all that can go uh the schedule maybe the annual schedule for the year uh any of that kind of stuff can be loaded right up in the parent folder right away so now uh you know they're they're good and i and i've also in that in that purple hexagon again now i've started a communication campaign with them which starts on the day that they registered and uh it starts you

Know in you know it's the orientation it gives them the intro it gives them all that cultural stuff that takes forever to try to you know pass out to people it's just a lot to know when you're raising kids i guess having raised a couple of them myself and then there we're also notifying the registrar again so now we have somebody that's come to now we're telling the registrar that this person's come through and they're self-identifying as a parent and that naturally should trigger to the registrar that that's going to come with some kids so now we're thinking you know we're going to have to take it to the next step which we'll get to it in a minute which is registering those kids and getting them on boarding but after that's done that the

Flow the parent flow is triggered and that parent flow is now collecting all the necessary uh like the the address of record the emergency contact information the covid waiver the talent release and you know all of those things that you have to do when you register your kid to do anything these days that's all you know loaded up in that parent onboarding flow and then that information since it's already associated with the crm contact is going to be used throughout the rest of their experience to to auto populate any fields they may have to draw in later for verification or maybe if they want to become a coach now i have their address of record already loaded and i've got their name and all that kind of stuff and how many kids they have and

I can pair that coach with their kids all that stuff so it's all in the parent onboarding flow and then i send them from there to a start page great job yeah so just to equate to the the functionality of SuiteDash this uh dave's using i'm sure shared folder so you can create a new shared folder assign it to a circle and then anyone in that circle currently or in the future will have access to everything inside that folder and remember that circles are dynamic meaning if i add someone to a circle they immediately get access to all the things associated with that circle and if i remove someone from the circle they immediately lose all that access so um as you move people in and out of circles their whole experience

Can change and by adding uh these parents into the parent circle they immediately the next time they reload the platform we'll see the parent shared folder and access all those documents additionally what days he's doing here is he's adding them to a parent email marketing list which he can then at any point of course send a mass email campaign or each list has an autoresponder functionality he can start a drip marketing campaign to these parents where maybe every two weeks it just sends out a helpful email in this case about preparing your child or safety or anything you want in this case and then anytime you make a circle change or anytime you reach one of these places

Where you can trigger the automations you can change this messaging to a different list which can be completely different messaging and then what they've also done is is is started them in what we call a flow and a flow is a single experience um stepped content acquisition i think is the best word for it right so you can have them read some language uh sign it e-sign that complete a form upload some files download some files and this all happens in a sequenced uh nice interface that takes them through and and leads them right down the path and then he's also because he's changed their circle to parents he's able to assign now a new start

Page so next time they log in instead of landing here which is where they landed when they were in the prospect circle next time they come they'll land now on this new start page which contains a completely different experience for them uh more more appropriate for where they are in the funnel yeah and you know i they never the parents never have to enter that information again when they enter it once it just gets remembered and then it gets recalled like season after season yeah so and you can even display all that information dynamically on this start page the start page can serve as the same page for all the parents but by using dynamic data placeholders you can say hi mrs campbell how are you you know and really reference them specifically and and all their

Data specific yeah and you know i also have i've produced a podcast for the last three years a weekly thing of discussions with parents and coaches and stuff on the sidelines specifically around this uh mission and around cultivating um you know the parents i guess bringing them on this journey so that they can take advantage of that youth development window and and i can embed those uh my back library into those uh orientation campaign kind of emails so that they just it drips it out to them over a period of time and now i'm killing two birds with one stone because i'm also bringing in you know they're becoming a listener on the show and they're starting to pay attention to the kinds of things

We've got going on over there so uh great cross-pollination uh ability right there right so i mean would you say dave that's really you kind of have your your building blocks to build your own software to do exactly what you need to do so you're not working inside this is what we try to to build try to design not working inside a very strict this is how it works approach but more with a flexible here are my building blocks now i can put this together to become my own bespoke unique software experience for my community or my company yeah absolutely this is this is so powerful if i was to do a consulting arrangement agreement with some other

