Some early birds were already singing as the sun began to rise over our fair valley this morning.  How do we know?  Because folks on our team were still up from the night before, putting the finishing touches on our latest release before pushing the button at around 5am.  These enhancements were in direct response to the feedback we have received from many of you, so please keep that coming.  I assure you, every email is read and every phone call is taken!

So, what’s in this goodie bag?  The school year is knocking on our doors, bringing with it a lot of opportunities to make plans.  Personally, school planning has always been hectic with afterschool activities to coordinate, lots of things to volunteer for  (mainly on paper signup sheets or emails flying back and forth), and those last minute freakouts when I forget I volunteered to help with something.  The lack of tools to make this tolerable (forget about delightful) is something we wanted to address with this launch. It is with that that I am excited to tell you about our new updates.

First, we improved our volunteer sign-up tools so you can more easily recruit and manage volunteers, whether it is for an entire school year, a single organization event, or just a small get together.  If you give us the list, we’ll take care of the rest.  The tasks can recur however you like (every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday for 4 months? No problem).  We’ll keep everyone on the same page by sending reminders and alerts.  Sure, people may still need to back out, and if they do, we’ll let you know immediately and help you communicate with everyone to get someone to step up in their place.  Ready to give it a shot?  You can start making plans here. Not quite ready? You can learn more here.

We also made some improvements to our local search to help you find the right places and service providers for whatever you might be looking for at this time of year (for our family, it was an orthodontist). Our search now combines aggregate ratings from across the web with the information and tags you and your friends have made on Center’d to provide even more relevant results.  If you are a Center’d member, do a search and you will see higher rankings for the places you and your friends have saved.  Want to make the results even better?  Save and tag the places you like.  I have saved everything from our pediatrician to our favorite car wash to help other people more easily find things they might like too. Give it a shot by connecting to a Center’d team member, and check out some of the places we like.

Finally, we redid our home page to make it a bit easier to use, and added a back to school resource center to help you get ready for the big day.  It includes some of our tips for taking the stress out of this season, back to school gear that we like, other sites that have proven to be helpful resources for us, and a sampling of back to school-related plans to give you a head start there.  Check it out, and let us know what you think!

Thank you for all the support and feedback you have given us since our launch.  Even though we are just getting started, we know we wouldn’t have made it this far without your help.

Jennifer Dulski
Co-founder and CEO