Let's Go Postal
Sure, postcards are a great way to make your friends jealous about your vacation to Bora Bora ("Wish you were here!"), but they are also a great way to send a little personal touch to your donors.
Wait, postcards?
You betcha! We've added the option to send postcards as part of our Letters on Demand feature. Now, you can use automated workflows to celebrate donor milestones, or send a little thank you, with a postcard. When adding a Letters on Demand action to a workflow step, just select the "send postcard" option.
Looking for a great way to use postcards in automation? Well then how about...
Happy Anniversary!
Celebrate the anniversary of a donor's first gift with the new "Donor Anniversary" parameter in Contact queries. Like "Birthday" in Individual queries, this parameters works with the "Matches" operator to identify date matches based only on Month and Day.
It's a great way to query for donors and send them a thank-you, whether in their mailbox or their inbox.
Go ahead, check it out!
Saved You a Click
Extra mouse clicks during gift entry? Who needs 'em?
Not you!
Now, in addition to the quick key command (ALT+C, if you're keeping score at home), we've added a button for adding a new transaction in the Gift & Contact Import tool. No need to open the Actions menu anymore! Just click and go.
What's in a Name?
Virtuous Giving forms are great for personal giving, but until now, accepting donations from a company or other organizations has been a little tricky. Where to put the organization's name?
Well, now you'll see a new field available in the form builder: Business Name.
Just add this bad boy to any giving or lead form to give your supporters the option to provide the name of their organization. You can even rename the field and add help or sample text to make things crystal clear for your site visitors.
Using this field will affect how some data is handled in the Gift & Contact Import tool. Instead of defaulting to the Contact Type of "Household," any record where there is a value present in the Business Name field will be set to "Organization" as the default. Keep an eye out for these records in your imports (like you wouldn't anyway!) so you can confirm the Contact Type, if needed.
Go Ahead, Take the Weekend Off
Hey, sometimes, you just need a day off. Maybe two. It's human nature.
And now, it's also...workflow nature?
When creating a custom workflow, or editing a existing workflow, now you'll see an option to specify whether your automation should run 7 days a week, or if it should not run on Sundays (aka, Chick-fil-A style), or not run on weekends entirely.
This is a great way to avoid sending your best email content when your donors might not see it, or creating tasks for staff members when they are not in the office.
Developers' Corner
With each release, we like to include some new features for developers and users who interact with our API. Sometimes, that might mean highlighting one or two new features, and sometimes a little more. But we'd like to make it easier for developers to get updates about new features and changes to our API.
If you are a developer, or if you just like to stay in the know on all the high-tech goings-on around here, just reply to this email and let us know, or use the support messenger to contact us.
In this release, we've added a few new API features:
- To make it easier to integrate with other systems and identify Contacts between both, we've added a new endpoint to get Contacts by email address, by Reference Source & ID (these always work together, like Batman & Robin or Abbott & Costello), or all three.
- When querying Gifts (not Full Gift), we will now return the Contact ID for the donor, eliminating the need for a second call. Twice the efficiency!
- We've added Origin Segment Code to the response payload when you GET Contacts by ID.
- We've updated our rate limits to apply limits based on user ID.
...And the Rest
As with every release, this month's update also includes a number of other fixes, tweaks, minor modifications, and assorted nudges. Among this month's assorted fixes:
- By popular demand, we've added the ability to sort transactions and recurring transactions in Virtuous Giving by clicking on column headers. Hover over any column header, and if your mouse cursor turns into a little pointing hand, then you can click to sort. If your cursor turns into anything else, you've probably been working too hard and you should take a break.
- In our last release, we added the ability to specify a type of phone number or email when adding a new Contact. Now, we're bringing that functionality to the Gift & Contact Import tool. We've even made "Phone Type" an available field for lead and giving forms. Because clean data is happy data.
- It was brought to our attention that Gifts with the type of Reversing Transaction were being left out of annual statements. We feel terrible for having excluded them, but we're happy to say they are back in the fold now.
- We've made few improvements to the logic we use to determine potential duplicate Contacts. So if you suddenly see an uptick in flagged duplicates, there's no need to panic. At least, not about duplicates...
- We also squashed a bug that affected the Recurring Gift Fulfillment Widget and the Recurring Gift Payment report. For a while, these two were not in agreement, but we sat them down and talked it out and now they both see eye-to-eye.
- New Statistics alert! We've added four new parameters to Individual queries to help use marketing activity in queries (and by extension, workflows). You'll see date parameters for First Email Opened, Last Email Opened, First Website Visit, and Last Website Visit. For web activity, you'll need to have the Responsive Listener active on your website.
- And while we are chatting about queries, we should mention that you can now using the nesting feature to nest Event Invitation queries into Individual queries, providing more flexibility for identifying specific Individuals based on Event Invitation data, including custom fields.
- Users who are restricted by Project Ownership and to viewing only Contacts in their own Organization Group will now be able to see giving from Contacts outside of their Organization Group when viewing the Project Summary Report. Phew! ("So clearly I cannot choose the wine in front of you...")
- We have added a new "PledgeProject" header to the Gift Import template to make it easier to import Pledges. If you've got any old templates laying about, it's time for a refresh!
- The new "Add Reversing Gift" feature, while great and all, was preventing users from editing the Gift once saved. This, as it turns out, was less than ideal, so we've corrected it.
- We've updated some of our best practice queries to make sure they are still using the latest and greatest in Virtuous Query Technology (VQT).
- Fulfilled Pledges can now be "un-fulfilled" if any of the Gifts associated with them are edited or removed, allowing for data corrections after the fact.
- Email users will notice a new "unsaved changes" prompt when attempting to leave the editor page. If, of course, there are any unsaved changes. Otherwise that would just be mean.
- Individuals created with a complete birthdate were not having their exact ages calculated correctly, but that's a thing of the past now.
- The Last Fiscal Year to Date Giving statistic was also not calculating correctly, so we went back and re-checked the math to make sure it's right from now on.
- Exporting large PDF batches (like, oh, say, all of your donors' annual statements?) will now automatically create multiple batches, with a maximum of 5,000 records per batch.
- We've expanded the drop-down for selecting pledge payments when entering or editing a Gift, to make it a little easier to find the right one. Why? Because we care.
And that's the list! As always, if you have any questions about these or other features, feel free to contact our team using the support widget in Virtuous, or drop us a line at support@virtuoussoftware.com.