We are delighted to make these changes a reality. Particularly in time for the Martin Luther King Day of Service which takes place next week on Monday, January 17th.

These back-end changes should provide a better user experience to our partners who use All for Good to power search on their sites such as AARP’s Create The Good; blogs like CNewmark.com; Facebook pages. etc. It also will result in a better experience for users who visit our site directly or who land on AFG after starting a search on Serve.gov.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Improved performance and significantly higher search quality
• Better search and query filtering functionality which enable more accuracy for common searches like MLK Day, Hunger, and many others.
• Added the first round of advanced search capabilities, allowing visitors to better refine their search. For example, an interested volunteer can refine and narrow down the date and distance ranges they want to include in their search for volunteer opportunities.

We will be talking about these changes on our next AFG Partner call, likely in early February.  A meeting invite will be sent out shortly.  We hope that you can join us – all will be welcome!

As always, AFG is a team effort. We owe our success to our remarkable partners, a whole slew of volunteers, a dedicated board of directors and a talented core team.  There are too many people to thank by name, but we would like to give a special shout-out to some friends who really stepped up over the last few months, including  a team of six Googlers for their intense one-week coding effort at the Google-internal Hackathon in Berlin, Germany last fall, Siteworx, EchoDitto, the indefatigable Adam Sah, the courageous Kelvin Tan who did our custom backend Solr work, the industrious Michael Thompson, our lead engineer, and our tireless product manager, Dan Stryker.

There is a lot more to come over the next few weeks… Stay tuned for more updates!