Company out there this diagram would look completely different there'd be all new cultural things there'd be you know different workflows everything would change and SuiteDash would be able to accommodate each of those instances i that's that was the selling feature for me when i originally saw SuiteDash i was like man i could there's so many different types of clients that could benefit from this and i'm going to start benefiting myself by using it my own organizations and it was cool yeah okay well as as the the action that's happening here i think we could say fairly say at least in generalities is replicated it's very similar in in these other trees that you have and will probably be very similar when you build these

Out but let's i think let's move to identify some of the challenges that you're having now okay and see and just talk about some approaches for for solving them now or possibly even some feature identifying future features that could help uh solve and i think some of that's down here uh when registering a child we talked about okay so you wanna okay so in just following that same flow uh they land on their new members start page and now they're not locked into that role as a parent it's not the only thing that they're ever going to do as a matter of fact we hope that they're going to volunteer raise their hand they're going to want to come out and coach and things like that and or they want to become a donor uh down the road so um

We give them the options here and this i'll just run through i think i put five right there um and i'll start on the right because that's the simplest one i want to donate that just takes them over we don't have to go there mike this takes them over to a new workflow which orientates them as uh or orients them excuse me as a donor and cultivates them over time and then i want to volunteer that we actually have an arrangement with the county that i live in where they help to register folks and attract time and things like that so that uh that's baked in it's just basically a hyperlink we orient them and then we would link them out to that site so they could be involved i want a coach takes us to the next swim lane to the right which we'll

Go over maybe later i want to order in a uniform or spirit wear kit this is this takes uh all of our members to the uniform provider to the manufacturer's website and a question that i have for you mike as and i and i'm i'm springing this on you last minute because i just put this in there last night as i was thinking about it but when when people come in and they're a member now of you know they can be in clarksburg or damascus or gaithersburg and each of those communities have different uniform color schemes and patches and things like that is there like a way that i can transfer some of that information you know or or direct i might be answering my own question direct them uh

To the different websites based on the option that they choose so you know they they wanna they they self-identify with the clarksburg community and they want a new uniform when they push that button i want that info i want them to be directed to [Music] the damascus ordering page not the one for i mean excuse me the clarksburg ordering page not the one for damascus or clarksburg or whatever or whatever the other towns are you get i'm getting tongue-tied around this but you get the idea i'm trying to direct them to the one so they don't get confused i want them to go to the website that i want them to go to based on their selections uh just on the fly what i think somewhere up here is that we should try to sort them into a circle when

You said the masses and i'll just use that as an example right a damascus circle and then if we are able to achieve that on this start page one of the functionalities we have is that you are able to show or hide entire rows even of content based on a circle circle affiliation so what it means is you can have an entire section of this start page content that's only going to show to people in the damascus circle okay and then in that way you can define the content there and then show a button only or show a default a button that's coded for that particular location and then what you'll end up with i don't know how many of these you have but say you have 10 you end up with 10 rows of content each

One individually coded to show to that specific circle and in that way you can show specific information to people from in that damascus circle including the button they clicked to go out and order uniforms so i just heard you tell me i only have to make one page instead of 10 and i love that exactly exactly that's great thank you um so and then the last one there is the one where i'm i'm really running into trouble on and that's i want to register a child so the way this works is i've assigned or the the family member has it's it's mom or it's dad so mom or dad comes in or or guardian they come in and they register themselves first and they go through this flow and they identify with the community and all that they tell me how many kids they have and

They want to register some number of kids so there's a one-to-many relationship here and those the kids that get registered i don't necessarily need to communicate with them but i have to keep track of their height their weight their age their grade what team assignments they've been given things like that i've got to track that information that metadata about each one of those kids how do i go about now and create sort of a one to many or allow that mom or dad to do two things one is register a child or two uh add a family member because if dad registers then mom has to get the emails too because they're all sharing carpooling or you know ride stuff that

