Echoleft release notes www.echoleft.com

New

We're making changes to how we collect Gift Aid on the site to make it quicker and easier for donors, and to make your collection of Gift Aid more robust.

A description is below, but if you'd prefer to see the changes, we've made a quick video:

The changes to the donation process will be rolled out over the next 7 days.

A new experience for donors.

Donors will now be asked about Gift Aid at the start of the donation process. Only if they indicate the donation is eligible for Gift Aid will they be asked to provide a home address.

This makes things faster for donations that are not eligible for Gift Aid, and limits the amount of personal information that is gathered from donors without being needed.

A better experience for admins.

When viewing donations in Control Panel, admin's can now see more clearly whether the donation is eligible for Gift Aid. They can also see the exact wording that was in the Gift Aid declarations at the time the donation was made.

More customisable Gift Aid declarations.

Organisations can now edit the Gift Aid declarations their donors make. This makes it easier to match the Gift Aid experience for their donors across all of their digital fundraising.

In Control Panel, visit Settings > Gift Aid Settings, where you will be able to update the Gift Aid statement and then add, edit and remove individual Gift Aid declarations.

A new “Your Data” step during donations.

Based on your feedback, a new step will be shown to donors before they confirm their donation. At the moment, this shows the “Anonymous Donation” and “Share your personal details“ options that are already provided for donors, however this will soon be customisable to allow you to add Data Consent Fields, so you can ask donors permission to use their data in a way that matches your GDPR and data consent policies.

This is part of the wider roll-out of our Data Consent Fields feature and we're excited to make it available for everyone, thank you to everyone who has helped us test it so far.

New

We're getting ready for the the new EU/EEA online payment regulations. If you're not sure what that means, we wrote up a blog post for you, here's as excerpt:

You might notice from September 14th, 2019 that when you go to pay for things online, you may be asked for some additional information when you confirm your payment details.

...

They may send you a code via SMS which you’ll need to enter, send a notification to an app you need to acknowledge or another method of their choosing.

As the deadline was extended due to the banks not quite being ready, we're taking the opportunity to do a phased roll-out of SCA payments.

We've had to make some changes to how payments work in Echoleft to make sure that we're able to support the new secure customer authentication.

These changes will affect all organisations, so please make sure that any users involved in finance and payment administration are aware of the changes in case it affects how they process payments.

• We've altered the “Description” for payments in Stripe.
  As this doesn't change our export formatting, as far as we are aware, this won't affect anyone processing payments, but please let us know if you'd like us to test this.

• We now show a link to the appropriate page in Control Panel for payments in Stripe.
  This has been a common feature request so we're glad to finally make this available. You now have a link from Control Panel to Stripe, and from Stripe to Control Panel.

• Logs and events will change in the “Developer” tab of Stripe
  If your organisation uses the events or logs in Stripe, please let us know as this has been altered.

We will be switching a percentage of payments to the new system as of Wednesday, 9th October, and based on the results of that trial, we'll be moving all users over the next few weeks. Payments for donations will be the first to be moved to the new system.

If you have any questions at all, please email support@echoleft.com and we'll do all we can to help.

New

Event organisers tell us they value tools which make the most of the support they receive from their sponsors. Today, we're rolling out the ability to add individual sponsors to your events in Control Panel, and they will show up automatically on the event page.

You can provide an optional link, logo and a small description for each sponsor.

We're going to be adding the ability to use the sponsor information in a variety of places automatically (emails, fundraising pages etc) - we'll let you know as soon as that's available and we'd love to hear what you need in the meantime.

If you want a closer look, you can see Max and Hettie from Echoleft taking a look at this new feature before it was rolled out in this behind-the-scenes video.

Improvement

Today brings some new updates for people managing events in Control Panel.

• A sales chart is now available for each event! 📈
• The date and location of your event are now more prominent.
• When making changes in an event's settings, we've made the navigation more consistent.
• A ‘publish’ button is now available when viewing a draft event. Don't worry, if you click the ‘publish’ button we ask you to confirm to make sure you don't publish your event by mistake!

New

We've added two new charts to the main dashboard for all organisations using Echoleft to power their events, fundraising and campaigns.

