June Product Update: Here’s What’s New in EverTrue This Month

Jenna Buckle
06/29/2017

Welcome to your June Product Update! You may remember reading about last month’s Hackathon, where we welcomed customers into our Boston office to brainstorm and “hack” on new features. You were bursting with great ideas on how EverTrue can help you better connect with alumni, and it was tough to pick just a few projects to pursue.

This month, we’re thrilled to release two features that came directly out of the Hackathon. We’re also excited to announce that our Alumni Community app is now available for web, giving your alumni an exclusive networking destination on both desktop and mobile. Read on to learn more about this and other enhancements to the EverTrue Platform.

[show-testimonials alias=’bucknell-1′]

Supercharge Your Engagement Efforts: Alumni Community Web Is Here!

Your alumni’s favorite networking platform just got even better. In response to customers who love the original Alumni Community app, we built a web version of Community as another powerful engagement tool for your team. Now alumni can log into their network and connect with peers on any device—desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Just like the app, Community Web is powered by our exclusive partnership with LinkedIn. That means alumni will have access to advanced LinkedIn filters, plus your team will be able to collect updated career and location information for every constituent in your database.

Along with launching the web platform, we’ve added a few other features to the Community product—both of which originated from our Hackathon.

Get alumni involved as mentors with a new mentorship feature (now available on web and iOS). Interested in building a mentorship program? This is a great way to provide alumni with mentor/mentee opportunities. In Community, alumni can now indicate a willingness to mentor other graduates by updating their profile with a “Mentor” tag. In addition, alumni looking for professional guidance can search for mentors in any industry or location by using a new “Mentor” filter.
Let users access their alumni cards right from the Community app. From the app home screen, users can tap on “Alumni Card” to view their individual alumni card and ID number. That way it’s easy for them to take advantage of any discounts and opportunities that your institution offers for alumni.

If you’re a current Community customer, you can activate your web Community today. If you’re not a customer but are interested in bringing Community web and mobile to your alumni base, please chat us in the bottom right corner or contact us at outreach@evertrue.com.

Search for Constituents by Remote ID or Email Address in EverTrue

With 10 “Jane Smiths” in your constituent base, locating the right “Jane Smith” in EverTrue could be difficult with our name-only search. You shouldn’t have to reference the constituent’s remote ID in your database to ensure you have the right profile—so it’s now possible to search for constituents in EverTrue by remote ID or email address!

Just paste the ID or email address into the main search bar and EverTrue will return any results.

Add Multiple Anchor Visits to a Trip Itinerary

Packing in more than one anchor visit on an upcoming trip? To support all you rockstar gift officers out there, we’ve adjusted My Trips to allow for multiple anchor meetings.

The process is the same: when you add an important meeting to your trip itinerary, check “Yes” next to “Is this an anchor meeting?” EverTrue will display a star on that meeting card, indicating that it’s an anchor meeting. You’re no longer limited to just one anchor meeting.

Please note that this feature is part of our Relationship Management offering for gift officers. To learn more, chat us in the bottom right hand corner.

We’ve got even more updates on deck for next month, so keep an eye out. (Speaking of next month, don’t miss out on RAISE 2017 from July 27-28—tickets are flying off the shelf.) Good luck in the final days of the fiscal year!

Endowment Spending & Growth Calculator

Enter your fund's current value and adjust the return, spending, and inflation sliders to see how its value in today's dollars changes over time.

Starting fund value

Expected investment return 6.0%

0%12%

Spending rate 4.0%

2%7%

Inflation rate 3.0%

0%8%

Duration (years) 10

5 yrs25 yrs

Value in 10 years

In today's dollars

4. Continue to Steward Donors

Your relationship with the donors who give to your endowment doesn’t end when you secure their gifts. Because your endowment exists to make a difference in the long term, your supporters will want you to keep in touch about its progress. Ongoing stewardship means keeping donors updated about your endowment’s performance and impact. A report that strengthens your relationship with donors should cover:

The fund’s balance at the start and end of the year
Spending amounts and allocations
How the fund’s returns compare to your investment targets
A short narrative detailing the specific impacts the endowment achieved

Create a report for each endowment rather than sending an identical document to everyone. A donor who endowed a scholarship wants to hear about the students it supported, while a donor who endowed a building fund wants updates on construction projects.

5. Upgrade Your Endowment Management Tools

Your endowment management tools should make applying your spending policy across every fund easy. Investing in dedicated software is especially useful as your endowment grows. Handling unitization in spreadsheets might work for a few funds, but as you begin to manage dozens or hundreds of gifts, dedicated software can save your team time spent manually calculating gains and losses for each one.

Why Nonprofits Need Dedicated Endowment Management Software

Dedicated endowment software brings accuracy and consistency to every part of the management process, from tracking individual funds to improving security. See how these solutions compare to a spreadsheet-based approach:

nfographic table outlining the information below.

How These Methods Compare:

In managing your endowment with traditional spreadsheets, you may see:

High administrative burden: Manual entry across disconnected systems
Limited security and audit footprints: Reduced version control and audit trail visibility
Difficulty with donor transparency: Spreadsheets provide only static data that is difficult to turn into custom results.

By using dedicated software, you are likely to find the following improvements:

Lower administrative burden: Automated fund tracking and calculated allocations
Enhanced security and audit footprint: Audit-ready reconciliation with clear tracking
Greater donor transparency: Connects with reporting platforms

Dedicated endowment management software keeps your organization compliant while freeing up the time your team once spent manually managing spreadsheets.

Secure Your Endowment with Balance by EverTrue

Effective endowment management begins with excellent accounting. Balance by EverTrue handles unitization, applies spending rules, and produces audit-ready reports, so your team can spend more time on the donor relationships that built the fund in the first place.

Turn your data into a clear picture of long-term impact. Combine accurate fund accounting with donor reporting that showcases impact.
Connect with the tools you already use. Pair Balance with Impact by EverTrue and ODDER by EverTrue to create and deliver compelling digital endowment reports that you can send to donors with ease.
Know where every fund stands in real time. Check market values, gift history, and available spending for any fund. Then, share view-only versions with your team, so everyone stays informed.

With Balance, your team can stop spending all your time on manual management and instead add balance to your endowment workflow.

Additional Resources

To learn more about managing your endowment and other ways that technology can help your organization, check out these additional resources:

Webinar: Building a Seamless Relationship Between Endowment Finance and Advancement. In this webinar, we cover the keys to un-complicating your institution’s financial endowment reporting process. Explore how building a connection between your finance and advancement teams can lead to happier donors and happier staff.
The Best Alumni Management Software Solutions in 2026. Alumni management software allows your university to maintain an active community that supports your school in a number of ways. Review top software solutions.
Donor Segmentation: How Organizing Donors Boosts Retention. What is donor segmentation, and how can you use it to boost retention? Learn the need-to-know information in this guide from EverTrue’s fundraising experts.

Less stress, higher endowment funds. Discover how Balance provides the organization, security, and accuracy your endowment needs. Request a demo.

0 0 votes

Article Rating