Email Mentoring Field Guide Last Updated On: 1/30/2013 Created by the Learning & Organizational Development and Support Teams education@score.org
Contents Quick Start Guide... 3 Overview of the Email Mentoring Homepage... 3 Logging In... 4 Getting to the CRM... 4 Changing Your Availability... 5 Reading and Responding to Client Emails... 6 Viewing Client Sessions and Reassigning Clients... 7 Help Erin! She Wants to Start a Business... 9 The Client: ERIN... 9 The Mentor: HEATHER... 10 Heather Receives the Mentoring Request... 11 Heather Logs Into the System and Replies to Erin... 12 Adding Attachments and Logging Time Spent... 14 Erin Receives the Response and Replies with More Questions... 15 Heather Must Login Directly to the CRM to Respond... 15 Additional Resources... 17 Frequently Asked Questions... 17 How do I know if I m an email mentor?... 17 How do I know if I m logged into the CRM?... 18 I don t remember what my username/password is, what should I do?... 19 Help! I was deactivated. What is this and what should I do?... 19 I m seeing an access denied error, what should I do?... 21 I m seeing an error that says There was an error connecting to the mail server... 22 How do I change my password?... 23 Support Website Knowledgebase... 28 2 P a g e
Quick Start Guide Overview of the Email Mentoring Homepage Below are some main features you ll use as an email mentor. Move your mouse here and a dropdown will appear. Click View all Sessions to see sessions sorted by client. Click View all MREs to reassign. Click here to edit experience/skills, days you re available, # of mentoring requests you ll take, and photo. Also click here to reactivate your account and change your availability. Click here to view your inbox the email mentoring requests from clients. You should respond from here, too. 3 P a g e
Logging In Go to: www.score.org. Look for the blue Log in button in the upper right-hand corner and click it. When you get to the login page, you ll need to enter your username and password. IMPORTANT NOTE: The default password is score2012. We encourage you to change this, but be sure to change it in both the CRM and in the Google email account. They must match in order for the email part of the CRM to work. If you don t know how to change your password, please visit the Frequently Asked Questions section of this guide. If you changed your password and don t remember it, contact help@score.org and they will reset it for you. Your username is your @scorevolunteer.org email address. If you don t know it, your Chapter Admin can look it up. If that person is not available or does not know how, contact help@score.org. Write your username here: @scorevolunteer.org Password hint: Getting to the CRM When you login, you ll be taken to the new Volunteer Center. To get to the CRM section, look for the button on the left-hand side that says Go to CRM. It s under the Home button. Click Go to CRM (ignore the drop down menu). 4 P a g e
Changing Your Availability You can control when people can send you a mentoring request and how many you receive each day, week and month. The availability feature of the email mentoring system is within your profile. To get to your profile from the homepage, click on View My Profile (for help finding the View My Profile link, see the first section of this guide, Overview of the Email Mentoring Homepage). Once you get to your profile, it will look like this: Click here to edit your profile. Once you click Edit My Profile, you ll see this: Scroll down past the contact/demographic information, Work Experience section and Education section, until you reach the Availability Settings section. There is a picture on the next page. 5 P a g e
Select which days of the week you d like to receive requests. You will only appear in searches on the days you select. Click the up arrow; above Sunday you will see None. Select None if you cannot receive requests for a period of time (like going on vacation). Make sure to log back in and change it when you return! Make these fields blank (or enter zero) if you don t want to limit the number of requests you receive. If you do want to limit the number of requests, enter a number in these fields. Once you are done, don t forget to scroll to the bottom and click Save! Reading and Responding to Client Emails Once you re on the CRM homepage, click on the Emails button towards the left hand side. It s between Reports and Chapters. Then click on the subject of the email you d like to read. See the pictures below. Click here to view the email. Do not click the Sender name.* *If you click the sender name, or any email address, you ll be taken to a screen where you can send a message to that person. You will not be able to see his/her message and you will not be able to log your time. We are working to change this, but there are other items that need more immediate attention. 6 P a g e
Viewing Client Sessions and Reassigning Clients You can view all of your online mentoring sessions, organized either by client or interaction. To view the sessions by client, move the cursor so it is over the Mentoring Requests button, and then move the cursor down to click on View all Sessions. You might need to reassign a client if you don t have time to help the client, or you don t think you have the right skills/experience. To do so, click on View all MREs instead. To reassign a client click on View all MREs. Then see the screen shot on the next page of this guide. Hover cursor here Click here to view all sessions organized by client. When you click on View all MREs in the Mentoring Requests dropdown (see above), you ll come to this page. Click reassign next to the client s name. 7 P a g e
Don t forget to click Submit! When you click reassign, you ll see this message popup. Please enter a reason that you need the person to be reassigned. If it is a matter of not having the required skills/experience, please include the type of skills/experience you think they need help with. This will allow the Support Team to find a good match for the client. Emails in Your Personal Email Account When someone submits a mentoring request or replies to you, you will receive an email. This email will go both to your CRM Inbox and also to your Google account (and personal email if your @scorevolunteer.org is forwarding to your personal email account). DO NOT REPLY to the emails that go to your Google account or personal email account. They are just alerting you that you should login to the system. If you reply directly in your personal email account (or Google account), the system has no way of knowing you did this. It will deactivate your account and your session will not be logged. If you see something like this, you are logged into the Google Account and not the CRM. You ll need to login to the CRM. Do not reply from here. 8 P a g e
