Support Articles

Let’s explore how you can present your opportunity for people to learn more and get a good feel for what this is all about.  Let’s review through your options to help promote your opportunity. Event Website Sometimes an organization has a specific website for an opportunity, if so, place that URL here.  You already have the link back to your main organization page so don’t worry about loading anything here if you don’t have a specific event website. Event Twitter Handle What’s your event Twitter handle?  This helps people post to Twitter and Instagram.   Event Facebook Page Sometimes you’ll also create a Facebook page to help build awareness of your opportunity.  Paste that Facebook page URL here.  Welcome Video  Here you can paste a YouTube or Vimeo video link if you have a specific video about this trip.  This is a great place to help quickly snapshot what this opportunity is all about.  If you don’t have a promo video consider loading a highlights video from a previous opportunity.   Photos Photos are always excellent to help capture the opportunity and help people see themselves in the place of serving there as well.  We recommend somewhere around 12-20 photos per opportunity.  

Many opportunities require preparation meetings, retreats, or even phone meetings for team preparation.  ServiceReef makes this simple to manage so that you can effectively prepare your team for this upcoming opportunity.   To get started click on the “Add Meeting” button where you will be prompted to this next page asking for the following information: Name - What is the name of your meeting?  Think about if it’s a retreat, a packing meeting, a conference call and name it something that describes what the meeting actually is. Description - Here you can post any additional information, the purpose of the meeting, and call in information for conference calls.   Location - Is this meeting happening at a physical location or virtual?  Here you can post an address, directions, or whatever information is needed to know where this meeting will occur.   Start/End Date/Time - Here you set the parameters of the meetings schedule  Required - Is this meeting required for your participants to attend?   Participants will be notified reminders of these upcoming meetings as well as have these listed in their update emails.  These are also visible on the main opportunity page for each event.  

Every opportunity is unique so we’ve built the requirements to match the uniqueness of how you run opportunities and how these all unique form each other.  These are open fields to give you maximum flexibility.  We’ll help think through a few ideas with you to get you started. Maximum Spots Available How many spaces are you looking to fill for this opportunity?  Set a number here and ServiceReef will automatically shut down opportunity registration at the point of filling all of these spaces.  NOTE: If the opportunity requires an application the opportunity will show spaces available until the maximum number of applications have been accepted for the opportunity.   Restrictions Do you have any restrictions for those people applying/attending this opportunity.  Consider things like age, physical ability, etc.   Prerequisites  Do participants have to have completed certain prerequisites in order to attend this opportunity?  This might be a training you require or perhaps you require serving locally before serving globally.   Responsibilities  What are the expectations for those who will be attending this opportunity?  List as much as you need to here - this is where you can capture the work people will be doing and any other expectations that need to be noted. Next Steps - Preparation Many times we have additional steps for participants once they’ve applied/been accepted for one of our opportunities.  Here you can list items such as apply for a Passport, talk with your family, fundraising, or any other preparation steps you might have.   Save Changes Don’t forget to save changes every time you update your opportunity information.  