You know so they they have to be able to add uh email addresses like i guess we could just add another form and say secondary or tertiary email but i don't know if that's going to send to all of them help me understand how we might handle that one-to-many kind of relationship it's difficult in our current architecture so uh just to define how you're actually doing this each of these parents each of these people that come in is in our world decline okay so they're on the external side of our structure and if you wanted to add more actual users they would be on the client side too so if you really want to register a new user you're essentially asking saying to SuiteDash i would like my client to be

Able to register a client which i think in most traditional business relationships we would right not not think would work right right it's not something that people do um now there could be a couple of ways we could approach this and maybe in the future we may have a situation where we could code in and say okay i'm a cl i'm a client i work at this company and i think we should say here that you what one thing you have done which is really smart and i don't want to introduce some confusion here but you've taken their what our company our company object and you've renamed that and reused that as a family so uh the mom and the dad both have individual users uh which are clients but

You have them inside a company which in your world is a family so now they have a shared association and can we can message to them and and kind of group them in the way that same way that we do um clients that two or three users that work at the same company but what what we need to do here and what we may do in the future is allow a client who works at a company to to register or send at least a registration invitation to a colleague who also works at that same company because we're not really crossing any sort of privacy lines at that point he just says right yeah i work at the company i would really like my colleague to also have access to you to your portal and i'm going to

Add them here so maybe there's a mechanism like that in the future and again i want to qualify saying that's not something we have now but the other way that that that you may be able to solve this is using custom fields uh for this for the the parent uh or one or more of the parents or i'm sorry yeah we talked about uh company custom fields would be a good fit here because you are using the company as the family so in this case now we're we're talking about family custom fields and um in your case the way to do this would be to create um child number one name child number one and what are the other examples you said with the data which you need all the demographic information the age height weight all that stuff yeah

So let's say there's ten of those you're going to say child number one x child number one why and you're gonna list you're gonna create all these custom fields and then child number two child number three and luckily you know we're we're limited by biology how many ways we need to we can go how many levels we need to go there but and it is a little bit of work for sure but um in that sense though then you can use those company dynamic data placeholders and then on something like this member start page you could start to even display and and build a layout that would work nicely to display all the names of all the children and um and their statistics and associated data so i put a box down at the bottom there i'm toying around with the idea of using the work order functionality

So that you know maybe we capture the information either in an on-demand flow or as you said up in the original onboarding flow that's a lot of information to put in um is there a way that i can then like trigger a bunch of actions throughout my administration staff for each child that a parent wants to register you know by like making each registration action a work order action does that make sense it kind of does i think what you would end up with a cement at least in the current the current availability of features

You would end up with some manual work on the other side but it may be worth it maybe something that can happen if you already have a registrar you could have the work request form which is customizable and you can create custom fields for that you could have uh eat the parent submit a work request and of course rename it using translation as you i've already done and submit that data and then your registrar would take that and and put that into the proper data fields yeah see i like the idea of being able to capture the information on those custom fields and have it automatically like can i capture crm or company fields in the work order process interesting yeah of course that would be something that's interesting

What might be even be there's ways of course there's ways to to solve this uh but it's not something that we have currently i can't think of a perfect solution to this so this for your listeners this is this is why it's uh listed as off the map because we're it's a problem that i'm i'm actively trying to to work on and thanks you know thank goodness mike has been open to having this discussion with me but um well i think a lot of the members of our community can can testify that and especially those that attend the webinar on a regular basis can testify that we always run it we not always but often we'll run into these little wrinkles or little structural um

