November Rain…Of Features

Not sure I can justify the title of this article with a reference to the early ’90s Guns N’ Roses song. That’s much more depressing than this blog post strives to be.

Over the summer and early fall our team was heads down on one of our other products, our Day of Giving app… or more affectionally known as our DoG. The DoG mobilizes large groups of nonprofits to raise funds together based on a theme over the course of 24 hours, hence, “Day of Giving”. That theme could be a location, like an entire state, or a cause such as adult literacy. Needless to say, building a brand new web application took up a lot of our time, which distracted us from working on GiveGab. But we’re back! Our focus is back on expanding our platform’s fundraising and volunteer management tools. Here’s a little sample of what we’ve been working on.

1. Add a Fundraiser

Have some board members that are great at fundraising, but too stubborn to sign up as a fundraiser? Now you can create a fundraiser for them, or anyone for that matter! Adding someone to your campaign as a fundraiser creates a fundraising page for them, sends an email to notify them of the honor, and gives them the tools to be a successful fundraiser.

Bootstrap your campaign with an army of fundraisers to help generate early momentum for your campaign. Learn more about how to use this function by clicking here.

2. Create a Group with Ease

We’ve redone our group creation form to make the process of creating an organization quick and painless. This helps new admins that sign up. Now they can get started by creating an organization, rather than starting with a user account and then having to create the organization later. It will also help existing users that want to use our “sub-Groups” feature to organize their organization.

If it’s the first time you’ve created a group, we’ll set that group as your default dashboard so that you can get to it faster when you sign in.

We also restyled some of the forms for editing your organization to make them prettier and more intuitive.

3. Admin Dashboard Improvements

Our admin dashboard for groups has undergone some changes. There are some cute, helpful graphics for screens with empty states. We’ve done a better job of highlighting the tab navigation that some folks weren’t seeing. We’ve also added your group logo up top, so you can quickly identify a dashboard…if you are used to managing multiple groups.

4. Team Fundraising

We’ve enhanced our fundraising campaigns to allow Teams to exist without individual p2p Fundraising Champions. This will allow more versatility in how an administrator chooses to run their campaign.

5. Speedier Campaign Pages

Campaign pages now load much quicker through some technical mumbo jumbo. More specifically, we now cache the content that changes infrequently, and we asynchronously load the content that changes more often. This means that visitors to your campaign should experience snappy page loads, so they can get busy reading your campaign story and get inspired sooner.

6. Moved Recurring Donations Option

Based on some customer feedback, we moved the recurring donation option up to the step where a donor selects a donation amount. It makes sense to couple these 2 choices, since you might want to reevaluate your donation amount if you intend to have it recur each month. It’s still too early to tell if this will increase the amount of donors opting to give monthly. What are your thoughts on this?

Other Improvements

• Added a unified search box to the donation flow, so a donor can find fundraisers or teams to sponsor with one simple search. Also added this search to the offline donation form.
• Added fundraiser’s name to donation receipt email when a donation has been made to a fundraiser. This is to reassure that your donation has made it to the proper place.
• Improved indication of which team received a donation on an admin dashboard.
• Added more information to the CSV export for “offline” registrants to an event.
• Event registrants are now sorted by date to make it easier to see who signed up recently.
• Various improvements were made around event fundraisers to make them perform better when a lot of participants are registered.
• Made it easier to change your profile photo.
• Improved styling around campaigns that use a lot of donation levels.
• Fixed a bug where some users were not able to opt out of a volunteer task.
• Started to remove “Followers” feature. More on that next month…

So that’s some of it. There’s a lot more that went on, but I don’t want to bore you with the details. As always, we want your feedback to build a better product! Reach out to us here.