This is our starting point for setting up an event so we have a lot of detail questions to answer.  Let’s unpack these one at a time: Name What you going to name your opportunity?  You should consider a name that’s simple to understand and comprehend.  Many of our organization will also place some general date context in the title, something like GhanaFall2016.  Also consider if this is an opportunity to a restricted access country - you may not want to use the actual name of the country in the title.  Some organizations will use symbols to replace certain letters.  We will cover opportunity security in other sections of the Knowledge Base. Start Date / End Date Each opportunity has a unique start date/time and end date/time.  ServiceReef can manage a simple 2-hour opportunity at a local soup kitchen all the way to some six month long internship.  These date ranges will be how ServiceReef orders your events in your opportunity directory (by event start date).   Time Zone Be sure to note the time zone of your opportunity as you may have participants coming from various places around the United States or the world.  ServiceReef simply manages the user’s experience based on their location.   Available On This is asking when you would like for this opportunity to be published to your public opportunity listing page.  This allows you to stack upcoming opportunities into your system without the public being aware of them until the date you select.  You can always change this later if you needed to push this event’s launch back (or forward).  The time zone comes in helpful here as the opportunity will go live in accordance to the time zone noted above.   NOTE: If you don’t set an Available On date the opportunity will go live upon your publishing of the opportunity.   Registration Deadline Most organizations prefer to set an end date for opportunities in order to finalize flight reservations, prepare the team, and other reasons.  You can choose if you would like to set a registration deadline or leave blank to allow participants to sign up until the day/time of the opportunity. NOTE: You do have the ability to restrict the quantity of people on each of your opportunities - we’ll cover that in the Requirements area of the Knowledge Base. Description Tell us about your opportunity. You can share the purpose, the vision, the goal, the history, etc.  This is someone’s first introduction to your opportunity to make it conversational and description… invite them into the amazing work that’s happening.   Service Categories  You can select up to three service categories for each of your opportunities.  These categories allow for ServiceReef to make better recommendations to those in your community and they allow for you to gain meaningful insights on various interests of those who serve with you.   You’ll notice that if you select Medical & Healthcare that an entire new directory populates on the page.  ServiceReef has a partnership with MedicalMissions.com and here’s how it works… for each of the areas you select will allow for this opportunity to populate on MedicalMissions.com for each of these Neighborhoods.   Privacy Level How private would you like to make this opportunity?  You have several options and we default to a public opportunity.  Let’s explore these a little more: Public - These opportunities are visible to everyone.  They will populate on your master list of events and even show up on other recommendation pages for other organizations and other individuals. Organization Only - These opportunities are visible to those viewing your organization page only.   Secure - These opportunities will not show up on any list.  They each create a unique URL that must be given to each team member to apply for the event.  These events also will not show event details (other than dates) to anyone who has not applied AND been accepted.   Primary Contact This information is how someone will reach out to you if they have questions.  You can have different contact information for each of your opportunities - sometimes this is someone at your organization while other times it might be your team leader.  You can select who this point of contact is and you can always change this later.  This person’s information will populate on the opportunity page.   Opportunity Location Don’t forget to tell people where this opportunity is occurring.  We don’t make this mandatory in order to allow for security specifications but you can enter this data to help people know where they are going.  We highly recommend you at least note the country in order to generate meaningful reports for your participants and your donors.   Save Changes Don’t forget to save changes every time you update your opportunity information.    

ServiceReef is built to handle many complexities of your organization and how you manage your service opportunities.  We will walk through every detail of these complexities through the ServiceReef Knowledge Base… but let’s start somewhere even bigger than the functional aspects and make sure we know the following reasons and answers: What is the purpose of this opportunity? Who are we aiming to serve? Why is there a need for this team? How are we partnering with those whom we are serving? How much is this all going to cost? Who are the idea team members? Who is the team leader(s)? How will we work to make our efforts sustainable once we’re gone? How will we engage donors for this event? How would donors like to be engaged? There are many more questions we could ask but this is a starting point to lay down some foundations for establishing a healthy missions trip.  You will see that ServiceReef does far more than simply helping to manage the aspects of your serving/missions opportunities… we work hard to help guide your people to even greater steps of missional living or living out their faith consistently as they serve others.  

What are financial milestones? ServiceReef allows you to set certain milestones (or deposits) along the way for your trip participants.  These milestones serve as goal points, with dates, for when certain funds are due to the organization for the event.   Where does a trip participant view these dates / milestones? These dates are viewable on the event page on the financial tab. Do these dates trigger any automated features? No, these are purely guidance dates set by you but there is no system automation connected with their fundrasing.  

How do I set trip costs? There are many variables to setting up a trip, and many just for the financial management of an event.  Thankfully you have a wide range of options for how you will set up your trip.  Let's unpack these more so they are not confusing.   Where do I go to access this screen? Your organization's ServiceReef account / Event management page / Financial  Are there any costs associated with your event? Most events have some cost (either for the participant to pay or to raise funds).  ServiceReef is first asking if there is some cost associated.  If yes, then click the YES option for the first question.  You will then have the option to enter the total cost of the event and the due date for the total amount.   Are you going to allow donations? If you select YES, then ServiceReef will automatically open the button on the trip page and the individual's page for allowing donations.  If you select NO, then ServiceReef will only allow for this individual to make payment for the event.   What about application fees? ServiceReef doees allow for application fees to be added.  We will unpack this in another post.  Two things for now - first, the application cost is not included in the overall trip cost that you enter here, and second, you must enter the value for this amount on the Application page for event set up.     There are more financial features at your disposal within ServiceReef that we will explore in subsequent posts.  