Which is good because you're actively still embracing that and i'm absorbing these we're listening and and they can definitely testify that thing that we've we provide solutions on a regular basis and in pretty short order once we can identify the need identify a worker or a solution that fits into our current architecture and it will spec it we'll we'll get it ready for development and and often two or three weeks four weeks later there it is on production so uh these are things that we really like to do we like to identify these things so certainly not something that i run away from run towards this and and look at it and say how can we fix this yeah that's not that doesn't happen in every organization mike so again on behalf of the rest

Of the membership of SuiteDash community thank you for being that kind of responsive because we've all had the experience trying to chase somebody down and help us on something they just they're just not there but look at us now we're here i only posted my first orientation uh like welcome i didn't even know you had that community site until very recently and i posted on there thinking i'm just going to throw it away because nobody's ever going to read this anyway and i was surprised yeah so good but we're going to to build a community there not just a place where uh myself or our other team team members are are active responding we're really trying to build a community of leaders and of of teachers and

And guides who are using the software successfully and are are happy and excited to help someone else uh along their journey as well so okay where do you want to go from here i can see that yeah that's interesting so let's i think let's talk about the other side of this one interesting area was the i think here where you were triggering a project profile and you talked about as i was in our previous conversation was trying to clarify some of this but you had a recurring need for project profiles maybe maybe hit on that and we can discuss some solutions there okay all right so just so that everybody

Has context starting at the top of that uh swim lane we've we've you know taken in their basic information they've self-identified as a coach or they've self-identified as a parent gone through the swim lane on the left and then they have the i want to coach button on the right it takes them to the same place they get a coaching introduction form i want to tag them first as they're not a coach yet they have to go through a screening process and that's what you're seeing here they if they come directly to us they're converted to a member if they're already a member they just stay that way we give them a new uh circle identification which is now prospective coaches and that's identified in yellow on this chart we also take them out of the prospect circle if they're not already out

Of it because we know who they are and we want them to be in the all volunteer group because we want them to get messaging later on down the road for for all of our volunteers like you know success stories or newsletters things like that we've got three notifications happening on this workflow so we're alerting the registrar we also have to bring in the risk manager now who's going to be making sure that our coaches are safe to be paired up with our kids and we have our director of coaching who's going to be evaluating uh coaching skill and coaching culture we in our culture we do not we we try to weed out this the screamers the one that you know yell at the kids to wake up out there and that kind of stuff we don't we want a

Different culture so we're we're screening them that's what the director of coaching is going to help with so we also assign some folders we've got coaching folders now and that has like the coaches manual uh coaching guide and then we have a welcome and orientation campaign we have to teach them you know how to run your first parent meeting and we have to teach them what is age appropriate and where to stand and when to take off your sunglasses and all that kind of stuff so that's in the sort of orientation campaign here which we're getting started but we we also need credentials and the credentialing profile is something that has timers on it so for example background registrations in this

Case are conducted every year 12 months whether they need it or not right so every 12 months we run them through a new background investigation we actually have a renewal in six months um but we want to make sure that they have verified that their information is still correct they're still living in the same address and all that kind of stuff very important to get them registered so we know where to find them and get their background investigation started with at least two weeks left before the actual season starts so they can be processed and then if they don't then we want to start a reminder campaign and as soon as they verify that they have completed their registration in this case or the background investigation excuse me we also want to trigger a stop reminder campaign or stop the campaign uh

Action so that they're not continuing to get these harassment emails for not having finished that's actually not the best example the next one down is better youth protection has to be renewed every 24 months concussion has to be renewed every 12 months and then because we're in a postcovid world and studies through journal american medicine have talked about you know kids having potential lingering effects of the cardiac kind of events um after they've had even asymptomatic covid then we want our coaches to be prepared with the sudden cardiac death training which is normal for uh all athletic coaches but normally not until much later in their career so we're adding it in here we're making sure that they're tagged with trained they're tagged

