Little Green Light: Spring 2020 Updates

With 2020 well underway, we want to share some updates we’ve made to Little Green Light over the past few months. This includes bug fixes, to provide additional insight into what has been happening under the hood in LGL.

Please see the list of updates and fixes below and click any item to jump directly to more details (you might need to scroll up a little to see the heading)

New updates

• View your fundraising data by campaign and appeal
• Ability to search gifts by in-honor/in-memory names
• Little Green Light is beta testing an integration with Zapier
• Automatically send pledge reminders to Gift Entry team members
• Reprocessed failed recurring payments that are resubmitted and for which the payment completes are now automatically synced to LGL
• Enable file uploads via Help request form
• Now only Admins can be billing contacts
• Step 4 of mailing builder now links off to “Excluded” constituents

Fixes

• Gift list merge fields and Smart Field gift lists
• Update to when Flex Importer “Constituent number” is displayed
• Mailchimp terminology updates
• Account owner mismatch between Team page and Contact Info page
• “Queued” and “Pending” emails now have the same conditions as a “Sent” email
• Now [[date]] in emails is equal to “today” and to send date
• Remove closed accounts from the LGL Forms dropdown menu

New updates

View your fundraising data by campaign and appeal

A new option in the View menu on the Fundraising tab allows you to display your campaign and appeal gifts onscreen.

Ability to search gifts by in-honor/in-memory names

You can now search in Fundraising > Giving by the name of the honoree/deceased. Tribute gifts now also show the name of the honoree/deceased in search results:

Little Green Light is now beta testing an integration with Zapier

Zapier is an app-connecting service that helps automate workflows. We are testing our integration with some early adopters and expect to open this up to more users within a couple of months.

Read more about how the Zapier beta integration works.

Automatically send pledge reminders to Gift Entry team members

Previously when you enabled the gift setting in your LGL account to send pledge reminders automatically, you were able to send them only to other team members who were Administrators. You can now automatically send pledge reminders to Gift Entry users as well.

Reprocessed failed recurring payments that are resubmitted and for which the payment completes are now automatically synced to LGL

You no longer need to resync failed recurring payments that have been successfully resubmitted. Those will be automatically synced to your LGL account.

Enable file uploads via Help request form

Now when you submit a help request you can upload a file, such as a screenshot or a spreadsheet, along with your request.

Now only Admins can be billing contacts

We allow only Administrators in Little Green Light accounts to be selected as billing contacts. Previously any user could be selected.

Step 4 of mailing builder now links off to “Excluded” constituents

When you’re building your mailing list in Step 4 of the mailing or email builder, the number of exclusions has always displayed so that you could see how many there were. Now, if there are any exclusions in effect you can click on the link and a new tab will open containing the excluded constituents so that you can see who they are.

Fixes

Gift list merge fields and Smart Field gift lists

Previously, a merge field such as [[gifts.2019.custom_list]] did not pull data into a mailing unless the merge field included at least one additional column name, such as “campaign” or “notes” (an example is shown in this merge field: [[gifts.2019.custom_list:campaign]]). Now the merge field will pull in the gift list whether or not additional columns are included in the merge field.

This update also applies to any gift lists created via a Smart Field. For example, if you create a Smart Field for “gifts to annual fund,” then the associated gift list, [[smart_field.gifts_to_annual_fund.gift_list]], will now work without any additional columns being defined.

Update to when Flex Importer Constituent number is displayed

Previously, when you uploaded constituents into Little Green Light, either using the Flex Importer, the LGL Forms Submission Queue, or the Integration Queue, the constituent number would display in mapped fields and in the record preview. This could cause confusion when data for only one constituent was being uploaded, because it wasn’t clear what the constituent number referred to. The constituent number now displays only when data for multiple constituents in a single record is being uploaded.

Mailchimp terminology updates

The User Interface in Little Green Light has been updated to match recent terminology changes in Mailchimp. “List” has been updated to “Audience”, and “Segment” has been updated to “Tag”:

Account owner mismatch between Team page and Contact Info page

Previously, you may have noticed a mismatch for who was labeled as the account owner between the Team page and the Contact Info page. This is now fixed so the correct team member is displayed as the account owner in both locations.

“Queued” and “Pending” emails now have the same conditions as a “Sent” email

Once you queue an email for delivery:

• It will not be possible to add new constituents to it
• The email content will not be updated if the underlying email template is updated

This update will prevent either of these changes from affecting emails that are in the process of being sent. If you do need to make a change to the recipient list for an email after you have clicked the “Queue for delivery” button for the email, you will need to un-queue the email before you can update the recipient list.

Make [[date]] in emails equal to “today” and to the send date

If you create an email today in anticipation of sending it later, and in the email you add the date merge field, it could previously end up being set to the creation date rather than the send date (if you created the email before sending it). For emails, we now always insert the current day into the [[date]] field, so the [[date]] merge field will always be the date the email is sent, rather than the date on which it was created.

Remove closed accounts from the LGL Forms dropdown menu

For cases in which you are a user in more than one LGL Forms account, you may know that you can select among those accounts from the top of your LGL Forms account page. Now, any closed LGL Forms account in which you were a user will no longer appear as an option in the LGL Forms dropdown menu.

You’ll see a down arrow next to your LGL Forms account name whenever your user profile is associated with more than one account. Click this to choose from among the LGL Forms accounts in which you are a user.