This week we'll break from the Life Happened series to share some updates to the application in recent months. We are a technology company at heart and it is good for you to know that our interaction with customers leads us to constantly improve what we do. That passion for support that leads to improvement is core to our company. It is a built-in part of our brand identity.
Those of you who have requested these upgrades likely already know about them. Others of you who regularly use the software may have already found them. Either way, here's the short list for a quick overview. Click on any one of the topics for more details.
- Lapsed activity report filter
- Workflow skip to current date
- Manage notes from member profile page
- Preview / Test an email that has merge tags
- Pledge campaigns in designation settings
- Increased performance for reports
1. Lapsed activity report filter
The purpose of this filter is to allow you to quickly find families or individuals whose giving or attendance has fallen off so you can provide pastoral follow-up. Specifically, it helps you find families who last gave or attended something within a certain date range like 12 to 3 months ago. Select your report type (Member Listing maybe), then filter to Members > Fixed Attributes > Last Activity:
We had options to include Registration / Group Join Date and Note Date, but added the option to "Only include the Registration Join Date". When checked, this excludes people who may have been manually placed in or transferred from another group by an administrator or staff person.
2. Workflow skip to current date
One of the common ways churches use workflows is to send emails or texts in preparation for a special event such as Easter. If you create the workflow with all fixed dates and someone registers or is placed in the workflow after it starts; the system will now skip over dates and actions that have passed. For example, if someone registers for a workflow on Tues. 4/12, they will skip over previous steps and get the next communication scheduled for Wed. 4/13. This only works if every date in the workflow is set as a specific date:
To enable this feature, check the option on the bottom of workflow name page. Otherwise, the system will send them all the emails/texts up to the current date when they register.
3. Manage notes from member profile page
We made Assigned to and Completed for the Notes feature available on the Member profile page. This should enhance your ability to manage notes without having to click into the full list of notes.
4. Preview / Test an email that has merge tags
When you click an option to Preview / Test an email:
You will see a new option to send the preview to yourself.
This option will allow you to see how your merge tags will look once they are sent. For example, this selection of the 4 Merge Tags.
Looks like this:
The other option to "Send preview to list of emails entered below" works exactly as it used to.
5. Pledge campaigns in designation settings
Several months ago, we released upgrades to pledge campaigns including the option for people to register a pledge directly into the software.
Here is the blog post on that. Notice the link to the pledge registration highlighted in this image. (Giving > Settings > Designations/Funds)
After this release, we added the # of pledges column (also highlighted). If you click on the number, the system will automatically run a pledge summary report so that you can see the details of who pledged.
6. Increased performance for reports
It is helpful for you to know that we often release upgrades that you never see to enhance the performance of the system. Most of the time we don't even blog these. They are things like an upgrade we released a couple of months ago that enhanced the speed for the system running reports. Up to .5 seconds for customers with larger databases. These were invisible modifications except for the very small detail on the Group Roster and Export Group Members report where we separated active from inactive registration attributes as output options. They used to be mixed. Here is a list of the reports that were impacted:
- Group Roster
- CheckIn Roster
- Missing Person Report
- Export Group Members
- Member Listing
- Member Listing with Notes
- Export People
- Mass Change
- Add to Group
- Remove from Group
- Contribution Statements