With concussion train they're tagged with youth protection trained and when they're all done and they have all that stuff then we ask the basic question are all the certifications orientation stuff done and that's what that diamond is there in the middle next to the green circle and if it is done then we pull them out of the perspective coaches circle we're actually going to add them it's not reflected on the map yet i just haven't gotten that far but we're going to add them to the appropriate you know all coaches circle or maybe they're a community coach or a premier coach or an academy coach we want to tag them appropriately so they get the right information down the road and then we also want to sort them which you see in the reflection there the new coach flow and then the next question down which coaching stage depending on what age group they're teaching there's

Different ways to manage those kids and we want all stage one coaches for example to have the stage one information uh stage two and things like that so we're assigning circles again it's just it's a sorting function here we're walking them through this this process that you're looking at here takes i can't tell you how many number of emails and phone calls and oh to do it manually this is a nightmare i mean it just goes on forever because you're constantly chasing i did the math one time on how many emails i had to send out to get somebody to make take one action and the the answer was 12. i had to send 12 emails for every one response that i got and considering that i'm one guy and there are potentially thousands of members

And dozens of staff members for me to send 12 out for every single task that has to be done it's just impossible as a club president so this process uh hopefully saves our sanity um and just kind of takes care of it and it it does the triggering so that and mike i'm going to ask you this question because to me reporting is very important i need to be able to go back into the system and verify that uh how many people i have and what stages and that kind of thing what kind of reporting capabilities do i have where i can go in and say let's pull all the youth protection trained but not done coaches or something along those lines that's something we're working towards um

Right now q3 and q2 are set aside for uh building the baselines for that for things like that we have reporting to build along across all of our tools really and so the difficulty is immense and that's in that way but definitely looking at these things uh as far as you know how to build reports around okay and i need everybody that's in one circle but not in this other circle and and and to return that so yeah so at this point the best answer i could say would you can export all of your contacts to a csv and uh with that csv i think you can do a lot of slicing and dicing um based on

On that but that was actually my plan was to do exactly that because i not only have to get i have to get the kids data and uh i have to get all that into our sports management system so it creates the team pages and assigns them to coaches and tracks the scores and all that kind of stuff that happens during games so i have to do an export function anyway if you're telling me that you know i mean anybody handle that data will be very very unique yeah and so it's almost more flexible in that way but um but you're right there there's a reporting there's there's a need for more reporting in the platform and when we we're aware of that and it's on our roadmap for in in our planning so yes i didn't know that's coming i didn't mean nothing to point out here just quickly

Is is that here you're removing them from prospective coaches and you're probably going to add them to a general coach's circle yes but also let's all remember that each contact can be in multiple circles and you can use those multiple circles to define their experience even on a more granular level so in this case right you want to add them to a general coach's circle yeah but also maybe to a stage one circle yep and then as they move through some and then maybe later they'll be in a concussion trained circle so there's three circles and then they graduate you move them from stage one to stage two so now they're in stage two general circles and concussion trained uh maybe you have a concussion expired

Circle so you're constantly using circles to move people yeah into different uh inside different experiences and adjust their experience based on that circle and that circle becomes your your switch your target to adjust that experience yep that's exactly right okay so here though i think it was it is interesting how you're using what we call a project profile and let me just bring that up on the on the screen here if i can quickly i have a project profile open in another account and then i'll help us a little bit so a project profile is essentially a predefined project all the metadata and uh assignments

Etc all predefined and it's just waiting to be triggered so it's meant to be used in an automation you'll see that anywhere that you're researching or looking the documentation about a project profile and that's the reason that we provide these dynamic placeholders etc and things like relative completion dates because it's all dependent on when this project gets generated you can even use a project or what we call a based on date which you'll see in the task generation the based on date so you can even use in a future event and base your and have your project generate and the task

Be generated relevant relative to the based on date so there's a lot of flexibility here but what we're going to talk about here in relation to dave's use case is these uh the set of scheduling options so let's go back and look at your at your mind map and then we'll come back and talk about what additional options i think we would really need here to achieve your goal and and probably something we will slate for development in the short term let's look at it and see so maybe we can use the concussion training as an example yeah so the way i have this thing set up now is that uh what i want them to do is the trigger one project profile first which it gives them the

