Hitting the notification sweetspot

Since our beta launch in September we’ve been listening to your feedback and making improvements to Squaddle. We’ve just published a Changelog, which we’ll update whenever we release a major change. It already contains a few useful changes:

❇️ The Outstanding Payments view now itemises unpaid activities so that admins can provide full details to participants who have questions when they receive a payment reminder

❇️ We’ve improved the message users receive when they have been invited to multiple activities. It’s also now possible to reply ALL to respond in or out to multiple invites at once

Today, we’re launching a slightly bigger change to improve notifications for admins.

One of our main objectives with Squaddle is to reduce distraction and screen time for organisers, and so we’ve been careful not to build in unnecessary notifications. Sometimes though, a timely notification can remove the need to check more regularly, and so we’ve just added some new notifications that only apply to admin users.

New notifications

When the minimum number of participants is reached

If a minimum is set, this update allows organisers to stop frequently checking to see if they’ve got enough people signed up yet, and shows how long an activity is taking to fill up.

In future we may extend this to give the option of notifying only when the minimum hasn’t been reached (we decided against this for now because we found a big range in the preferred notice period for this kind of notification).

When the maximum number of participants is reached

This seemed like an obvious notification to have alongside the minimum. Because of Squaddle’s reserve functionality, there’s nothing an organiser needs to do on receiving this notification, but we thought it would be useful to know that the maximum has been reached.

When a participant drops out

Dropouts (especially close to the activity start time) are often a cause for concern. Prior to this notification, there was no way to easily tell if a participant had dropped out after previously being IN (unless you saw them on the IN list).

By notifying admins when someone drops out, they can take immediate action to fill the resulting gap (for example sending out a message to members who’ve not yet responded to the invite).

Changes to messages

In addition to the new notifications, we’ve also made some changes to who receives messages.

As discussed in our previous blog post, Squaddle’s messaging functionality can be helpful in ensuring that only the right people receive messages rather than the whole group being distracted. However, we found that sometimes admins needed to communicate with each other to check what had been sent, which was self-defeating.

We’ve now made it so that any admin who is either IN or hasn’t responded (i.e. they are not OUT) will receive all activity messages sent by other admins. This is so that if one admin sends a message to non-responders, the other admins (even if they are already IN) will receive it too. This avoids any confusion about who is chasing for responses and what has been communicated.

We’ve also made it so that even if the admin sending the message is OUT for that activity, they will still receive a copy of the message so that they can be sure it’s been sent.

Remember that you can change where you receive notifications at any time via your Account Settings. You can receive notifications via Email, WhatsApp, or both.

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These changes should mean that you don’t have to log in to check on your squad quite so often, so we hope you find them useful.

Keep the feedback coming! Let us know how you’re getting on with these updates or any of the others you see on the Changelog, and we’ll keep working hard to make Squaddle even better. Thanks!