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Stay in the know with your fellow volunteers and learn about current events happening in the Volunteer Nation

 

    

 

 

 

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Stay in the know with your fellow volunteers, read the latest volunteer spotlight, and learn about current events happening in the Volunteer Nation.


WOW! What Great Staff!

 

  Big gold star, with smaller gold stars embedded in it


 

WOW!  Learning Ally staff members are so great!  What is it that makes us so terrific?


 

Maybe it’s our WOWs: Ways of Working.  A set of guidelines for positive action, we refer to them and incorporate them into all our personal and organizational goals.  By following the WOWs, we all work together to make Learning Ally a great place to work and volunteer.


 

Maybe you’d like to consider adding some or all of our WOWs to your own toolbox?  Here they are for you to ponder:


 

a. Focus on customer needs as we embrace continuous change.

b. Project ahead to find and deliver on the changes that need to be made.

c. Find the meaning in the data.

d. Make fact-based decisions and remain aligned with those decisions until a new case is made and a new decision is reached.

e. Ask how we can do it better, consistently and often.

f. Display bravery and be comfortable standing up and taking an unpopular view on issues.

g. Assume positive intent.

h. Communicate truthfully, candidly, and constructively.

i. Demonstrate concern for all functions and see the organization as one.

j. Acknowledge and celebrate team efforts and wins.

k. Address issues with each other directly before taking them up with others.

l. Set clear expectations and define everyone’s role (ownership) for achievement.

m. Ensure the right people are in the room when making decisions.

n. Regularly ask for and give feedback.

o. Openly acknowledge mistakes, seek solutions, and not blame.



 

Some of these WOWs seem so obvious, but others maybe not so much depending on your personal background and the experiences you’ve had.  Confession time: I grew up in a very negative household. A few years ago, when a member of our Senior Leadership Team told me, “Assume positive intent”, it hit me like a thunderbolt.  I was stunned. At that moment, I realized all my life I had assumed negative intent, and it had colored so many of my experiences as an adult. I have been grateful to that person ever since then for taking the time to tell me that, and am pleased to see it as a part of our WOWs.  Just that one WOW has had such an impact on me personally; imagine how incorporating ALL of them can create positive, dynamic change in all of us?


 

Pick a WOW and try it on for size.  I bet you’ll like it.


Tech Tips: Literature Portal login

You may have noticed that we use a lot of Google products: Google login, Hangouts chat, Google Groups, Google Drive cloud storage of audio files, Chrome browser (recommended), etc. It is a ubiquitous platform that offers a lot of flexibility and is very low-cost for nonprofits. We understand that others have a preference for other browsers or email clients for whatever reason, but using Google makes it much easier for us to develop and maintain our production systems. Almost everyone has a Google account these days and you can create one or easily tie a different email account to a Google account as well. 

 

We use Google login for the Training Site, EasyBooks, and the Literature Portal. However, we see some common issues with login in the Literature Portal that we'd like to cover today. Here are the troubleshooting steps we recommend if you're not seeing what you expect in the portal, i.e., missing PDF Download button or Google Group, or nothing in the My Projects tab when you have assigned projects:

  1. Be sure you're logging in at top right with the Google account we added to the Literature community;
     
  2. Try logging out and back in
     
  3. Try using an incognito window to login and see if that helps (in Chrome PC Ctrl-Shift-N or Mac Cmd-Shift-N); if that does help, try logging out by left-clicking the profile image picture at google.com; select Sign Out and then sign in just the account you want to use;
     
  4. If third-party cookies are blocked in your browser, you may be able to log in and download the PDF, but the Google Group will fail to display:
    To fix this, you need to allow third-party cookies from Google Groups:
    In Chrome, open the More action menu (3 vertical dots) at the top right of the screen and:
    - Select Settings in the drop-down menu;
    - Scroll down and press Advanced;
    - Open the Content Settings;
    - Open the Cookies Settings;
    - Under Allow, press Add; 
    - Enter groups.google.com and click Add; and
    - Go back to the project site in the portal and refresh the screen
 
We hope this helps those who have had these issues...here's an instruction sheet with more information and screenshots if you need it.