The team at Harvest has been designing great new features and making improvements to The HiVE so that our customers and your end-users have even better experiences with their online public participation.

In our latest Release we have added a new ‘InstaFeed’ tool that allows you to display images from your Instagram account directly on your project websites. Selected images can be pulled from the account that match a certain hashtag or are even tagged with a certain location. We're interested to see how our clients might use this as a creative method for public participation.

For customers on Premium packages, Team Leads can also view two new report types: Teams and Groups. This means that in addition to viewing the reporting at a project level, you can now see the aggregated results for related projects. This will allow you to track overall performance for a group of projects.

However, one of the most significant improvements in the new Update is the work we have done on the user interface for the Block Settings of the participation tools. Here, you will notice that settings have been more logically grouped into consistent headings or tabs across all tools. A general description for each of these sections is as follows:

  • Basic - This is where you will find settings about the overall activity, including the general title, description. In the case of the Quick Poll and Social map, 'Activity Title' is called 'Activity Question' and is used as the main call to action for the Activity.
  • Activity - This contains the main configurable parameters of the activity. For the most part, these are the critical settings that must be setup to get the activity up and running. It is also where you can configure the Member Attributes of the activity to collect user profile information above and beyond your registration process.
  • Display - This contains settings to do with how the activity will display on the front-end.
  • Advanced - This contains a number of settings that are considered as ancillary to the main activity settings. This section is also where you will find the user registration and moderation options for the activity.
  • Notifications - This contains settings relating to setting up the potential notifications for the activity. These may include confirmation notifications to your contributors or notifications sent to you each time a new contribution is made.

In addition to these changes, the language of each setting has been revised to be clearer to the user. Heading labels are now consistent across the tools, and more helpful descriptions have been added to better communicate what each setting does.

A number of binary 'switches' have also been incorporated as an easy way to configure the settings. Users can toggle the setting simply by clicking the switch to determine whether it is on or off.

For a full list of all new features, improvements and bug fixes included in the update, please read the Release Notes on the Helpdesk as well as more detailed documentation on each tool on the Help Docs.