Tent Docs & Guides
Tent Docs & Guides
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Opportunities

You can use the Opportunities feature to advertise things that your members may wish to sign up to or apply to. Some examples of how Tent customers can use the opportunities feature:

  • Advertising a lead volunteer role to a community of volunteers
  • Advertising an internship to a community of programme participants
  • Sharing external job opportunities amongst a professional network of programme graduates

Opportunities are different from Events. Opportunities are longer-term (or are potentially open-ended) whereas events run at a specified time / date for a short number of hours or days. Unlike Events, Opportunities may also include an application element, rather than just signing up.

Contents:

Switching on the Opportunities Feature

Like all features, you can toggle Opportunities on and off as you require. When Opportunities are switched off, your members won’t see the Opportunities item in the sidebar menu. Admins will always see all features, but a banner at the top of the page will inform them if the feature they’re viewing has been switched off.

You can toggle Opportunities on or off under Platform Setup > Toggle Features as and when you require them.

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Toggling Opportunities off doesn’t stop you from creating opportunities, it just makes the entire feature invisible to non-admins. If you want to create some opportunities prior to launching the feature to your members - or if you just want to have a play around and a practice - then simply switch it off in Platform Setup and get creating.

Creating an Opportunity

Creating a Draft Opportunity

All Opportunities are first created as a draft. This allows you to preview the Opportunity before it’s published, or save it for later if you’re not yet ready to make it available to your members.

Creating an Opportunity is simple:

  1. Navigate to the Opportunities section and click ‘create opportunity’
  2. Give your Opportunity a name, a summary (which will appear on the opportunities listing page) and a description (which will be visible when clicking through to the opportunity).
  3. If you wish to, you can also optionally:
    1. Attach additional documents (e.g. a detailed role description) using ‘attach files’
    2. Direct your members to an external application site using ‘apply URL’. This is useful where the opportunities being shared with members are external (e.g. outside job opportunities they may be interested in).
  4. Specify which groups you would like your opportunity to be visible to. By default the opportunity is not visible to any groups, meaning that if you don’t select any groups from the dropdown it will be invisible to all members.
  5. If you have added any custom fields to opportunities, you can fill these in as required. All custom fields are optional, so only those you fill in will appear on the opportunity. If some / all of the custom fields are not relevant to the particular opportunity then leave them blank.
  6. Under Time, choose when you would like your opportunity to be visible. You have two options:
    1. The default setting is for ‘publish at specific time?’ to be toggled off. This means that the opportunity will be visible to members from the point at which it is manually published to the point at which it is manually unpublished. Use this option when you want your opportunity to be available for an unspecified time period, or on a rolling basis.
    2. If you want to make an opportunity available for a specified timeframe, you should toggle ‘publish at specific time?’ on. You can then set your desired start and end date and time. Be aware that you will still need to publish your draft event in order for it to appear to members at the specified start time.
  7. Press ‘save opportunity’ to save it as a draft. It will not publish it, so it’s still invisible to members at this stage.
  8. You can now see what your opportunity will look like when it is published. If you are happy with this preview you can press ‘publish’ straight away. This would make it appear to members straight away (if published without a specific time) or at the specified start point (if published for a specific time frame). If you do not wish to publish yet, you can return to your event at any time under the unpublished opportunities list.

Duplicating an Opportunity

If you need to create an opportunity that’s identical or very similar to another current or previous opportunity, you can use the duplicate feature to save time:

  1. Click on the opportunity you wish to duplicate. This can be a published, unpublished, upcoming or past opportunity
  2. Click on the down arrow next to ‘Edit opportunity’ and select ‘Duplicate opportunity’
  3. This will create a new draft opportunity, pre-populated with the same information as the opportunity you have duplicated. The only difference will be that the name of the opportunity is now ‘Copy of [original opportunity name]’.
  4. Change any of the details you need to change.
  5. When you’re satisfied, press ‘save’. This will save your opportunity as a draft. It will not publish it, so it’s still invisible to members at this stage.
  6. You can now see what your opportunity will look like when it is published. If you are happy with this preview you can press ‘publish’ straight away. This would make it appear to members straight away (if published without a specific time) or at the specified start point (if published for a specific time frame). If you do not wish to publish yet, you can leave it as a draft and return to your event at any time under unpublished opportunities.

Publishing an Opportunity

  1. Navigate to the opportunities section, and then click on unpublished opportunities
  2. Click on the draft opportunity you wish to publish
  3. Select ‘publish’
  4. If your opportunity was created without a specific time frame, it will now be visible to members and will remain visible until manually unpublished. If it was created with a specific time frame beginning in the future, it will not move to the upcoming opportunities list, and will become visible to members at the specified start time.

Editing an Opportunity

You can edit an Opportunity at any time:

  1. Click on the opportunity you wish to edit. It could be a published, unpublished, upcoming or past opportunity.
  2. Select ‘Edit opportunity’
  3. Edit the details you wish to change
  4. Press ‘Save’

Custom Fields on Opportunities

Opportunities automatically have a number of essential and optional fields. If there is additional information you wish to display on your opportunities, then you can do this using custom fields.

To create a custom field:

  1. Navigate to Opportunities > Custom Fields
  2. Select ‘add field’
  3. Give the field a label and some help text. Set the type of field
  4. Set the visibility of the field. If you select ‘visible on individual opportunity page only’ then members will only be able to see it when they click through to an individual opportunity page. If you select ‘visible on opportunities list’ then they will see it on the individual page and in the table on the main opportunities listing page.

All custom fields are optional fields. This means that you do not have to populate them for any individual opportunity, and they will not appear on the opportunity page if left blank. Please note, however, that if you have selected them to be ‘visible on opportunities list’ then not populating the field will leave blanks on the listings page.

Managing Interested Members

Viewing Interested Members

If a member wants to express interest in an event, they can click ‘declare interest’ at the top of the opportunity. They can withdraw interest by pressing ‘withdraw interest’ at any time. The express/withdraw interest button is not available to admins. Members can see all the opportunities they have expressed interest in on the ‘You are interested in’ list.

To see the members who have declared interest in an opportunity:

  1. Click on the opportunity you are interested in. This can be a published, upcoming or past opportunity. Unpublished opportunities do not have interested members if they have not been published, but they may have interested members in the event that they have been published and then unpublished.
  2. Members who have declared interest will be visible under the ‘interested members’ section at the bottom of the page.

Interested member lists are not visible to members, only to admins.

Downloading a List of Interested Members

If you want to extract a list of interested members:

  1. Click on the opportunity you’re interested in. This can be an published, upcoming or past opportunity. Unpublished opportunities do not have interested members if they have not been published, but they may have interested members in the event that they have been published and then unpublished.
  2. Select ‘download CSV’

Unpublishing an Opportunity

Once published, an opportunity will remain published until:

1. The end date and time on the specified time window passes (where a time window has been specified)

OR

2. The event is manually unpublished (where a time window has not been specified, or where you wish to end an opportunity before its pre-specified end point)

In order to manually unpublish an opportunity:

  1. Navigate to the published opportunity that you’d like to unpublish
  2. Click on the ‘published’ button. The status will not revert to ‘unpublished’
  3. If you unpublish by mistake or you change your mind later then you can republish the opportunity at any time. Unpublishing an opportunity will not notify or delete members who have expressed interest.

Filtering Opportunities

When an admin or a member looks at the list of opportunities, they will see some available filters at the top of the page. The filters are set automatically, and are the same for admins and members.

Available filters will include:

  • The name field
  • All custom fields

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