Cool Qlubb Tchotchkes!

Check out our new Qlubb tchotchkes (click for the origin of this word). We have been waiting for these gifts for awhile - doesn't everything take longer than originally planned?

Anyways, we are excited that we can now send our users a small token of our appreciation at their support and usage over the past several months.

The aluminum water bottle (non-plastic, yeah!) looks great and is so functional! "Your Groups...Refreshingly Simple"

The ballpoint ben - orange and striking! "Your Groups...Markedly Simple"

And finally, our white, jersey cotton t-shirts! "Your Groups...Basically Simple"

Anyways, we are going to be sending our Qlubb founders an aluminum bottle over the next few weeks - if you don't receive an email, please drop me a note sophia at qlubb dot com.

New File Sharing Released

As of this morning, we released file sharing capabilities for our users. Anyone in the group can upload, share and download documents (up to 50 MB free) within the group. Anyone can add descriptions and also be able to associate the documents with an event or a particular date. It's great to be able to share things like the group handbook, forms to fill out and various other flyers and documents. It's the central place where everybody knows where the latest copy is and it reduces the need for paper because you can distribute and store it all online.

What's also very cool (or at least we think) about file sharing is that you can associate a file to a specific event or to a date. Now you can store all of the files associated with an event, all in the same location as the information and planning for the event. So if you have, for instance, a fund raiser, you can have all of the information about the fundraiser (.pdf documents, waiver forms, etc.) next to all of the volunteer signup sheets, next to the RSVP's, next to all of the files that are associated with that event. No more searching through emails to find that file attachment, or going through a list of all of the files the group has ever uploaded in a repository to search for the right one -- it's all there in Qlubb.

With the date association, users can now link files to specific dates for time sensitive documents like a monthly newsletter.

We hope you like file sharing and believe it'll help out a lot of groups. Of course, please do give us feedback if you have ideas and suggestions on how we can improve it further.

Another couple features we released today are improvements to the task and events. On events, we list all of the open volunteering opportunities to encourage people to volunteer for events. We want to lift up tasks more prominently so that people know how they can help and to encourage participation. We also added location and time to events as well - something many of our sports teams really wanted. On the tasks side, we also added dates to tasks. Our users like to be able to set tasks on specific days either for a specific day of an event or for days leading up to an event or even post event (like cleanup, picture book creation, etc.).

We hope these features really help you all out. Let us know how we can continue to improve at info@qlubb.com!

When YahooGroups Becomes a Tool for Disorganization

So your group just had their first meeting and somebody invariably suggests, why don’t we set up a Yahoogroup so we can communicate? For some situations, Yahoogroups (and others like it) is a useful tool that helps people send broadcast messages to each other without having to remember everyone’s email address.

But when group email is used for anything other than broadcasting messages to everyone, you quickly start seeing its limitations. The effect ranges from the mildly annoying to the comically bad.

One of our employee's on just started a new preschool this school year. Since starting preschool this August, this preschool's YahooGroup has become the biggest source of non-useful email (euphemism).

Why? Let us count the ways this YahooGroups has been comical and, increasingly, annoying...

1) COLLECTING INFORMATION: In efforts to create a class roster, the room parent blasted the whole group with a request for everyone's contact information. Seems harmless enough, until everyone replied back to the email and every family received 15 emails. (15 EXTRA EMAILS SHE DID NOT NEED)

2) COORDINATION: One parent asked if anyone wanted to plan a playgroup afterschool and sent the request over the email list. 4 parents volunteered their house and their dates, 6 others replied that they could attend, 3 others replied they could not attend. (13 EXTRA EMAILS SHE DID NOT NEED)

3) INFORMATION: Three parents sent an email asking when preschool picture day would be. Two people responded back. (6 EXTRA EMAILS SHE DID NOT NEED)

In the past 6 weeks, she has received over 30 emails from this one YahooGroups, of which only 3 have been useful, the other 31 have gone straight to the trashbin.

What is the problem? Email is a one-directional, broadcast vehicle that allows the message sender to "fire-and-forget". Because it is non-transactional and decentralized, there is no central place to keep the "master list" nor a place to collaborate/plan/organize.

At Qlubb, we do provide group emails for the activities that require broadcast but we are driven by our desire to provide a destination where groups can collaborate and organize. With tools like shared sign up sheets, web publishing of events, photos and resources Qlubb provides the needed centralized and transactional component critical to group collaboration.

Send us your email distribution list horror/humorous/annoying stories... We'll publish the best and send you a Qlubb gift pack.

Some new resource pages for you!

We updated a few of our web pages to better help our users and prospective users understand how Qlubb can help them.

We revamped our Learn More pages to explain most of our key features that help many groups become better organized.

We also illustrated 6 examples of group types so that you can see screenshots of how Qlubb can help playgroups, classrooms, families, hobby clubs, sports teams and faith groups get online and productive.

We also included new resource pages for each of these group types as well. We welcome your contributions that you'd like to share with others! Just send a note to info@qlubb.com and we'll review and add it.

Here are the new resource pages:
http://www.qlubb.com/resource/playgroups
http://www.qlubb.com/resource/roomparent
http://www.qlubb.com/resource/sports
http://www.qlubb.com/resource/families
http://www.qlubb.com/resource/faithgroups
http://www.qlubb.com/resource/clubs

Enjoy!

A few extra reminders went out...

Hello dear customers.

We apologize but yesterday we had a glitch where we may have sent a few repeat reminders. I wanted to explain how that happened and the steps we're taking to prevent that from happening.

Every night we send out our batch of scheduled reminders. Last night we ran into an error with our third party email provider. We were sending out too many reminder emails and that caused a connection error part way through the email job. Some of the reminders went through successfully and many did not. At that point, our development team ran the script again after making some changes that should have alleviated the connection problem, but again it only ran part of the way. After hunting down the problem we were able to run it successfully so that all reminders were sent out properly. We made the decision to err on the side of caution by making sure everybody got their reminders at the cost of having some repeat reminders be sent out.

Our development team is in the process of switching to another vendor that can handle more capacity. During the switching process, our email process ran before midnight which caused a repeat of the reminders from yesterday. So all in all, everybody received a duplicate copy of any reminders from yesterday and some received a few more. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience but wanted to let you know we are taking the steps to prevent duplicate reminders from being sent out.

Please let us know at help@qlubb.com if you have any questions.