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.

June release overview

• Smarter lists. Lists now have an option to get updated automatically, which should save everyone some time. You can also view the history of each addition to or removal from the list, so it’s easier to see how a list was created. Finally, if you do want a static list that never changes until you change it, that option is still available.
• Constituent categories. Groups and tags are cool, but many have asked for the ability to track more specific information, so we have added a way for you to create as many different categories as you want or need to segment your constituents appropriately.
• Gift categories. Gift categories cannot have multiple dimensions like constituent categories can, but they provide an additional way to track where a gift came from. By default the values will be Individual Gift, Corporate Gift, Foundation Grant, Public Grant, and Bequest. Values are customizable in the Settings area.
• Member/membership tracking. For membership organizations we have added the ability to track membership levels and dates, and then search/browse by both sets of criteria. If you need this set up or turned on for your subscription, let us know.
• Seasonal addresses. To help increase the accuracy of mailings, you can now set a specific month/day date range for a given address, and LGL will automatically use the correct address based on when you’re exporting your list or the due date for your mailing.

Smarter lists

With LGL’s new list functionality, it’s a whole lot easier to create living lists that can serve as the basis for most of your common queries and reports.  Instead of needing to re-build the list from scratch each time, you have the option to use the list creation history to automatically update the constituents on the list every day (or whenever you edit/update the list).

A fairly simple example might be to create an always-current list of lapsed donors who have given more than $1000 total, which you can build in the following way:

1. Navigate to the constituents tab and click the “Build a list” button

Note the new Auto-update option, which is selected by default.  If you don’t want the list to remain automatically updated, then you can deselect this at any time and the list will freeze.

1. Use the “Gift amount” option in the advanced search to find constituents who have given more than $1000.

1. Then restrict this further by constituents with a “Lapsed Donor” giving status.

1. Lastly, remove any organizations, for good measure, resulting in something that looks like the following.

1. If you are happy with the list, click “Save” and from this point forward you can always use this as the basis for other searches, mailings or exports.
2. You can clear the entire history of the list and all constituents by clicking the “Clear list history” button.

Note If you add or remove individual constituents to/from the list, then these will take precedence over any bulk additions or removals.  Also, lists are updated automatically on a daily basis, or whenever you edit and save them.

Constituent categories

Everyone has four constituent categories by default (groups, tags, capacity, and interest) but it can be handy to add more if you have some specific information you might like to track. Custom categories are nice because they let you split things up in a way that makes them easier to read and you can also browse through your constituent results that way.  For example, here is a setup with custom categories for Status, Program Interest and Volunteer Interest:

You can edit a category independently by clicking on the “Edit” or “Add” links next to each category (visible when you mouse over the category) or you can edit all categories at once by clicking on the Edit all categories button.

Full constituent editing

Previously when adding a new constituent or editing an existing one, you only had the ability to change name and contact information.  Now you can edit everything about a constituent from a single form.  This form is admittedly quite a big one, but you can make it a bit less intimidating by closing any sections that you don’t care to edit at the moment:

Gift categories

Gift categories provide an additional dimension to gift tracking, so you can more easily track where gifts are coming from.  The default categories are Individual Gift, Corporate Gift, Foundation Grant, Public Grant, and Bequest, but these are fully customizable in the Menu Items section of the Settings area.

Member/membership tracking

With member/membership tracking turned on (it is off by default) you can track a constituent’s membership levels and dates, and also easily search for constituents by level and expiration date.  Assuming you have membership turned on, you can:

1. Add/edit membership information from the constituent details page by clicking the “Edit Membership” button, or you can

1. Add/edit membership information from the constituent Edit form

1. Browse constituents by membership level and status

1. Search constituents by membership level and end dates

All of these tools combined make it fairly easy to do things like generate a monthly mailing to members who are up for renewal.

Seasonal addresses

As in the above example, it’s now possible to set dates that relate to a particular address.  By default, all addresses are considered to be “Year ‘round”, but in the case where people spend the year in different locations, different dates can be set.

LGL automatically figures out the best address to use based on the date.  In most cases, the date used is the current date, but in the case of a mailing, the due date is used (if available) to ensure that the correct address information is used.

Miscellaneous changes

Along with these big changes, we changed a number of other small things.

Constituent lookup

In gift, goal, and task forms, and everywhere else that you need to look up and set a constituent, the process has changed a bit to make it easier to see who’s who.

1. Click on the Set Constituent button. Hitting the “Enter” key should also work in most browsers.

1. Search for a constituent or click the “add a new constituent” link if you need to create a new constituent for this record

1. Click the “Select” button to set the constituent and close the window

Constituent details page updates

The location of contact information on the constituent details page has shifted over to the right, to make way for categories in the middle, and also to allow for more vertical space to display all contact information on the main page

Update all categories on a list

The ability to update groups and tags for a whole list of constituents has been replaced by the ability to update all categories on a list.  You can do this by clicking on the “Update categories” button from any list details page.

You can add/remove any category to or from all constituents on a particular list.

Edit all menu items

The menu items page now allows you to edit every kind of customizable type or menu, including all of the categories, task types, note types, and more.

1. To get there, click on the “Setting link” in the upper right hand corner of any page

1. Click on the “Menu items” link in the sub-navigation

1. Add, update, delete, or reorder the values for any menu

Last night we rolled out a new version of little green light™ (LGL) with basic time tracking, so you can easily keep tabs on how much time your team spends on fundraising and donor management for budgeting and reporting purposes. One of our customers requested this feature, and we think it could be useful to everyone, so we built it. Here’s a quick look at how it can work.

Track time as you work

Click the clock icon to add hours to any activity (activities encompass any unit of work, including tasks, documents, notes, gifts, and goals) on the list.

Filter activities to get the list you want

Look at activities by any combination of date range, team member, list, type, constituent group, or constituent tags (key words). 

Export the results as a report

Export the full result set for any activity search into a spreadsheet to view hours, team member, and role information for each activity. 

Honorable mention

Other noteworthy features and updates in this release include: 

• Campaigns and funds list – view all of your campaigns and funds in one unified list, with financial progress information for each
• Better reminders – now all of your task reminders (anything due within the next 48 hours) are bundled in one e-mail sent to you once a day
• Dashboard calendar – overdue tasks and contact reports now stand out from the rest of the items on your calendar