March 7, 2016 |

How Do Auto-Calculated Fields Work in a Donor CRM

This weekend, we deployed the DonorPerfect 2016.02 release to production. This release continues to deliver on our goal of listening to clients via our Suggest and Vote program, and as a result we’re releasing five improvements suggested by you for Tributes Management and Calculated Fields. In addition, new and existing clients that don’t already have templates loaded into their Mail Merge Template library will now see the three most commonly used templates preloaded.

Release Schedule

Before we get into the details of what was released, I want to to point out a few changes to our release process. If it seems like we just had a release not too long ago, you’re right. We did! In fact this is part of an evolving process to improve how we do releases, incorporate your suggestions and get software improvements out the door. So look for more frequent releases in the coming year and improved communication about them.

New Mail Merge Templates

Last year, we released a new Mail Merge Template library where you could upload your templates once and use them over and over again. With this release, we’ve added some of our standard templates to the Mail Merge Template library for new and existing clients that don’t already have any templates loaded. The preloaded templates include the Letter – General, Letter – Thank You, and Letter – End of Year Tax Merge templates and will help with merging letters more quickly. To access them, simply click the “Gear” icon to access Settings and select Mail Merge Templates.

Autocalcs Moved to Calculated Fields

Autocalcs have always been a powerful tool to create a calculated field for your filters and reports. However, they took a few steps to use. For starters, you had to copy a filter from somewhere else and paste it into the autocalc. Then, it could only sum total the gift amount and you had to recalculate your entire database. With this improvement, you get all the power without all the hassle. We’ve combined the best of Autocalcs and Calculated Fields, moving Autocalcs out of Settings > Parameters > Calculated Fields and into the regular Calculated Fields screen. How does this help? It allows you to take advantage of the power of Calculated Fields, such as building a filter, changing the calculation to other fields such as Fair Market Value (FMV), changing the calculation type from Sum to Average, and more.

What Else is New?

To see the entire list of changes, please visit DonorPerfect Updates category of this blog.