One of the bigger projects that has been in the works is the new Tour and General Induction, for several reasons:
- Currently, a new member has to visit the site at least twice to join
- Onboarding new members is a significant effort, the General Inductions run every two weeks (used to be every week) and it takes at least an hour to go through all the info
- Restricted times to do induction means some new members can’t join, as they can’t come on Tuesday nights
- There is a bit of paperwork involved to get someone through induction, and anywhere we can reduce the load will be a boon to any exec team and volunteers
- Teaching the same material repeatedly is boring and not-fun. I can personally attest to this.
There has been a ton of effort as several elements have needed to be pulled together to make it happen. I can’t go any further without acknowledging @jaimyn for his work on the portal, @GeoffC for his work on the card printer, @Antifoo for shooting and editing the videos, and @devians for his help and experience with creating Canvas courses, helping to write video scripts, and stepping in to shoot when I was knackered. I’ve been working on a script for tours, so anyone who wants to help by running one knows how to describe each area, and can name bits of equipment (Something I’m still working on). Tour guides aren’t expected to know everything about every machine, so I’ve left that open as much as I can, the wiki and discord are the go-to for any curly questions.
So, why the Forum post if so much has been done? Because now it needs testing! With real humans! And feedback is a good thing! And if all feedback is here in this post, you can see if I’ve already been told about a stuff-up, so I’ll be going through replies to this post to fix anything you find wrong- typos, bad questions, wrong answers.
Just to give some context, the current joining flow is:
- Person comes for a tour
- They are directed to go to the website to create a portal account, when that is done, they receive an email to book in for induction on Eventbrite
- They come to induction
- They sign the members agreement, this is scanned along with an RFID card, ID and any concession evidence
- Scans are organised in Gdrive according to induction date, RFID card numbers are entered against portal profiles
- They receive their card and are emailed their first invoice
- If they pay their first invoice right away, exec can sight the payment and authorise access
- If they elect to pay later, the new member must email proof of payment to exec, who then authorise access.
- Treasurer reconciles the invoice along with (as of writing) 168 other member invoices each month.
This is the proposed new flow, as I understand it:
Tour Stuff
For the tour guides, here’s what I’ve put together for them: Tour script for new onboarding flow - Google Docs
General Induction Stuff
You will need a Canvas account to look at this, but it is worth the effort as quite a few HSBNE courses are already on Canvas, and there are plans for more!
Here’s the canvas link to the online course: https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/2406446
Another aspect of this new flow is the move to Stripe billing, to reduce the load on the Treasurer and make it easier for members to stay up to date with their membership fees. I’m excited to see this all coming together to help HSBNE grow, and take away some of the drudge work of running the space, and getting to make Something Awesome!
Looking forward to feedback and comments! 