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We Need the Correct Dates

My initial question to Support: "One of our processes closed last night at midnight. A number of applicants successfully submitted their applications before the deadline, but their dashboard page says the submitted date was today, which, technically means they submitted late, and which caused me to receive a number of panicky emails. Can this be fixed?"

The response I got: "The date on the applicant dashboard currently uses GMT. There is no way for us to change this but switching to Central has been suggested to our developers. You can also post the idea to the Idea lab to see if this is a priority for other users."

I have not seen this idea elsewhere on Idea Lab, but I think it's a darn good one!

posted January 12, 2013 by Tom Wickersham, Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa

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  • Chris Dahl commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi Tom,

    While I agree that a deadline shouldn't be subjective - and while I am used to using technology and understand the implications of services that span the globe - it can be a challenging thing for some folks to truly understand, and for them it will seem subjective.

    Regardless though, we will be releasing an update to our date functionality. In this release, we will be storing all dates in UTC (so a global timezone) and then translating them in the user interface to the time zone of the foundation. This will require the foundation tell us their time zone - until they do, we will be defaulting to Central.

    While this doesn't immediately fix the deadline date issue, it puts us in a position to be able to address it in the next few releases. We do need to take into account some foundations that want a "soft" deadline and others that want a hard cut-off date and time.

    Let me know if you have any questions.

    Thanks,
    -chris

  • Ideas commented  ·   ·  Report

    Chris,

    Thanks for the response. Here are a few thoughts... First, a deadline shouldn't be subjective. That's one of the benefits of using an online system. Think about things like auction deadlines on eBay or start times for U2 tickets going on sale through Ticketmaster. The dates and times are explicity clear -- regardless of where one lives.

    But deadlines aside, the fact that an applicant submits a grant on one day, but it shows that the application was submitted the next day is really the concern here. The day following a grant deadline I get a series of panicked emails and phone calls from folks wondering if they made the deadline or not. It seems we might as well go back to using the postal system and let folks wonder if their applications made it through the mail in time to meet the "postmark by" deadline.

    Since you're asking how I would like to see this work, I would like to be able to set the closing date and time based on a particular time zone. Ideally it would be a meta setting -- once I set the time zone for our foundation, I shouldn't have to set it again. And all application "Updated" and "Submitted" dates would be based on the same time zone that was set up for the foundation.

    -Tom

    posted January 29, 2013 by Tom Wickersham, Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa

  • Chris Dahl commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi Tom,

    Thanks for the suggestion. I would certainly agree that it's a good idea.

    It's also a bit of challenge - in part because even a "midnight" deadline is kind of subjective. Is that midnight based on where the foundation is? Is that midnight based on where the applicant is? Would an applicant in Australia get more / less time?

    It's certainly something that is on our radar and that we will address, but it's not trivial. At this point, it's not our highest priority item, but it continues to be a topic of product conversation. When we do get to the point we can address it, we'll be soliciting feedback around how it should work as I'm sure there will be quite a few different opinions.

    If you have more input on how you'd like to see this function, please let me know. The more information we get upfront, the better our eventual solution will be.

    Thanks again,

    -chris

    posted January 29, 2013 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies