It’s been four months since we’ve updated the site to be more international friendly. Part of that effort has been updating personal, troupe, theatre and festival profiles to have the appropriate information for world travelers. Adding those pieces to the profiles was a good excuse to add a few other pieces of information that people have been asking about for a while.

That’s all well and good for people joining the network today, but for folks who have been with us for a while, their profiles are now a little out of date. I definitely encourage people to update all their profiles from time to time, but for anyone with lots of profiles, that could be time consuming to go through all your troupe and festivals to be up to date.

That’s why starting today, and running through the end of the year, you can use the Globalization Tool. It’s on the main menu to your left. The globalization tool asks four questions that will take about 30 seconds to fill out. Running the Globalization Tool once will update your personal profile, and any troupe, theatre or festival pages which you are the administrator for making them more user friendly for international readers.

That’s all you need to do. But if you want to really fine tune your profiles with all the new features, here’s a description of all the new tiny differences.

All Profiles:

All personal, troupe, theatre and festival profiles have the following new pieces of info

• Country: Pretty self-explanatory. This is the country you live in.
• Country Code: The International Telephone Code for your country. North Americans don’t use these often. The U.S. and Canada are ‘1’.
• Admin Transfer: Not an international tool. Just a requested feature to allow people to transfer ownership of a profile.
• Number Formatting: Based on your country, the numeric displays will match your local styling as much as possible (some countries use commas. Some don’t).
• Better Facebook Scraping: Sharing on Facebook will start looking cleaner
• Search and Sort: More options in searching and sorting

Personal Profliles

Some small changes are available in your personal profiles. This can be found on your profile page under “Edit” (It’s just below your picture).

• Date Format: You can choose your preference for date formatting. “MM-DD-YYYY” or “DD-MM-YYYY” if there are countries with other formatting, please let me know.
• Gender: Got rid of it. Why do we need to know? Why do we get to decide what the options are?
• Teacher: This has actually been a feature for a while, but not everyone knows about it. Please check the “I am a teacher” box to unlock teaching tools.

Troupe Profiles

Now there is a bit more flexibility with troupe profiles.

• Coaches: You can add a coach to your troupe now. Coaches may also create new profiles without being a member, and may submit to festivals.
• New Toolbar: At the end of the Edit Wizard, there are direct links to add or remove performers, add or remove a coach, add your troupe to a theatre company, read tips on creating festival packets or go directly to the festival submissions listings.

Theatre Profiles

New options for opting in to some upcoming features ahead of time.

• Venue: If your theatre company has a dedicated venue, you can now add venue information.
• Traveling Tools: This lets you opt your theatre into the Traveling Performer Tools (coming 2017). These tools will allow you to receive notifications when traveling teachers or performers will be in your city so you can reach out to them for workshops or shows.
• New Toolbar: New options in the tools setting for Adding or removing troupes performers or teachers, or update your training center.

Festival Profiles

Most of these options are to make submissions easier.

• Improved Timezone Settings: International Time Zones have been added. Improved Daylight Savings settings are built in. Submission dates in review pages are now your local time.
• Better Calendar Input: A hopefully more elegant input method for adding dates.
• Teacher Submissions: Again, not a new feature. But one that hasn’t been around too long. You can accept teacher submissions
• Faster Loading Teacher Page: The memory leak that made teacher reviews so slow has been fixed.
• Submission URL on Profile: Fests not using the tool can have a link to their submissions page in the event profile now.
• FAQ: You can now create a FAQ based on common troupe questions (travel logistics, cost info, etc)
• Customized Submission URL: A customized URL is created for you to share to FB that will take TIN Members directly to your submissions, and new members to a registration page skinned for your festival.

Umm… I think that’s it. So if you have 30 seconds, go ahead and give the Globalization Tool a whirl. And if you want to spend some more time later, please go through the individual profile wizards to squeeze the new goodness out of it all. Oh, and now that these are in place, a couple of cool new things are coming in October.

Currently Bill is an instructor at The Torch Theatre and producer for the Phoenix Improv Festival.