Hyperlinks they need to get the certification done or the training done and then it it has a completion or an estimated either completion date or what do you call an expiration date for the certificate that they get back right in some cases i want to set that expiration date within the system so i actually want to have another field that i can uh set behind the scenes that maybe the the person that is completing the project profile doesn't necessarily see but the fact that they took the action to submit a let's say a check mark or something to say yes that it's done or that they put in a certification date that automatically calculates out either 12 months or in this case probably 11 months because we want to give them at least a month to

Get it done or 23 months in the case of youth protection training so that we want to trigger again we don't want them to see it for those 23 months or the 11 months but in the 11 month mark we want them to automatically see a new project profile assigned to them that says okay now it's time to renew right and we just keep repeating that process until that person is no longer a member yeah this this would be really great to achieve this so here you're using this trigger to generate to for to trigger this project profile to generate a project which is assigned to the user in this case the coach and that project is you build that and pre-define that to have these tasks and that's immediately assigned to them available to them they can

Go in they can see their task those tests can have be full of description and instruction and then when they complete them they're going to click complete you're going gonna as part of this you're going to want to grab an expiration date in some custom field and then based on that expiration date you want to essentially add 11 months or 12 months and then generate another project profile that that gets them on the path to complete this training again in 11 months right and the date i would add the one more feature that we talked about last night which is you know the verification or authorization piece if the risk manager says that it's done then i'm inclined to believe that then somebody's self-reporting that

I did something so i think we talked last night about baking in a new uh sort of an approval step in there that the new custom field would key off of that approval as opposed to keying off of the initial submission yeah and that that's something that that we want to try to target but let's look in the sense of the recurring options that are available to you so we talked about the recurring options what you can use a start on date and then or and say every one month which that won't work for you necessarily because it's based on the the date that they started of the first project for example or the date that they that you set here and but you want to base it on the the acquisition

Date of the of the certificate so that you know it's going to expire in 11 months or 12 months so then we looked at the possibility of using a specific date but unfortunately that won't work either because that's a specific date and time including a year then this option though is a powerful option because we can trigger this project profile to go off based on the value of a custom field which of course is different for every single contact the value is so in this case i have in this account tax portal last updated but in your case you could call it concussion certificate expired right and so yeah i mean this this project profile would now generate on the or no let's say concussion certificate acquired i

Think is the right way to maybe do this yeah either way so in this case we would say it would generate on the acquisition date but that's still not what we want so what we talked about possibly coding here would be some math right so now let's get the date plus 11 months and that's when it'll happen or start every 11 months or every 12 months from this date or something like that would be a solution here for you so yeah your use case is a little bit outside of what we have the capability for now but really cool idea to to make i'll go you one better because you just triggered uh an idea since we're just sort of spitballing some of this stuff yeah we're just written here um

If i were to have a form that let's say my director of coaching or somebody like that were to fill out that would enter start and stop dates for each of the seasons and lay out sort of an annual calendar and then my my question now is would those variables be available to all of my clients inside the portal like was there is there like a general um because i can set flags all day we can set up you know these placeholder fields data fields inside the system and then just fill them with the dates that we think are important like i want to have everybody trained and certified at least three

Weeks before the season actually starts and so where do i define where the season starts in a system like this or where you can make a custom field yeah a contact custom field let's look at that really quickly and then you can you can hide that from everybody in the system essentially it won't it won't show up in their list or uh it won't show up in placeholders so when you say hide placeholder that'll hide all the placeholders so this is sort of a hidden data field that you're keying off of um and then what you can do is i think i understand you're where you're going with this is you can use our bulk edit feature to set the date for every single uh contact all in one go and so you can look at it and then you

