2019 feature updates: Our year in review

As a new year and decade kick off, we want to share a wrap up of the most significant feature updates that we made to Little Green Light in 2019. Please read below to see the list and click on a feature name to jump to its description (you’ll need to scroll up a little to locate the section heading).

• LGL-QuickBooks integration
• Automatic address deduplication
• Email signatures
• Customizing Giving Status definitions and addition of New Donor status
• Customizable fields for volunteer time entries
• Ability to allow gift cloning, to make entering recurring payments easier
• Lists in Smart Fields
• Editing team member name and time zone
• In-kind gifts set appeal status to “Donated”
• Ability to view constituent counts in an appeal
• Ability to view goal status in a constituent record
• Ability to search on nicknames in Constituents Advanced Search

LGL-QuickBooks integration

Little Green Light is now integrated with QuickBooks Online (QBO).

The synchronization between LGL and QBO helps you create sales receipts in QuickBooks (QB) without needing to re-enter any data. You can set default mappings to populate the Product/Service and Class fields in your QuickBooks account and match or create QuickBooks Customers based on your LGL constituents.

The integration is a two-way process that pulls back the deposit information for each transaction, once you’ve connected it to a deposit in your QuickBooks account.

You can turn on this integration in Settings > Integration settings:

Read more about this feature in the Knowledge Base.

Automatic address deduplication

When you enable this feature in your account, all addresses within a given constituent record are deduplicated on an ongoing basis. This feature works best when you also have the Address Verification feature turned on, as that service normalizes addresses and makes them easy to match (and de-duplicate).

Read more about this feature in the Knowledge Base.

Email signatures

You can use a personalized signature in emails, and each member of your team can use and update their own individualized email signature. You can also add an image to your email signature.

To view and update your email signature, go to the Manage Senders tab on your Mailings > Emails page:

Read more about this feature in the Knowledge Base.

Customizing Giving Status definitions and addition of New Donor status

You can customize the criteria LGL uses to apply Giving Status tags, including:

• Top Donors
• Lapsed Donors
• Consecutive Years Giving
• New Donors

You can edit these criteria on your Settings > Subscription settings > Gift settings page:

Read more about this feature in the Knowledge Base.

Customizable fields for volunteer time entries

You can add custom volunteer groups and categories for volunteering, giving you more ways to slice and dice your volunteering data. A good example is if you want to track the type of volunteering work (river clean-up, admin, tours, etc.) and you want to track the company that sent people.

You can set up these attributes in Settings > Menu items > Volunteering menu items:

Read more about this feature in the Knowledge Base.

Ability to allow gift cloning, to make entering recurring payments easier

It is possible to clone a gift, helping to save time on gift entry. The process preserves all the information from the gift being cloned, except for the acknowledgment template.

To enable gift cloning, go to the Settings > Subscription settings > Gift settings page, and select the “Clone gifts” check box. To clone a gift, find it in search results (in Fundraising > Giving) and click Actions > Clone. Here’s where you can turn on the feature:

Read more about this feature in the Knowledge Base.

Lists in Smart Fields

This update to Smart Fields gives you the ability to add specific gift lists to a mailing. This feature has some cool applications, including:

• An end-of-year letter that itemizes gifts given to the Annual Campaign (only)
• A letter that itemizes gifts given during the past quarter

Ability to edit team member name (and time zone)

Any Administrator in a Little Green Light account can now edit a team member profile (with the condition that they aren’t a team member in another LGL account) and make updates to the first and last name, and to the team member’s time zone:

“In kind” gifts set appeal status to “Donated”

Now when you enter an in-kind gift for an appeal, the appeal status is automatically set to “Donated” within the appeal:

You can also view the status in the “Appeal Req.” activity within the Related activity section of the constituent record:

Ability to view constituent counts in an appeal

You can see how many constituents are in your appeals and how many have donated, from the Constituents/recipients column on the Appeals page in your account:

Ability to view goal status in a constituent record

You can see the status of each goal within the Related activity section of a constituent record:

Ability to search on nicknames in Constituents Advanced Search

You can run a search on nicknames (and search by “is not blank” for that field):