Help Erin! She Wants to Start a Business The Client: ERIN Erin would like to start a business, but she doesn t know where to begin. She hears about SCORE from a friend, but works full time and doesn t think she has time to meet with a mentor in person. She decides to try email mentoring. She goes to www.score.org and clicks on Mentoring. Then, in the Find an Email Mentor section, she types in some keywords her business idea involves helping non-profits create educational materials, so she types in education and non-profit. A few different profiles come up. One of them has some catchy text, and the person in the picture looks nice. She clicks on the name Heather Hendy to view the profile. Heather seems to have the type of experience she is looking for, so she submits a mentoring request, which looks like this: Summary: Erin needs some help in starting her business. She goes on score.org and does a keyword search. Heather s profile comes up, because the words she used in her profile match the keyword search. Erin submits a mentoring request to Heather. 9 P a g e
The Mentor: HEATHER Heather has been a SCORE mentor for almost two years. She has experience in curriculum design and program management with several large non-profits. She is still working, so she decides to be an email mentor so that the availability is more flexible. She emails help@score.org to have them create an @scorevolunteer.org account, get some tips on writing her profile, and publish her profile. She cuts and pastes some of the text from her resume, and makes sure to include a photo and a catchy sentence at the beginning. Most clients don t take the time to read the entire profile, so she wants to make a good impression from the start. Her profile looks like this in the client s search results: Summary: Heather is working full-time, but would like to mentor She decides to become an email mentor to have more flexibility She emails help@score.org to set up her profile Heather inputs information from her resume, a nice photo and catchy text at the beginning 10 P a g e
Heather Receives the Mentoring Request One day, Heather is checking her email and sees that she has received a mentoring request. It looks like this: Click this link Should she reply to Erin directly through her email account? NO! If she does, the session will not be recorded, she won t get credit, and the system might deactivate her account since it won t know that she replied. Instead, she clicks on the link at the bottom of the message. Summary: Heather receives an email letting her know she has a mentoring request. Heather DOES NOT reply directly from her email account. Instead, she clicks on the link in the email. 11 P a g e
Heather Logs Into the System and Replies to Erin Heather clicks the link in the mentoring request email, and it brings her to the login page. Uh oh, what is her username and password? Her username is her @scorevolunteer.org email address. The password was the default score2012, but she changed it to something more secure. Luckily, she wrote down her username and a hint to her password at the beginning of her Email Mentor Field Guide, so she is able to remember them. If she didn t have that information, she would need to email help@score.org. Once she logs in, because she clicked on the link in the Mentoring Request email, the system automatically takes her to the Email Inbox page: Erin s Mentoring Request Once there, she sees Erin s email. Heather clicks on the subject, Email Mentoring Request from Erin to read the email. The email looks like this: Heather clicks here to reply to her client, Erin. 12 P a g e
Heather clicks on Reply and writes a response to Erin. Writing the response is just like using any email system. She includes a link to the Simple Steps for Starting Your Business workbook, since Erin is looking for information on starting her business. In order to make the link active, she highlights the text she wants to be an active link, and then clicks on the hyperlink icon (the earth with the chain link over it). She will then see a pop-up window where she can paste the link. She then clicks save and the link is now active. Her email looks like this: Click this and you ll see this. Enter the URL here (aka web address) Then click OK Summary: Heather clicks on the link in her mentoring request email, and is taken to the login page. She has recorded her username and a hint to her password, which she uses to login. Since she clicked on the link in the email, she is automatically taken to the CRM Inbox. She clicks on the subject line of the email from Erin and views the email. She clicks Reply to write a response, which includes creating a link to a document found on www.score.org. 13 P a g e
Adding Attachments and Logging Time Spent Once Heather is done writing the response, she scrolls down the page a bit. She sees a link that says Add attachments. She clicks on it, and sees this: Upload up to 3 attachments to the email. Send yourself a copy of your reply to the client. You can also view your reply in the Sent folder in the CRM Email Mentoring System. She could have included the Simple Steps for Starting Your Business workbook as an attachment instead of creating the link. She will remember that for when she wants to send a client something that is not available online. She also sees that she can check a box to have the system send her a copy of the email. This way, she can have a confirmation that the email was sent out. Finally, she wants to make sure the time she spent helping this client is recorded. Under the attachments section, there is a section for logging time. It looks like this: This is checked by default. Enter your time spent here. You can always go back and edit this if you enter the wrong amount. Click SEND to send the email to the client. 14 P a g e
