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2024 feature updates: LGL’s year in review

Posted January 29, 2025 by Teri Bicknell

2024 LGL Feature Updates

As we enter 2025, we wanted to take a look back and share these changes that our developers made to Little Green Light in 2024. Click any item to link to more details.

2024 feature updates

Dashboard

New dashboard widgets

Updated dashboard widgets

LGL Forms

Integrations

LGL API

Other updates

2024 feature updates

Dashboard

New organization dashboard and print dashboard options available

An organization dashboard is now available to any LGL user with Administrator-level privileges. This dashboard can have a different layout than the user’s customized dashboard view that is uniform across the organization. You can now also print the entire dashboard as displayed, as well as individual dashboard widgets. Individual widgets can also be downloaded as a JPEG or PNG file.

April 2024 release note: new dashboard view and widgets

New dashboard widgets

Current Donors by Gift Tier

This widget displays a pie chart of the percentages of donors by gift tier (using account custom gift tiers, if present). There is also an option to toggle to a table showing donor percentages and counts by gift tier.

current donors by gift tier widget

Donor Attrition by Gift Tier

This widget shows donor attrition by their last giving tier. The information is represented by a stacked column chart that toggles to a table view.

donor attrition widget

Donors by Retention Status

This widget illustrates the number of donors who gave in the years shown as a bar chart. The information is also presented in a table.

retention donors widget

Annual Retention Rate

This widget displays the count of donors in bars (left axis) and the retention percentage in line (right axis). The table displays the count of total donors, retained donors, and lapsed donors.

annual retention widget

Donor Giving Compared to Prior Year

This widget illustrates the change in giving for donors by year when compared to their giving in the previous year. The widget will default to counts but can toggle to percentages. You can click on a section of the chart to be taken to a search page that will return the result. There is also a pre-calculated field that you can search on, named “Year over year giving”, which allows a comparison between one selected year and the year previous to the selected year. You will be able to select the year to be compared and the comparison type.

annual donor giving widget

Updated dashboard widgets

Consecutive Years of Giving

We added a pie chart to the Consecutive Years of Giving widget. The pie chart displays the percentage of current-year donors who have given 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6+ years.

consecutive years of giving chart

Change Donor Summary by Year

We renamed the “Donor Summary by Year” widget to “Total Raised by Retention Status” to clarify the information being displayed. The category “Consecutive year donors” in the widget was renamed to “Retained donors” to be in alignment with new widgets displaying similar information.

total raised widget

Stewardship Opportunities

We updated the text in the Stewardship Opportunities widget to clarify that it includes the top donors, and not necessarily the top “100” donors (since that count can be adjusted via your gift settings). We also excluded constituents coded as “deceased” from this widget.

stewardship widget

Existing widgets now open in new tabs when links are clicked

We updated the following widgets to open in a new tab instead of the current tab when links are clicked:

  • Calendar Alerts
  • Favorite Lists
  • My Constituents, Goals & Tasks
  • Stewardship Opportunities
  • Constituent Search
  • Donor Summary by Year
  • Fundraising Totals
  • Goals Summary
  • Membership Summary
  • Pledge Summary by Year of Pledge
  • Volunteering Hours

“Refresh” option now available in the Alerts dashboard widget

We added a “Refresh” button and “Last updated date/time” information to the Alerts widget on the dashboard so users can be sure they are referencing the most current data.

widget refresh button

LGL Forms

Behind the scenes: Moving LGL Forms into Little Green Light

We rewrote much of the code for LGL Forms, which allows for a tighter integration between it and the donor management database side of all Little Green Light accounts.

This does not affect the location of any of your published forms, and access to all of your public forms is unchanged, so you don’t need to take any action.

The most visible change is that the URL (web address) for LGL Forms now matches your Little Green Light account key. In other words, if your LGL account is at “https://myaccount.littlegreenlight.com”, your URL for LGL Forms is at that same URL followed by “/lglforms”. So your LGL Forms account URL is “https://myaccount.littlegreenlight.com/lglforms”, as opposed to what it previously was, “https://admin.lglforms.com/”.

New and improved PayPal integration for LGL Forms

We updated PayPal in LGL Forms to the latest version, which adds additional security and payment methods. The PayPal Complete Payments integration uses a completely new and improved platform provided by PayPal and provides three benefits for LGL Forms users: Support for recurring donations without the need to be logged into a PayPal account, and the additional payment options of Venmo and Google Pay. The update also includes the ability to offer PayPal and Venmo as potential payment methods in a Stripe-enabled form.