The new charts show total revenue per day for all donations and across all events. In this initial roll-out, we're displaying the last 4 weeks of data, but we will be rolling out the ability for you to choose different date ranges.

This is part of a range of work to improve visualising and reporting, as well as providing insights and clear actions for your team to improve their events, fundraising and campaigns.

As part of this release, we've temporarily removed the ‘Recent Donations’ section from the dashboard. That data will be returning soon, along with an improved format and layout.

New

Every organisation using Echoleft to power their events, fundraising or campaigns gets a profile page (sometimes people call it their Echoleft Home page). Until now, that page had limited editing for the branding and content, these updates give organisations more flexibility.

These are the first in a series of changes allowing Echoleft to provide organisations a ‘full site’ experience for their supporters:

• We've updated the “profile” area in Control Panel to provide more tools to edit profile pages. We'll be adding more tools here over time.
• Organisations can now choose a cover photo. This image dominates the page and can help keep branding consistent, especially across multiple websites.
• The main heading, sub-heading and ‘welcome’ message on the page are now editable.
• Events, campaigns and in-memory giving content will appear on the profile page automatically. Images, descriptions and branding will be pulled through automatically.
• “Donate” and “Fundraise For Us” call-to-actions are added automatically for organisations that have these features enabled.

We'd love to hear from you how we can make these pages even more powerful, let us know at support@echoleft.com.

New

Today we're rolling out something we mentioned in our last release and have been working on for a little while, something we’re really excited about: Email Follow-Ups 🥳

When you perform certain actions in Echoleft, for example creating a new fundraising page, you receive a confirmation email giving you some useful information about your page.

You'll now also receive follow-up emails letting you know more about what you can do with Echoleft. For a fundraising page, that might include advice on how to get your first donations, adding photos, adding status updates and sharing on social media. Of course, we make it easy to unsubscribe from these follow-ups with one click, you don't need to remember your password or anything like that to unsubscribe.

We've got a range of useful email follow-ups rolling out over the next few weeks.

Really great emails and easy unsubscribe links are already pretty thrilling, but here's what we're especially excited about: this opens up opportunities for organisations and good causes to deliver more of their message to supporters, making sure that it's done in a GDPR-compliant way.

Here are some examples:

• Tell fundraisers more about the story of the work their money supports.

• Provide additional space for corporate partners and sponsors to share their message, so you can increase the value of your corporate giving offering.

• Provide additional support materials to families using in-memory giving, or let them know about your legacy giving services.

We're looking for organisations that want to personalise their donation, fundraising and campaign email follow-ups to provide more of their story to their supporters. We're already approaching select organisations using Echoleft, but we'd love to start more conversations so get in touch.

New

When creating a new fundraising page, we now send a brand new email with a handy link to your page. (It also subtly tells you how excited we are to be a part of your fundraising journey with a big confetti cone 🎉).

This is the first step in the rollout of a series of emails that help people make the most of their fundraising on Echoleft, including how to make the most of sharing the pages on social media, adding photos, status updates and more. You'll be able to opt-out of the follow-up emails at any point.

We're really keen to hear from good causes about how they'd love to customise these emails and the messaging that people receive for their fundraising pages, send your feedback to support@echoleft.com.

Improvement

In Control Panel, the area of Echoleft used by organisations to manage events and fundraising, we've improved the layout and formatting of payments, where we display the financial information for each transaction on Echoleft.

We now show the total amount, fees and net total with consistent alignment, they should also layout neatly on mobile devices, which had previously been an issue.

We now also show Stripe fees on the payment itself, however please note these are marked as ‘estimated’ for now until we implement some additional work to confirm the final fee with Stripe. You can confirm the Stripe fees by clicking “View In Stripe”.

This is part of ongoing work with finance teams at different organisations, if you have any feedback we'd love to hear it at support@echoleft.com.

Fix

We've rolled out a fix for an issue experienced by people registering or buying tickets for some events with a dropdown list in the form. When trying to save their details, they may have seen a validation error even if the dropdown appeared to be populated.

A huge thanks, as usual, to the people who took the time to report this issue, especially as it was easily worked around. We really appreciate it 💛.