Colleges and universities around the world have long been faced with a changing landscape when it comes to running successful fundraising campaigns. For one thing, potential donors lend their support to a variety of organizations, which makes it more challenging year over year to secure gifts from alumni, parents and friends. Moreover, the recent economic crisis has left many prospects in the position of simply not having the extra cash to make charitable contributions. Yet, in the midst of it all, the University of Vermont and their “Chatty Cats” student caller program – working in partnership with Harris Connect – have managed to add new donors and increase funds raised over the course of the last five years.

2010 - The Year in Review

In 2010, we worked tirelessly to deliver two (2) brand new product initiatives, MyGadgets & Admin Manager, along with twenty-five (25) product enhancements to improve efficiency and increase user engagement.

Here are some of the highlights of 2010:

• Administration Center: The Administration Center was overhauled with a slick new design and security enhancements. The easy-to-use navigation menu, activity snapshots, alerts and announcements make managing your community a breeze.
  
• Admin Manager: Managing a variety of personnel and administrative roles within your organization is easier than ever.  This new application empowers super administrators to work more efficiently and productively by providing one central location for managing administrator accounts.
  
• Email Marketing - Personalized Form Link Tags: We’ve streamlined the form submission process by allowing you to deliver highly customized, pre-populated forms that are easier and faster for your constituents to complete.
  
• Forms - Granular Permissions:  With granular permissions, you may set permissions for specific tasks that individual administrators may perform within form applications - Event Registration, Donation Forms, Membership Forms, and Survey Forms.
  
• Forms - Complimentary and Discount Event Registrations: Whether it’s on a case-by-case basis or part of a broader marketing program, now you can offer event registrants a discounted or complimentary registration by allowing administrators to enter a percent or flat dollar discount amount on event registration forms.
  
• Event Registration - Flexible Attendance List: Now you can customize the information about each attendee that is visible on the attendance list to community users or to administrators, making the Attendance List an even more useful tool for marketing and managing your events.

We genuinely appreciate your invaluable feedback throughout the year – it has given us the opportunity to improve not only the quality of our products and services, but also the way in which we communicate and implement those new enhancements. We could not have accomplished so much without you, our client partners.

For more information on all the product enhancements we released in 2010, click here. 

Recent Releases

Forms – Merchant ID Access - January 10, 2011
For those client partners who designate different Merchant IDs (used for payment processing within forms) for individual departments within their organization, this release will allow greater control over the appropriate assignment of these Merchant IDs to forms.  A new tool within the Admin Manager application will allow administrators with “super admin” status to specify which Merchant IDs other administrators (such as chapter administrators, volunteers or staff) will have available to them for assignment to forms created in any of the Form Applications. (i.e. Event Registration, Donation, Membership, and Survey Forms).

Opt-out Link - Enhanced Validation - January 10, 2011
This Email Marketing update to the Create & Manage Content > Check Links button will validate unsubscribe links using more rigorous validation rules. If any link fails the validation check, an appropriate error message will display. This update will NOT prevent an email with an invalid unsubscribe link from being sent out - it will simply allow clients to proactively identify emails with invalid unsubscribe links so that they may be corrected.  We will perform a one-time scan to identify all existing emails that contain invalid unsubscribe links to prevent administrators from having to manually search for invalid links themselves.

What Portal Case Types should I use when submitting a case?

Please refer to the following guide when submitting cases.

Data Request: The Data Request portal category is intended for cases related to the extraction or manipulation of a data file, or an individual data field or field label changes.
 
Error/Bug: When an application (front end or admin center) is not working as designed and prevents you from completing your task.

Error Page: When you try to access a page or application, and you receive a specific error message. Such as “page not found”

HTML Change: Any change that requires code to be added, changed or removed. Changing the width of columns, site navigation changes, image changes, link and text changes could fall into this category.

Maintenance: Any type of updates to existing pages or applications like text changes, deleting directory records or admin records, providing access to admin center features for the main admin, adding to dropdown menus and classnote change requests.

Questions: Any type of "How do I" question.

Site Down: Access to the front end sites or admin center is not available.

Site Slow: The time to load pages or process requests in the admin center are taking longer than normal.

Please Note: If something is not correctly resolved on a case that has already been closed, you can request that the case be reopened by entering a comment on that specific case. These new comments are reviewed by the Tech Support Manager.

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