Can say update all circles or update all contacts and what this update all what that does which is really powerful it's essentially going not to update all the contacts at that moment in time but it will update in the future as well depending on the use case here but then now you can identify your custom field set the start date of the season of 2021 maybe the custom field is called 2021 season or 2022 season start date and you can use those and your automations uh maybe maybe that project profile that we just discussed as a triggering mechanism that is brilliant yes and you'll be able to just change that for all people all the time you know all people all at once

Or circles yep absolutely that's brilliant i think that can work yeah so let's go back to your and so with a little a few changes and i think some generally useful changes which of course makes it uh easier for us to make our decision about whether to develop it or not but these are definitely generally useful changes we can get this this whole section here working for you uh and even these um recurring sort of complex recurring mechanisms that recur based on some date that is dynamic that changes it's moving around but i think it can happen i think it could happen dave and i think maybe one thing we should even start to think about

Is is a follow-up episode in the future to look at how this is evolving for you and and what roads and paths you've taken based on some of these ideas and i sure would love to keep with you and even keep all the the listeners and the community and all the SuiteMates comprised of where you're heading how it's going what the success is and and where you're still having challenges and maybe we can just take this journey with you yeah i'm generally happy to help out if it seems like it's something of value for your audience um i have in in mind like once this is done i have several other chunks of modules that i've got to get through and get diagrammed out

Like the billings for example i've got a you know map out the different membership plans that we have and uh how we do the math to figure out um if you if you're telling me which i think you just did is that you have the ability to do math inside of custom fields that feature alone is a game changer that's something we're targeting yes in the probably in definitely this year in the latter half of this year where you'll be able to actually take dynamic placeholders and [Music] put them in math equations for things like charts so you know we have a chart we have chart blocks and portal pages so yes you can return a simple value but what if you

Could uh return the result of an equation based on values that are entered by your your customers or clients then you could really start to do some fancy listen i'll pose this to you what about a loyalty program i'm actually thinking i want to reward my parents and i want to reward my coaches for the time that they've spent doing what they do and if they're a member of our organization that i you know at the one year anniversary i want to be able to know when that happens i want to be able to send a notification that i have these number of people that have you know come up or or even just do it automatically behind the scenes where we send out a coupon code or a a discount or something like that you're you're right

In line with some of our thinking someone we're in sort of some pre pre-planning for some gamification features and badges badging features that go right along with what you're saying wow um you know so if they complete this step add 100 points you know or whatever the denomination is that that we that we settle on or go with but some you know and when when that you reach x number of points then do this so present them uh a form that says choose your reward or something and let them choose it and you know and then on the back end we got to figure out how to do the notifications and fulfillment of those um of those gifts but the the potential here is it

It's that would be that would be really neat and especially for those who are building something like a membership site or some complex restricted access or community type setup that kind of thing would be really neat so just looking at all this in in the zoom out mode right i mean i think what a lot of people might see is wow this is a lot of work but but i'd just like to maybe have you comment on and you have touched on a little bit you know things of value don't come cheaply right and some people will use a simple setup some people need more complex but i think you have illustrated already and talked about

A little bit the amount of work that you're going to be able to save on this automation when this is complete when this is working when you have layered it on layered it built it tweaked it now it's working just like you need it to and i mean how much work can that save you i mean it's hours and hours i mean it it can save your look i'll go back to the original story uh when you're i'm an avid hiker i i do backpacking for weeks on end i'll go out and purify my own water and you know spend you know a few weeks in a tent in the mountains somewhere and if you don't if you don't have a map of what your organization is about you're gonna get lost and how much time energy and

Are you gonna spend as i did with this product i spent like i said i started probably half dozen to a dozen times trying to figure this thing out and it wasn't necessarily the software so much as what it what do i really want to do with this software and once i started getting clear on that then i can start mapping those things that i want to do with the elements inside the software that will do it and it's just so much easier to flow out when you understand what came before and what's coming after and what your target at the end of the day is going to look like plus from my perspective i can take these diagrams i can just tuck them away in the in the board notes and stuff and when i leave which as an elected person i have you

