New features & Improvements

New Feature - Customizable “competencies” at portal level

A portal can now change from Riipen’s default assessed soft skills (Creativity, Communication, Critical Thinking and Professionalism) to their own preferred set of skills. If modified, changes will be applied to all newly created experiences in the portal.

At the experience level, the portal level competencies can be removed if the user chooses, and new ones can be added.

Help articles:

• https://help.riipen.com/en/articles/11816509-competencies
• https://help.riipen.com/en/articles/7340390-feedback#h_718b392d9e

New feature - Silent imports

Admins can now control whether users receive emails during bulk imports. A new “Notify” column can be added to import files for learners, teams, or project matches. When set to FALSE, the user will not receive a notification about the import, or any other notification-type emails.

• Note that they will still receive unread message emails if a user attempts to send them a message, and if they are invited to anything else they will receive an invitation email.

As part of this, we’ve disabled ongoing notification emails for all imported users regardless of whether they were notified about the import, to improve compliance with email sending rules. If import notifications are on, the user will instead now receive up to 3 reminders to activate their account.

In both scenarios (import notifications on or off), once the user activates their account and accepts the terms of service they will receive all notifications normally.

New feature - AI summaries

1. A survey admin can now enable summaries under Survey > Settings.
   What it does: This produces a text summary and an overall sentiment tag on each individual response to that survey.
   Why: This is useful to save time interpreting a user's response to a longer survey, particularly those with text responses.
2. If summaries are enabled, a survey admin can enable automated flags to be generated under Survey > Settings.
   What it does: This will automatically create a flag if a survey response below a configurable sentiment threshold is created, and will email the experience admin with the flag notification. The flag is also visible in the team tracker under the flags column.
   Why: This is the main power of the survey summary feature, as it allows automated identification of issues and opportunities brought up via surveys.
3. An experience admin can now enable summaries of conversations under Experience settings > Features.
   What it does: This produces a text summary and an overall sentiment tag for an employer-team conversation, on a recurring basis. This is shown in the conversation page details panel.
   Why: This saves time in reading through learners' conversations with employers to understand how things are going. Only experience admins with "View" or "Membership" permission to conversations can see summaries.
4. If summaries are enabled, an experience admin can enable automated flags for conversations.
   What it does: This will automatically flag a conversation below a configurable sentiment threshold, and will email the experience admin with the flag notification. The flag is also visible in the team tracker under the flags column.
   Why: Allows early identification of issues such as non-responsiveness or frustration that may surface in employer-team conversations.

Improvements

• New “Score” column on activity tracker. When scoring is enabled for an experience, a new "Score" column now appears in the Team activity tracker, making it easier to track and evaluate learner performance at a glance.
• Warning for educator-assigned team formation. Experience admins now see a warning when adding learners directly to the experience (instead of teams) if team formation is set to Educator assign, reminding them that learners can’t start projects until they’re added to a team.
• Decline reason shared in conversations. When a team application is declined, the reason now appears in the system message in the application conversation.
• Work log and invoice improvements When an invoice is cancelled, the work log entries associated with that invoice will be disassociated from that (or any) invoice. Educators with permission to view a team’s work log, are able to delete entries if they are not currently linked to an invoice.
• Visual indicators for date changes in match revisions. When a match revision updates timeline dates (such as start, end, or milestones), the changes now display clearly on the match request page. Previous dates appear with red strikethrough, and new dates are shown in green, making it easy to spot updates at a glance.
• Improved CSV imports for projects. Project imports via CSV are now more flexible. Boolean fields will now accept values regardless of capitalization—true, TRUE, and True will all work without causing errors.
• AI-generated experience content now better tailored to employers. We’ve updated the AI generation prompt for experience descriptions to focus more on the benefits to employers rather than learners. We've also added new guidance to avoid overly academic language and to ensure the content connects clearly to employer needs.
• Faster, simplified match requests for employers. We’ve streamlined the match request process when employers create a project directly from an experience: The project wizard skips the company step if the info is already complete; “Match preferences” and the preview step in the project wizard are skipped. After publishing, the employer is taken straight to Step 2 of the match request wizard, and the match revision step is also skipped.
• General improvements to the project wizard. The company step is now skipped when company info is already filled out
• Experience wizard content and label updates. We’ve improved labels, tooltips, headers, hints, and placeholder text in the experience wizard for better clarity and consistency, reducing the overall length of each page.
• "Opened at" date now shown on projects. Published, open projects now display the date they were opened next to the Open status pill.
• Departments now show on experience pages. A new sidebar section displays up to three departments.
• New success pages for published projects and experiences. After publishing, employers and educators see updated confirmation pages. These new pages offer a cleaner layout, clearer next steps, and match recommendations.
• Updated ‘Teams’ and ‘Members’ tab structure The Teams tab is now a top-level tab next to Requests, no longer hidden under Learners. The Members tab now includes three sub-tabs: Learners, Admins, and Invites. Requests from both learners and educators appear under a new Requests section with filters for role.

• AI-generated content notice. The experience wizard now includes a notice reminding users to review and edit AI-generated content to ensure accuracy.
• Clearer language for application review. The employer task for reviewing applications now uses clearer wording. CTA updated from “Confirm application” to “View application”.
• Experience cards replace experience tables for learners. Learners will now see experience cards instead of the experience table on their Dashboard, My Experiences page, Portal experiences page. These cards give learners a clearer more engaging preview of each experience, including categories, compensation, project assignment type, and more.
• Work log reminder task. Learners will now receive a task reminder if their experience has work logs enabled and they haven’t logged any hours within 7 days of project kickoff. This helps learners stay on top of tracking time and ensures accurate invoicing for paid projects.
• Clearer learner join settings. We’ve updated the Experience > Settings > Learners tab to simplify learner joining options, making navigation easier and clearly indicating that only one join method is required
• Account merge restrictions. To protect payment history, users with invoices or payments can no longer merge accounts. The merge option is hidden in these cases, and attempts to access it directly will be blocked.
• Improved message notifications. Previously, if a user sent multiple messages in quick succession, the email notification would include only the first unread message, meaning later messages could be missed. Now, all unread messages sent close together by the same user will appear in a single notification.
• Updated checkbox label on match request acceptance screen for employers. The checkbox now reads “Open to additional educator matches for this project” with clearer subtext explaining that unchecking it will remove the project from the marketplace and stop new match requests.