What type of security does ServiceReef offer for events? Any of us who are engaged in global service events understand the complexity of managing events in "restricted access" countries.  The security of the teams traveling and those you are serving with is significant.   ServiceReef breaks the security of each event into three primary categories.  These three categories allow you (the admin) to set the trip's security level to your deisred level of protection. Three tiers of security Public - These events are public to everyone.  They will show up on your organization's main page and recommended to others on various pages. Organization Only - These events only show up on your organization's ServiceReef page.  ServiceReef does recommend events to people based on their interests so your event has the potential to populate in another person's recommendation list even if not affiliated with your organization.  To turn that off, select this option. Secure - These events are our highest level of security.  Once you select this option the event will not show up on your organization page (or on recommendations).  You must provide someone the direct URL for these events to have them register.  The event page is stripped of the majority of its data and the user isn't allowed to see the trip specifics until they have applied AND they have been accepted.     These three tiers of security allow you to set the necessary level of security for each of your events.  

Did you know each team member has their own personal donation page? We all know the challenges of fundraising for a missions trip... the letters, the emails, the follow up, and the thank you notes.  And it's not just the trip participant that has the challenge, we as trip leaders and organization leaders have challenges engaging our trip participants in their fundraising.   Our goal at ServiceReef is to make this as simple as can be for the trip participant and the organization... but also to respect the donors as best possible.  Let's dive into a few features to help make this better for everyone. Personal Donation Page Every participant on your events have their very own personal donation page.  The user can customize their fundraising letter, load a cover photo, link a video, and present their own landing page for fundraising. Team Stories Stories that are shared by each member of the team all show up on the personal donation page.  We've done this in order for the donor to not only see stories shared by this person, but also the other team members.   Donate Button Each personal donation page has a simple and obvious donate button for others to give online to this individual.  Each time a donation is made this person's balance is automatically updated.  

What is an embed widget? Great question!  An embed widget is a small piece of HTML code that allows for content from another site to site natively inside of another website.  For example, in our case, you can display your entire trip list from ServiceReef right into your own organization's website.   How do I embed this in my site? Go to your organization's admin page and look for the navigation title "Embed Widget".  Here you will see options for various types of Embed Widgets.  Copy the HTML code and paste in your own website.  Publish and refresh your webpage and take a look how it looks with your brand new event table.   What information is in the table? ServiceReef includes the trip name, trip dates, trip location, button to apply, button to donate.   Note: Secure trips do not populate on the table. What types of Embed Widgets are there? ServiceReef provides a widget for the following: All Events All Domestic Events All International Events All Organization Stories  Why should we use an Embed Widget? This is a great opportuntiy for you to share your events and your stories right on your own website.  A simple click allows the reader to dig deeper into your events and your stories.  

Things to consider What do you hope to accomplish with your application? Will you have essay questions? How much time is realistic for someone to take in completing your application? Only ask questions that provide information on the decision criteria you determined early or that you will need to communicate.   Questions you might consider asking (but not limited to) Remember that ServiceReef will automatically give you the applicant’s name. Preferred Name Current Address Permanent Address Citizenship Marital Status Cell Phone Email Gender Passport Information Educational Background Professional Background Work Experience Local Church Engagement Volunteer Experience Personal Skills or Hobbies Strengths and Weaknesses Cross Cultural Experience Practical Skills Creative Skills Concerns they have Most excited about Agreement to Terms Comments   Emergency Questions Some organizations will ask emergency questions either on the application or after. Here are a few things you might consider asking: Name Phone Numbers Relationship Insurance Information Medical History Critical Medical Needs Allergy Information 

Qualities of your team members What personality traits are we looking for? Do they need to have certain professional skills? How many is our ideal team size? What if someone can’t make it? What types of cultural awareness is needed? What age ranges work best? Is this a mixed gender event or just for men or women? What expectations do you have for your team members (before, during, and after)? Creating a grading scale (example to the right) Write out each of the application areas by title (left column) Make a sheet for each individual who applies Score each individual with an objective tool like this Discuss with review team each applicant and their score Use comments area to expand your thought