I suggest having a group of members who are not already ambassadors, to have conversations with HE about website changes and new features to help get direct, in person feedback to help with prioritization and identifying the most pressing needs. Looking at both the forum and the Facebook group there are a lot of ideas to sift through but no dialogue with HE directly about what makes most sense to members to do or not to do. It’s a pretty standard feedback mechanism in similar organizations – please consider!
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I agree and wish that HE would do this. I was a software developer, business analyst, and project manager for most of my working career, and it is standard practice. For some reason, the HE development team seems to rely on a small circle of long-time facebook moderators and chat volunteers and aren’t using some of the IT best practices to gather requirements and assess product improvements. I’ve been a member for over 12 years, am an Ambassador, and have asked the product team several times whether I can help with requirements and design specifications, and have never been asked to help.
The “Suggestions” section of this forum is supposed to be an arena for members to suggest improvements, but many times, one of the veteran members who are in the inner circle, argue why a member’s suggestion can’t be done or shouldn’t be done. I don’t feel that many suggestions are given fair consideration by the development team. Often they cite the excuse “not HE philosophy” to shoot down suggestions. Well, if many members want a certain new feature, shouldn’t it become “HE philsophy”? Examples are improvements to the messaging system to permit hosts to contact potential guests, improvements to the guest points calculation algorithm, a checkbox for whether a host charges a cleaning fee, improvements to the calendar to better support people who also have their home on other platforms, etc.
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Thank you for this suggestion. It is something that we aim to implement, that is why we have created the suggestions box on the forum (to be able to prioritise the requests) and why we have created more opportunities for members to share their opinions, such as webinars around new features, round tables etc.
We acknowledge that there is still a lot further we can go to improve. The good news is that amongst your examples, some of these projects are in the pipeline 
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Hi Melissa. Just to be clear, I meant an offline group of very specific people who gather (probably virtually) quarterly or as needed to discuss directly with HE what the priorities should be from the member perspective. I have not mentioned multiple examples of a better pipeline, only this one. A “suggestion box” gives no sense of how high a priority a feature should be given, it only shows how many people commented on it which is not the same thing. And webinars are only one-way dialogues, not real life conversations.
Please pass on to the HE staff the idea of having an official advisory committee.
Thank you!
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