Happy 4th of July weekend! To celebrate our nation’s independence, we’ll be rolling out some new updates to Little Green Light (LGL) on Monday, July 5th. Here’s quick overview of the major changes, with more details to follow below:

• Volunteering: Track volunteering commitments and time for any constituent. Volunteering information will appear as Activity, and will also be summarized on individual constituent records, where applicable.
• Lists on the go: Harness the power of lists from any constituent search, selecting constituents in bulk or individually. Then you can save them into a permanent list, or just do something like update the categories or add a task to them all.
• Relative date searches: Instead of typing in or selecting an exact date for search purposes (i.e., looking up constituents by Gift dates), relative dates like “1 week ago” or “5 years ago” or “today” or “5 days hence” are accepted. When used with a list that auto-updates, this can be a great way to keep tabs on lapsed donors, for example.
• Document updates: Assign customizable categories to documents (so it’s easier to see a Report or Proposal), and make particular documents “sticky,” so they’ll always be at the top of your list.
• Dashboard activity: On the dashboard, under the calendar (now compressed to save space), you can see the list of your activity by day. The default setting is for the current week, but you can filter by other date criteria as well.
• Activity sharing: Sometimes it makes sense to display certain activities (tasks, contact reports, and notes) on more than one record. For instance, if you are having a meeting with one representative of the bank, you might want the main bank record to note that this is happening, but it would be a drag to enter the same task twice. With activity sharing, you can display any task on multiple related constituent records.

Volunteering

Basic volunteer commitment and time tracking is now a standard part of LGL, for all accounts, so you can add volunteering information to any constituent in the Related activity section, like so:

Commitments

If it makes sense to track someone’s volunteer commitment, you can add a new commitment and time entries at the same time:

Volunteer time

Or, if you just need to add some volunteer time, you can do that as well. Commitments are not required:

Volunteering summary

All volunteering activity is listed in the Related activity section, and on the top-level Activity tab, but it is also summarized directly below the giving summary on the constituent details page:

Lists on the go

List building capabilities are now integrated with the standard search on the Constituents tab. This is handy for cases when you want to select a few constituents and update their categories, or add a task to them all in bulk, but you don’t need to keep the list around for a long time. It’s also a much more convenient way to start building any list of constituents.

If you want to save a list from this point, click on the Save list button. If you want to clear the list, you can do so from within the More actions menu, or from the History menu.

Relative date searches

Relative dates like “1 year ago”, “18 months ago”, or “2 weeks hence” can now be used in all of the date range searches. For example, if you want to have a current list of all donors who have not given for more than two years from today, that could be set up as follows:

1. Search for donors who haven’t given in the last two years

2. Select them

3. Save the list

Since this list will auto-update every day, it will always be current, and can be used as the basis for other lists. You can also use the following handy shortcuts for dealing with relative fiscal year dates:

• This fiscal start: The start of the current fiscal year
• This fiscal end: The end of the current fiscal year
• Last fiscal start: The start of the previous fiscal year
• Last fiscal end: The end of the previous fiscal year

These would be useful for setting up LYBUNT (donors who gave last year but not this one) and SYBUNT (some year but not this) lists that stay automatically up to date.

Document updates

We made several changes to the Documents tab, and also to documents in general.

Document categories

First and foremost, you can assign customizable categories to documents, and then filter by them. This allows for better organization of your documents. Categories can be edited on the Settings page, under Menu Items.

Sticky documents

Sometimes it is helpful if a document remains always at the top of your Documents list. This might be best practice notes or general coding guidelines that you’d like to have easy access to all the time. Now you can easily make particular documents “sticky,” which means they’ll always be at the top of the list.

You can make this change while editing or uploading a document:

You can also make the change while viewing the Documents list by clicking the star icon:

Dashboard activity

A listing of the current week’s activity, grouped by day, is now available on the dashboard, underneath the calendar.

You can filter the results by date range, and also by user. By default it shows the current week, and all users.

Entries for each day can be collapsed and expanded.

Activity sharing

To help better track communications with families and organizations, where relationships are key, you can now share an activity with one or more related constituents.

For example, when we add or edit a task for our contact at the fictional Accessible Arts Foundation, we can share that task if it is relevant:

Then it will display on the Accessible Arts Foundation Related Activity list, as follows:

That way another member of your team who looks at either record will see the most relevant recent activity. Additionally, if Marcy Boroughs leaves Accessible Arts to work somewhere else, the record of this task will remain. Shared activity will display with a highlighted background, and show the constituent that it is directly connected to.

Some organizations choose to enter each donation twice, once in their donor management system and again in their accounting system, as a way to provide checks and balances in their system. The upside is increased protection against errors while the downside is increased time by both development and finance to reconcile their records on a regular (usually monthly) basis. Little Green Light always allowed for the basic export of all the gift information you’d need for this kind of reconciliation, but we recently got a request from a customer to help her make the whole process a bit easier and more efficient.

Instead of the usual export in CSV format (that required extra cleanup and formatting in Excel), Megan Farkas, the development coordinator at the Sant Bani School, wanted to be able to pull a particular month’s deposits in a format she could just print or email without alteration. On the surface, those extra steps might not seem like a big deal, but they fly in the face of our belief that Little Green Light should give you the information that you want in the format you need without requiring you to jump through hoops. To that end, we worked with Megan to create a custom PDF export format that provides her with exactly the information she needs. Here’s what the new workflow looks like when she wants to grab the previous month’s deposit report from Little Green Light:

1. Go to the Fundraising Tab and select “deposit date” on the date filter, then choose “Last month” from the dropdown
2. Click the “Export results” button and select the “Deposits” export type; save the export
3. Download/print the results

Just like that, in about 30 seconds flat she has a nice-looking PDF with all of the information she needs in a format that she doesn’t have to re-create every month. Here’s what it looks like with some test data:

The only thing that’s missing now is automating the process so Little Green Light will email her the report at the beginning of every month. That’s a feature we have in the works, and it should be ready (along with a slew of other reporting updates) within the next month or two. We’d like to thank Megan for working with us to provide her with a better report. We encourage all of our customers to do the same, so please don’t hesitate to let us know when you’d like to do so.