LGL Forms now offers a QR code for published forms

It’s now possible to copy a QR code for your published LGL form and use it on a poster or a letter or embed it on your website. Scanning this code will take users directly to your form on a secure page hosted by LGL Forms.

QR code in LGL Forms

Creation of a current year (2024) version of our Giving Tuesday form

We created an updated Giving Tuesday form for 2024, which became available in late September.

2024 LGL Giving Tuesday form template

Forms: 3% fee data now available in exports

Some users were interested in understanding how much money their organization received due to the additional 3% optional fee in LGL Forms. To address this, we made available an “Added 3%?” field in the donations/payments submissions export available within LGL Forms so that organizations can track whether a donor opted to add that additional amount to their gift.

LGL Forms export

Forms: Deductible amount now increased if the “add 3%” option is checked

In LGL Forms, when the 3% increase is selected, we have added functionality that increases the deductible amount to the original deductible amount plus the 3% increase. This is relevant for cases where the deductible amount is pre-defined in the form.

Forms: Email confirmations immediately sent for ACH payments

A gift that is submitted through an LGL form using ACH payment now receives an email confirmation when the form is submitted, rather than needing to wait until the ACH transfer completes.

Forms: The option to copy the code for your form to your clipboard is now available via a “Copy” button

In LGL Forms, we added a “Copy” button in the Publish tab for the Javascript and iframe code.

copy code button

Forms: Payment summary with $0 items selected now available

In the payment summary for a form, we added the ability to see $0 items.

payment summary form

$0 payment form summary

Forms: Popup error message updated for minimum amount in LGL Forms

In LGL Forms, the popup error message when a lower amount than the minimum allowed was submitted has been updated to now state what the minimum amount is rather than only that the amount was too small.

Minimum amount error message in LGL Forms

Integrations

Upgraded integration with QuickBooks Online

We built a significant upgrade to our QuickBooks Online integration, which will benefit anyone using Stripe as the payment processor for LGL Forms. With this upgrade, we are able to queue up deposits based on your Stripe funds transfers and connect the underlying sales receipts to the deposit automatically, and deposits no longer need to be created manually in QuickBooks.

Enhanced integration from Little Green Light to Double the Donation

Double the Donation discovers matching gift opportunities and nudges donors to submit their matching gift request directly to their employer. This integration, built by Double the Donation, pulls recent gift transactions, by gift categories you select, from your LGL account on a nightly basis. This new enhancement complements the earlier integration built by LGL into LGL Forms.

For LGL accounts with Civic Champs turned on, there is now a link from the constituent page to Civic Champs

volunteering widget

Integration Settings page redesign

We updated our Integration Settings page to make it easier for customers to find useful integrations. We also moved the enhancements listed in the “Provided by LGL” (LGL Forms, LGL Email, and Address Verification) section off the Integration Settings page and into their respective homes within LGL.

LGL integration settings page

LGL API

“Expand” option now added to the API “Search for Gifts” request

We added an “expand” option to our API to allow responses to gift searches to include information about the related donors, eliminating the need for additional requests.

New fields “create_at” and “updated_at date-time” added to gift query returns and sort returns

We added “created_at” and “updated_at” in the data we return for gifts via the API. The results are also sorted so the latest record processed is on top.

“Relationships” added as a record type that can be accessed/updated

We added the ability to search for relationship types and update/post relationships for constituents via the API.

“Class Affiliations” now exposed

We exposed “Class Affiliations” in the API.

Other updates

2024 Annual Statements feature updates

The 2024 version of the Annual Statements feature is live. Each year, we enable this feature for the just-ending calendar year. Annual statements are designed to be mailed or emailed in early the following year (i.e., January 2025), but we know some customers like to start working on them earlier.

We also added functionality to the Annual Statements feature to make the resolution of failed emails easier. From the list of failed emails, users will be able to either update the failed email address, move the recipient to the mailing segment, or re-send the email.

LGL Annual Statement updates

School types are now merge-able

We added the ability to merge school types. This can be used by organizations that have inadvertently created duplicate school types.

school types category

Search fields: Indicator and help text now present for pre-calculated search fields

We added an asterisk next to search criteria fields that are fundraising-related and pre-calculated, such as “First gift date” and “Consecutive years of giving”. When one of these fields is used in a search, a help icon appears next to the field and a description of the calculation that the field makes is provided in the help text.

help text

“External ID” values now included in the constituent overview section of the comprehensive export

We added “External constituent ID” as a column to the constituent_overview.csv sheet in the comprehensive export.

LGL Comprehensive export file

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