Know a limited number of terms that i can serve when i'm gone i can hand this off to the next person and actually have a succession plan that makes sense uh for the organization so yeah i'm i'm look as a management consultant this is i totally understand how much work goes into creating some of this stuff and how much people are willing to pay uh to have that kind of work done it's incredibly incredibly valuable to get this kind of stuff done and then once you have this then you can go into the needs list mode where you can say okay i know that i'm going to need a prospect circle i know that i'm going to need a a start page i know that i'm going to need a list an email marketing list here i know i'm going to leave a shared folder there and

Then you can go and start building your components and yes maybe start with here's an example you start with the circles now let's build out all my circles i know what they are here's the description then i'm going to go build out all my marketing lists and then build out all those other things and then when it comes time to create that first intake form right where all those questions are asked then you have answers to everything instead of an empty drop down menu and you say well okay now i have to go make that planning ahead really will make your process much smoother as you you did a needs list for me just before we started this call where you'd like use some kind of something simple like a sticky software or something just wrote down here's the circles that i need here's

The right and how much easier was there we were talking about so yeah so i need circle x and circle y and just make your list then go into the song you do this because you're a software developer and this is what you think anyways but you know guys like me we if i don't have a visual in front of me just get it started and once i get that started uh that's incredibly valuable but um yeah anyway well you've done a great job here and uh i think you really deserve to pat yourself on the back and i think you you make made a great start you know why don't we see the party once you're getting to be done and then i wanna i wanna keep an eye on this and and help you along any way we can okay

Thank you mike yeah well dave i appreciate you taking the time to be with us today i hope this is helpful for a lot of people out there to see this how this thought process starts how it can be broken down into these components and then identify the elements that are going to be needed to make it successful and you know what we're looking at here is a pretty complex setup many of you don't need that many of you need something a little simpler so for some of you you know you'll take this node here and you'll just attach something like this node here and you're done and that's your that's what you need for others you'll have one one need here and another need here and and they'll be slightly different but not very different so

On somewhere on the scale of complexity everybody is is finding themselves but in general i think that you'll see that with some planning you can you can get a handle on what you need and start to move forward with it uh don't be afraid to jump into the community and ask for help and and and submit you know this you just just say here's what i'm trying to do here's what i have in mind here's what i'm thought about but maybe somebody's done it differently and and as dave was so maybe you'll be surprised by the the response but uh we're happy to have you and dave thanks again for your for your uh if you want to shout out to anybody or talk about your your organization and no no i don't have to

Do any of that um i i'll just i'll just thank you because uh the fact that you're so accessible um and the community some of the the responses i don't know if you were able to show some of that but you know guys like jeff kaufman i would say you know he did some thinking about it he he actually went out and he approached the problem a little bit differently by going out and looking at at the the way that zapier looks at the software and that helped him to clarify uh what's going on and i and that's the kind of really useful feedback um i mean not to diminish this kind of conversation my god this is uh this is unprecedented for me to be on the phone with the guy who's actually creating the software and helping me walk through how i'm going to use it i mean that's what a

Privilege to be here for me but this this is accessible to everyone right it's accessible to everybody i mean jeff just jumped in there looks like three days ago from when we're recording and um and he was just genuinely trying to be helpful and you know i i definitely appreciate people like that uh in the in this community and and and people like you so thank you to you and everybody else from me thanks for and to everyone who is jumping in here and helping and uh thanks again david i'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up and maybe we'll see uh we'll have you again and get a look at your updated onboarding mind map and maybe um get some get a look at how your system is working and and get some updates but if

Not best of luck and thanks again for joining us thanks mike all right thanks everyone we'll call that a wrap hope to see you in our weekly webinars and uh in the community so thanks again have a great rest of your day thank you you