Summary: Heather scrolls down the page a little bit to see the other options before sending her reply to Erin. She learns that if she clicks Add attachments, the section below will expand to show three places she can upload files that will be sent to the client along with her response. She sees that she can also check a box to send herself a copy of her reply. This way, she can confirm the reply was sent. Finally, Heather logs her time before clicking Send to send the response to the client. Erin Receives the Response and Replies with More Questions Erin is very excited to see that her mentor has responded. She replies to thank Heather and let her know she will read the workbook. She also asks a few follow-up questions regarding which business structure she should use for her business. Erin s response goes directly into Heather s personal email account, in addition to the Email Mentoring System inbox in the CRM. Heather Must Login Directly to the CRM to Respond When Heather sees Erin s reply, it s tempting to reply directly to it. But instead, Heather knows she needs to log back into the system to reply. This time, however, there is no link in Erin s email that will take Heather to the CRM. What should she do? To login to the CRM directly, she goes to www.score.org and clicks on Log in. Click Here 15 P a g e
This will take her to the same login screen she saw when she clicked on the link in the original email, which looks like this: Heather enters her @scorevolunteer.org email address as her username, enters her password and then clicks Log In Since she is logging in directly rather than clicking on the link in the initial Mentoring Request email, she is not taken to the CRM Email Inbox. Instead, she is taken to the CRM homepage and clicks on Emails. Click here to view the Email Inbox. 16 P a g e
Now she is back to the Email Inbox and can follow the same steps outlined above to reply and log her time. Summary: Erin receives the response. She replies thanking Heather for the workbook and asks some follow-up questions. Heather receives Erin s reply to both her personal email and to the Email Mentoring System inbox. She knows that she must log back into the system to reply, since if she replies from her personal email the session will not be recorded. Heather goes to www.score.org and clicks on Log in to get to the login screen. She enters her @scorevolunteer.org username and her password. Once logged in, she clicks on Emails to get to the Email Inbox screen. Once there, she follows the same process outlined in the previous sections to respond to Erin and log her time. Additional Resources Frequently Asked Questions Below are questions we ve received from email mentors. How do I know if I m an email mentor? The easiest way to check is to visit www.score.org click on Mentoring search for your name in the Find An Email Mentor section. If you show up, your account is all set up. If you don t show up, your account is not published and you should contact help@score.org. Here is a step-by-step guide to searching for yourself: Step 1. Visit www.score.org. Step 2. Click on Mentoring. 17 P a g e
Step 3. Search for your name in the Find An Email Mentor section. Enter your name in the field and click the Find An Email Mentor button How do I know if I m logged into the CRM? You re looking at an email from a client and you re not sure whether you should reply are you logged into the CRM or the Google account? Because the CRM has an email-like feature, it might be confusing at times. Here is a comparison so you can determine whether you re logged into the CRM Inbox or the Google account: CRM INBOX REPLY FROM HERE 18 P a g e
GOOGLE INBOX DON T REPLY FROM HERE I don t remember what my username/password is, what should I do? Your username will generally be in this format: firstname.lastname@scorevolunteer.org. If there is someone with the same name as you who already has his or her account set up, you might have an alternative format. If you didn t write it down, can t find it in your saved emails, and otherwise have no record of it you should email help@score.org. Likewise, if you changed your password from the default (score2012), which we recommend, and didn t keep a record of what the new one is, you should email help@score.org. Just remember to keep a note of both your username and password in the future. Help! I was deactivated. What is this and what should I do? All of us know that, regardless of our role at SCORE, our ultimate purpose is to help small business owners and prospective entrepreneurs. In today s world, if people don t receive a quick response they are likely to form a negative opinion and might not come back to SCORE for the help they need. So we want to ensure that all clients are receiving a response within 48 hours. Deactivation occurs when a client has not been responded to within 48 hours. When this happens, the mentor s account is deactivated so that they will not receive any further requests if they are not checking the system. This is not meant to be a punishment for the mentor, but rather a way to ensure quality service for the client. In some cases this deactivation might be done in error, but in many cases clients are simply not being responded to (though we know YOU are doing a great job!). If you ARE checking the system and just simply didn t respond in time or were confused about how to login to the system, you can easily reactivate your account. First, you should login using the instructions in this guide. Then you ll see the CRM home screen, which looks like this: (see next page) 19 P a g e
Click Here Click Here 20 P a g e
