SOAR

We have a number of enhancements and bug fixes to the Event Signup feature that we wanted to make available to you immediately. Here they are !

Bug Fixes

• Event Registration block on Home Page now sorts events by their upcoming date
• The Attendee List for an Event will not show any cost information if costs are not enabled for that event
• When an Event is using the No Time option, only the date will shown on the Event Signup pages

Signup Type – Individual

The initial Event Signup used a “style” we call Family Style. Where possible an entire family would signup during the same registration. Scouts and their Parents (even if leaders) would all register under a scout’s name. Only those adults without scouts would register separately.

The following changes have been made to the Online Payments feature.

• The bug that prevented Option Descriptions from displaying as been fixed.
• An options has been added to determine if the Checkout Button should be displayed in the User Menu.

This upgrade is for users of PackMaster and TroopMaster. PM/TM 2008 have two (2) fields for email addresses. The current SOAR website Roster supports three (3) email addresses. Previously, the 3rd website Roster email address would be cleared on every TM/PM Import.

This has been changed. A TM/PM Import will now only clear the first two email addresses in the website Roster. This will allow you to add a 3rd email address for members, that will not be affected by TM/PM Imports. You need to use the last email address field on the right side for this feature.

When setting up a PayPal account:

• Select Business account – not Personal or Premier
• Select Website Payments Standard – not Website Payments Pro
• Select Sole Proprietorship for Business Type – not Non Profit Organization
• Select Sports and Outdoors for Category – not Non-Profit
• Select Camping and Outdoors for Subcategory

PayPal has a specific account type for non profit organizations that caters to online collection of donations at a reduced transaction fee. To qualify for this account type the majority of your online payments need to be of the donation type and you need to provide PayPal with a lot of paperwork to prove non profit status. Packs and Troops will not qualify for this so you want to avoid it.

Sunday January 4th, 2009

SOAR Customers,

It is our policy to provide you with notification of any issue that has interrupted service to your website.

We do this to ensure good communication with our customers and to make you aware of the issue so you can answer questions raised by your unit members.

Service Outage – 1/4/09 4-10 AM EST

At 4:00 AM EST on Sunday January 4th, 2009 one of our customer servers went offline. The server in question hosts approximately 40% of our customers, so a large number of customer sites became unavailable.

We put a call into our hosting provider at 4:30 AM EST to log the issue and have them start working on it. After diagnostics by our hosting provider it was clear there was a hardware problem – the RAID (disk drive) controller had failed. The state of the disk drives and their data integrity was unknown.

Monday December 29th, 2008

SOAR Customers,

It is our policy to provide you with notification of any issue that has interrupted service to your website.

We do this to ensure good communication with our customers and to make you aware of the issue so you can answer any issues raised by your unit members.

EBlast

Any scheduled EBlasts for Sunday (12/28) and Monday (12/29) did not go out automatically. An error was found in the EBlast scheduling logic that deals with end of year wrap around. This effectively prevented any EBlasts from going out this week, due to the way the calendar fell this year.

Each time a member clicks an Add To Cart button, their item will be added to the shopping cart within your SOAR website. Once there items in a member's shopping cart, a "View Cart" button will display in the User Block in the top left of the page.

When they click the "View Cart" button they will be taken to the shopping cart page where they will see the items they have added. They can delete individual items from the shopping cart.

When they are ready to checkout, members will use the "Checkout" button on the shopping cart page. This will transfer their shopping cart to PayPal and they will be taken to the PayPal page for your unit to complete the transaction.

After you have created your PayPal account and followed the PayPal Account Setup instructions you can enable Online Payments on your SOAR website.

Go to Admin/Control Panel/Online Payments/Setup to get started.

• Click the Enable checkbox to make this feature active.
• Enter & verify (enter a 2nd time) your PayPal email address
• Make sure this email address is correct, otherwise you may be sending money to someone else !
• Enter the label that will be shown in the Navigation for the Online Payments page
• Enter any instructions you want displayed at the top of the Online Payments page
  

When setting up a PayPal account:

• Select Business account – not Personal or Premier
• Select PayPal Payments Standard – not PayPal Payments Pro
• Enter your email address and unit contact information
• Select Business Type – DO NOT select Non Profit Organization
  • The business type you select should match the Tax ID number of your unit's bank account
• Select Sports and Outdoors for Category – not Non-Profit
• Select Camping and Outdoors for Subcategory
• Select lowest Monthly Sales
• Enter your Tax ID number

PayPal has a specific account type for non profit organizations that caters to online collection of donations at a reduced transaction fee. To qualify for this account type the majority of your online payments need to be of the donation type and you need to provide PayPal with a lot of paperwork to prove non profit status. Packs and Troops will not qualify for this so you want to avoid it.

Wouldn’t it be great if your unit members could simply pay for yearly registration fees, recharter fees, event fees, and other item costs online? Now customers with the Advanced package can with SOAR’s new Online Payments feature !

SOAR has leveraged the simplicity and power of PayPal (www.paypal.com) to allow unit members to pay online using credit cards and PayPal accounts. Create a PayPal account, turn on the SOAR Online Payments feature, and define a PayPal button (or two!) on your unit website and you are ready to start accepting payments online.

Each “button” you create will have an Add To Cart button, including any Events you define in the Event Signup Feature. Members can add items to their shopping cart as they browse your unit website. When they are ready member can “checkout”, using a convenient button in the User Menu, and pay for their items using a credit card on the PayPal website.