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Happy holidays! LGL end-of-year release preview

Posted December 13, 2014 by Nick Bicknell

It’s been quite a year, and we are happy to close it out with a sizable update to LGL that includes some great new features, slated to go live during the last week of December. Here’s a brief run-down of the more significant updates in the release:

Free address verification for U.S. addresses (provided by SmartyStreets)

Gain access to first-class CASS-certified U.S. mailing address verification, cleanup, and geo-location services with just a couple clicks. The functionality here is not new, as we’ve had an integration with SmartyStreets for quite some time. What is new is that SmartyStreets stopped offering free unlimited accounts to nonprofits, and because we think address verification is such a great complement to LGL we decided to foot the bill for this integration for all customers and offer it to all U.S. customers free of charge.

If you currently use SmartyStreets and LGL together, the integration will continue uninterrupted. If you are not using it yet and you have a lot of U.S. addresses, we highly recommend that you turn it on as soon as this release is live.

New dashboard widgets and 3-year view in fundraising

Stewardship is a key ingredient to any fundraising effort, and donor retention is a pretty good way to measure how you’re doing in that area. To that end, we’ve designed three new dashboard widgets to provide more insight into how you are doing in both areas. Each widget will provide handy, clickable links to view the lists of constituents who meet those criteria.

Stewardship

With this widget, you’ll gain insight into the following items:

  • Which of your top 100 donors have not given or pledged this year
  • Which of your top 100 donors have not been contacted this year
  • LYBUNTs and SYBUNTs (donors who gave “last” or “some” year but not this year)
  • Gifts that need to be acknowledged

Donor retention

Quickly get a handle on how many new donors, consecutive-year donors, and recaptured donors you have.

Membership summary

Get a nice overview/summary of the status of your membership program, if you have one, by accessing a quick summary of your memberships that are active, new, recently expired, soon to expire, and expired sometime this fiscal year.

Fundraising view: Giving by constituent/year

We’ve added a new view option in the Fundraising tab that shows you total giving for this fiscal year and the prior two fiscal years, by constituent.

Reporting updates

Export data in native Excel format (XLSX)

In addition to the standard CSV reporting options, you can now generate custom report exports as real Excel files (in XLSX format). This will be the default format for any new custom report or export that you create, but it won’t change the format of any existing reports you have or any scheduled reports.

The main benefit to using XLSX over CSV is that it removes the extra step of saving any export as a native Excel document before doing additional work on it.

Define custom report field templates

When creating a report, you define the columns of data you want in the report in the Customize tab. Now you can save the set of fields you select as a reusable template. For instance, if you like to pull a standard set of fields for multiple types of ad-hoc reports, you can define that set of fields one time, name and save them in a template, and then have that template available to use with any report in the future. You can also edit these report templates at any point, as necessary.

Bulk volunteer hour assignment

We’ve had a number of requests over the last few months for a way to add the same volunteer entry to multiple constituents at once, without requiring an import/export type solution. This is now possible with our bulk volunteer assignment tool, which lets you apply the same volunteering activity (hours, date, category) to a set of selected constituents.

New de-duplication options

We’re always trying to improve the ways you can find possible dupes and resolve them. To that end, we’ve added two new methods for this:

  1. Deduping by phone number alone
  2. Deduping by address alone

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