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DonorSearch identifies prospects in your database with the capacity and intent to give.

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

For this month’s product update, we’re straying from the typical format—because this wasn’t a typical month. For five full days this May, we cast aside our product roadmap and daily routines to welcome customers into our office, listen to their ideas and feedback, and “hack” on new potential features.

Get a short recap of the Hackathon below, and keep reading for a rundown of the new features we shipped this May to make your EverTrue user experience better than ever.

EverTrue Hackathon 2017: Bringing Your Ideas to Life 

On a Monday morning early this month, 20 EverTrue users arrived in our office and broke out into focus groups with our engineers, designers, and product managers to talk about the pain points in their daily work and help brainstorm ideas for new features. The conversations continued throughout the week, culminating in a bake-off where four EverTrue teams presented their solutions to another large gathering of customers.

As a product manager who enthusiastically drinks the Kool-Aid when it comes to being a customer-centric company, I was thrilled to see our team working alongside the people we strive to help with our advancement software.

Thank you to all of the customers who were able to join us this year: Boston University, Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noble and Greenough School, Salem State University, Stonehill College, Tufts University, WBUR, and the Winsor School. While we hope that you and others will join us next time, please don’t wait for our next Hackathon to share your ideas and feedback—we’re always listening.

With that, I leave you with a short video recap of the event. Keep an eye out next month for the first Hackathon project we’ll be publicly releasing: an opt-in mentorship feature for our Alumni Community product!

 

If the video doesn’t render, click here to watch it.

Hackathon aside, here are the features that went live this month…

 

Collaborate on Trips With Colleagues  

Just as you can add collaborators to an EverTrue list, now you can share and collaborate on fundraising trips in My Trips.*

Traveling with colleagues? Have an assistant who coordinates your meetings? Add them as collaborators to your trip so you can build an itinerary and manage meeting logistics right in EverTrue—no need to send spreadsheets back and forth. When you add another user as a collaborator, he or she will have full editing permissions on the trip.

My Trips Collaboration - EverTrue

Please note that this feature is part of our Relationship Management product for gift officers.

Re-Send Gift Receipts to Online Donors

If you use EverTrue for online giving, you may remember that we unrolled custom gift receipts last month. We have another update to gift receipts today: In the case that a donor makes a gift through your EverTrue giving page—but the automated receipt fails to reach his or her inbox—you can now manually re-send it to ensure that the donor gets the “thank you” they deserve.

To do so, head over to the Gifts tab in your Giving Dashboard and click on the gift/donor in question. You will see the status of the receipt in a Gift Emails table. Re-send the receipt to the donor by clicking Send Receipt and typing in the donor’s email address.

Re-Send Gift Receipts in EverTrue

Please note that this feature is part of our Online Giving product.

Take EverTrue on the Go With Our Android App 

This one’s for you, Android users! The EverTrue app is now available for download in the Google Play Store. With the app, you’ll be able to easily access constituent profiles on the go, find prospects and visits, and collaborate with teammates from the palm of your hand. Use EverTrue on your smartphone, your tablet—whichever device own and love.

If you’re an Apple user, no need to switch to Android. Don’t forget that we have an equally awesome iOS app.

That’s it for May. Like what you see? Let us know in the comments below.   


Eben Pingree is the senior director of product at EverTrue. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter @EbenPingree.

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.

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