It’s a Date! (Relatively Speaking)
A new donor welcome series is probably one of the most common workflows in Virtuous. To build a welcome series, of course, you’ll first need to create a query that targets Contacts who recently gave their very first gift.
And “recent” can mean a lot of things.
For example, Taylor Swift recently released a new album. But for those of a certain generation, any album released since the year 2000 might rate as “recent.” (We won’t even talk about how the last four years all seem to run together in a blur.)
In Virtuous, building a query to target “recent” new Gifts has usually meant looking at the last 30 days. Which is great, especially for workflow steps where actions may take place over the course of 30 days. But not always ideal.
And that’s why so many of you asked for “7 days ago” as a relative date parameter instead. And who are we to deny the will of the people?
That’s right, in this release, we’ve added “7 days ago” as a relative date parameter for all your query needs!
BUT WAIT…THERE’S MORE!
(Yes, we are still doing that, never get tired of it)
Since this is so handy, we thought we should add the same option for filters as well!
Now, it will be much easier to hone in on recent activity.
And here, “recent” means within the last week, so The Tortured Poets Department wouldn’t make the cut (apologies to Tay-tay and Swifties everywhere).
Show me the Money (That’s Due)
(OK, it’s a hard pivot from Taylor Swift’s latest opus to a 28 year old Tom Cruise rom-com. Yes, 28 years old, which means it came out in the late 1900’s…AKA, the tail end of last century. The movie is old enough to rent a car without paying an additional fee. 🤯 We’ve got pop-cultural references that span generations.)
There you are, minding your own business, entering gifts in the Gift & Contact Import tool. And lo, you select a Contact only to discover that they have an active pledge. Aha! Maybe the Gift you are entering should be logged as a payment towards their pledge? You check to see and, in fact the Gift is a match for the next expected payment. Success! You apply the Gift to the Pledge, and then move along.
Except…
Well, it’s a little tougher to see which Pledges are active and which are already paid, or cancelled…or written off.
Well, not anymore!
Yes, another popular request is here! We are limiting the Pledges displayed in the Gift & Contact Import tool to only show Pledges that are active, meaning they have a status of “Up-to-date” or “Past due.”
This will make it easier to quickly scan and see if a Contact has an open Pledge, so now you can easily catch Pledge payments coming in and make sure they are applied correctly.
(Feed)back to the Future
(See? Now we’re referencing a movie from way back in 1985. Though it is also a recent Broadway musical, so it’s all a matter of perspective. Depending on your age, you may not like hearing that if Back to the Future were made today, Marty McFly would go back in time to…1994. The movie might have references to the new show “Friends” or the introduction of something called the “Playstation.”)
As part of our ongoing effort to engage with user feedback, we’ve made an update to our in-app roadmap board. As part of this release, you’ll see a new Product Feedback board, where you can stay up-to-date on recent product updates, see what we’re currently working on, and provide feedback on all areas of Virtuous.
Be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!
And the Rest…
As with every release, this latest update also includes a number of other fixes, tweaks, minor modifications, and assorted nudges. Among the various fixes released over the last month:
- New Gift Type! New Gift Type! Yes, after many requests, we’ve added PayPal as a Gift Type option. (Some of you may have already seen this in the wild - this feature was initially rolled out only for customers syncing RaiseDonors and Virtuous, but now it’s available wherever you get your Gift Types.)
- Some workflow actions were, on occasion, not properly updating custom field values. While a little random chance can add excitement, this doesn’t seem like the place for adding a touch of surprise and delight, so we made sure workflows actions will be boring and predictable from now on.
- We’ve deployed a fix for some sporadic issues plaguing segmentation imports. If you haven’t had issue with your segmentation imports, congrats on being plague-free!
- Memberships were not being creating by membership forms in some cases. While there are no doubt some fascinating existential questions posed by this (”If a form does not create a membership, is it truly a membership form?”) we are engineers, not philosophers. So we fixed the issue and made sure membership forms will do their job. If you want philosophy, go watch The Good Place. (Seriously, you should. It’s great!)
- We checked and double-checked our math on reconciliation reports for users processing via Stripe and made a few improvements to make sure everything is as accurate as possible. Yes, we did math. For you. Because we care!
- Some archived Contact Addresses were showing up when using the search bar. We thought about just rebranding this as “Zombie Addresses,” just for fun, but instead we just made sure that archived addresses stay in the archive from now on.
- Bulk data updates were, indeed, updating data. But among those fields not being updated? Last Modified Date and Last Modified By. We’ve made a few fixes to ensure bulk updates will show when they were updated, and by whom.
- We fixed an issue affecting some users logging in via SSO and another affecting logging in with two-factor authentication. Because Virtuous works a lot better when you can log in.
- We tightened up a few things that were causing imports to get stuck. Because Virtuous works a lot better when you can get your data in.
- We also squashed a bug that was causing some workflows to fail. Because Virtuous works a lot better when…OK wait, we can’t keep using this. But things are better when workflows are humming along nicely.
- Some users building Zaps in Zapier were not seeing recent data when loading samples for testing. We could bing back the whole “recent” bit from the first section, but suffice it to say, now the data pulled in for samples will be shiny and new.
- For our friends from the Great White North! Some receipts were blank, which, while great if it means they are printed in secret, invisible ink—and if you are a spy—is not as great for donor receipts. So we’ve made sure receipts will run in all their intended glory.
And that's the list! Phew! As always, if you have any questions about these or other features, feel free to contact our team using the support widget in Virtuous. And be sure to let us know your thoughts in the new Product Feedback portal!