VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Notification Diagnostics

Test your notification events by right-clicking on them and selecting Test this event. VSys will describe the events filters and show you:

• The notifications it would have generated (testing creates but then discards the notifications instead of saving them),
• How many were generated,
• How many were excluded based on filters,
• How many were excluded because a previous event for the same item and notification event, and
• The net count of notifications that would have been generated if the process was run for real and not testing.

Re-notification

Seeing "removed x notifications as already notified"?

To avoid sending out the same notification over and over again, VSys tracks what notifications have been sent before. In this case VSys looked at the item in question - training record, assignment, application, what have you - and found a previous notification based on the same event (for example, "VSys Live Application") in the past, and so won't send it again here to the same recipient.

To see the notifications sent in regard to a specific item, right-click in that item in someone's profile and select See tracked changes or See notifications. VSys will pop up a list of the notifications it generated in the past.

Consider the event "Training statuses". We're allowing the Statuses Cancelled by volunteer, Failed and Registered. VSys will send a notification when someone is registered for the course. A few days later the volunteer cancels online, and VSys will not send out a notification about that. Why? Because this event in this subscription has already sent a notification, and VSys has no way of knowing that you meant that a change in status was enough to warrant a new notification. So what should we do? Create two different events:

• One for the Status of Registered. As before VSys will dutifully send out the notification when someone is registered.
• And a second with the Status of Cancelled by volunteer. This will still not work because VSys, as noted previously, won't send a notification based on the same event for the same item, and this is the same event, "Training statuses" as the first.
• In the second event, check the box When checking for duplicate notifications, Training statuses notifications generated separately don't count as duplicates. Huzzah! Now, after generating the second notification, looking at the training whose Status is Cancelled by volunteer, when it looks at the previous notifications it will ignore the one that was based on the first event.

Checking the box Allow re-notification for the same item after some period of time tells VSys to ignore any previous notifications based on this item, whether or not they were created based on this event.

Be careful with Allow re-notification...: if you set that to, for example, ten minutes, then these trainings will send out new notifications as often as every ten minutes - even though nothing has necessarily changed about those trainings!