You ll see this. Scroll down until you see this section: Click on email and make sure it s highlighted. Then scroll down to the bottom and click save. I m seeing an access denied error, what should I do? You may encounter an error that looks like this: If you do, there are a couple different reasons why you might see it. (1) First, you might be trying to access something in the CRM, but you are not logged in. This will most commonly happen if you bookmark a page in the CRM or new Volunteer Center while you re logged in, and then try to access it later when you are not. If this is the case, simply click on Log in in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Once you ve logged in, try to access that page again. If that is not the cause, the system may be experiencing a momentary glitch. All of the information contained in the system, including usernames and passwords, are held on 3 servers. This is good because it means that if one server fails, the site will not go down. (2) However, this also means that at times (we re working to reduce this) a server might not be caught up and might give you an access denied message, though you should actually have access. The best thing to do in this situation is log out, wait 5-10 minutes and try logging back in. (3) Finally, you might be trying to access something that you simply don t have authorization to see. If you think this is the case, but you should have authorization, please contact help@score.org. 21 P a g e
I m seeing an error that says There was an error connecting to the mail server You may encounter an error that looks like this: First, here is an explanation of how the email server works. When you use Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or any other email service, those companies are acting as an email server. Their equipment is receiving the messages and then delivering the messages to you through a custom front-end system. MS Outlook is an example of a front-end email system that does not have its own email server. It is relying on a web-based email server to send and receive messages. If you ve ever had to set up Outlook, you know that you need to enter in some information to connect it to an existing email account that is web-based. The CRM Inbox feature is similar to Outlook in that it is relying on a web-based email server to send and receive messages. The email server we are using is Google s, since it s free, good quality, and easy to integrate with. Google s email server needs to be able to communicate with the CRM so that it can deliver messages. It doesn t know anything about recording sessions. It simply sends and receives your email messages. If you login to the Google account, you can see copies of those messages there, but again Google doesn t know that they are linked to clients. You can receive non-email mentoring emails there as well; they won t show up in the CRM unless the person first sent you an email mentoring request. So you can put that email address on your business cards! If you are seeing the error message above, something happened to the connection between the Google email server and your account. The most likely cause is that you changed your password in either the CRM or Google account, and now the systems can t talk to each other. Please read the next FAQ, which explains how to successfully change your password so you avoid this error. If you haven t recently changed your password, please email help@score.org so they can troubleshoot to see why you saw this error. 22 P a g e
How do I change my password? A. There are three places where you ll need to change your password but it s not as complicated as it may seem. First Place to Change Password: Google Account Go to: http://mail.scorevolunteer.org and login Your username is the part of your @scorevolunteer.org email address to the left of the @ symbol. For example, someone with the email address jane.doe@scorevolunteer.org would use jane.doe to login here. The default password is score2012 (you need to use the full email address as your username when logging into the CRM. Click here to make the menu appear Then click Settings Then you ll see this screen. Just click on Accounts. 23 P a g e
Then you ll see this. Click on Google Account settings. (Only a few more steps!) That will bring you here. Click on Security. (Hang in there, you re almost done!) Click on Change Password (Only one more screen!) 24 P a g e
You made it! Enter your current password below, followed by the new one twice. (Now, don t forget to make note of your new password.) Second and Third Places: CRM email account settings and account tabs Go to www.score.org and login (see instructions in the Quick Start section in the beginning of this guide). Move your cursor over Go to CRM so this dropdown menu will appear. Then slide the cursor down and click on Edit Account Settings. 25 P a g e
The default tab open will be account. Enter your new password in these fields. Remember that it needs to match the one you used for your Google Account. * *Technically the password on the account tab can be different than the Google Account password or the one in the next step. But why worry about having two different passwords? From the same screen, click on email account settings. 26 P a g e
Make sure you enter the EXACT same password you used in the two places mentioned above. This will ensure that your email system will work correctly. Remember, make note of this new password. There is a space for that at the beginning of the guide. You can also add an email signature here. Q. I ve received multiple emails from the same client. What should I do? A. We are working to make changes to help ensure clients don t accidentally submit the same request multiple times. If they do, please alert help@score.org so they can delete the additional requests. If a client sends two different messages on purpose (for example, a client sends you information about her business and then realized she forgot to mention something, and sends you another request with the missing information) you ll still need to alert help@score.org. Otherwise the system will think you ve ignored a request. Again, we are working to create a better solution to this problem. 27 P a g e
Support Website Knowledgebase There are multiple resources on http://support.score.org/knowledgebase/. If you haven t watched one of the training webinars or reviewed the guides, please do so before sending the Support Team an email. Many questions about using the system can be answered by watching a webinar or reading a guide. By turning to those materials before emailing the Support Team, you are ensuring that they have more time to address critical issues with the system. Materials are being added as needed, but the following materials are now available (as of January 30, 2013): 28 P a g e