Households by Date Joined

Software

Suppose you want to know

  • which families have joined your Temple during the current fiscal year; or
  • which families have belonged to your synagogue for at least ten years.

There is now a way to pull that data (and export it to spreadsheet).

This three-minute video shows how.

ShalomCloud Query by Date Joined from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Labels–Starting Where You Wish

Software

Suppose you’ve printed several labels, and now have a few more to print, for a selected audience.  You’d like to start where you left off, rather than inserting a whole new sheet of labels.

For example, suppose you’ve asked the system for a list of Board members:

starting_labels_screen1

Now, you want to print labels for this audience–and the latest sheet of labels used the first row and the first label of the second row–a total of four labels.

Simply change the starting label number to 5:

starting_label_position_2

The result will be a sheet that looks like this:

starting_label_position_3

Next time printing labels, you’d start with 12.

Email Templates Now Available

Software

Now live and in production–email templates.

  • Format and save email templates, using a familiar-looking toolbar.
  • Not only static content–able to substitute values from family records, individuals’ information, and Yahrzeits.
  • Watch this video (6 m, 13 s) to see how to create a template, and to see how to send emails using the template.
  • email_templates

New feature: role within family

Software

If you wish to gain a finer designation of family members, beyond what can be inferred from age alone, we now offer a field that we’re calling Role within Family.  Typical values would be Parent, Minor child, Adult child, and perhaps others such as Elderly parent.

You may then use these fields within the queries and reports–for example, to find all the minor children not enrolled in religious school.

Below is a 3 1/2 minute video illustrating the feature.

Produce a Synagogue Directory in Three Clicks

Software

Creating your annual directory can be a daunting challenge.

No longer: After you’ve designated your format using the ShalomCloud Letter Templates, you are now able to product a directory in three mouse clicks.

Have a look at this three-minute video to see the end-to-end process.

ShalomCloud_Directory from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Field selection on Yahrzeit queries

Software

Some time ago, in response to how crowded with fields was the Member query, we made available check boxes by which the user could select which fields should appear on the reports and spreadsheet downloads.

The same selection ability is now available on the Yahrzeit queries.  This makes for a more device-responsive, cleaner appearance.
Yahrzeit_field_selection

 

New Chart–Membership Units by Year

General

A common, but non-trivial, question that constantly occurs is simply this: “How many membership units do we have?”

ShalomCloud answers this question two ways, in seconds.

  1. By a bar chart that shows membership counts going back twenty years
  2. By a table that shows members joined, members resigned, and membership count, by year.
Chart_of_families_by_year
Chart of families by year

member_by_year_table

Next set of Yahrzeit Enhancements

Software

Realizing that this is fairly dry material, we nonetheless wish to mention several small enhancements within the Yahrzeit capability:

  1. ShalomCloud has for some time offered “tags,” alternatively dubbed “attributes,” for Households and individuals.  Yahrzeits can also now be associated with tags….which means you can also query and report by those tags.
  2. If your congregation maintains plaques for Yahrzeits, you might be interested in a new query–displaying all the Yahrzeits with no plaque.
  3. In the same vein, the application has long been able to show and display Yahrzeits and relationships to people in the congregation.  Now we flip to the opposite question–showing all the Yahrzeits for whom no relationship exists.
  4. Next occurrence of Yahrzeit, as of a user-entered date.

 

 

Handy keyboard shortcuts

General

Here is a small collection of keyboard commands that potentially could save the reader time, compared to constantly alternating between the mouse and the keyboard.  I can’t guarantee that these will work on all operating systems, all browsers, but it’ll take about two seconds to find out in each case:

  1.  Instead of pointing and  clicking to your browser’s address bar, just use <Ctrl>L       .
  2. Instead of scrolling to the bottom of a long document, whether Word or Google Docs,  use <Ctrl><End>     .
  3. Conversely, if you’re at the bottom of a long document and you want to go back to the beginning, instead of grabbing the scroll bar and dragging up, use <Ctrl><Home>.
  4. To go back one screen in your browser, Instead of grabbing the mouse and aiming at the small back arrow, use <Alt><left arrow>.
  5. If you’re fond of tabs in your browser, instead of clicking to go from tab to tab, use <Ctrl><Page up> or <Ctrl><Page down>  .

If this list looks daunting, I’d suggest picking any one of these shortcuts, and trying it for a week.  It’ll quickly become a habit, and you’ll find yourself incrementally more productive.

 

Expanded capabilities on acknowledgment letters

Software

ShalomCloud has, from the outset, provided the ability for the congregation to create letter templates, used primarily when acknowledging donations and sending Yahrzeit notifications.  Moreover, the software exposes a letter preview for each contribution letter, which the office can use to override the letter template for that specific missive.

However, until now the letter heading has been fixed per congregation.  With today’s release, both the letter template and the letter preview allow control of the following:

  • The heading text itself, including line breaks
  • Bold lettering anywhere in the heading–by line, by phrase, by word–even by individual character(s).
  • Italics anywhere in the heading–by line, by phrase, by word–even by individual character.
  • Font size–varying anywhere in the heading.
  • Option to center the heading or place it on the left margin.

In addition, several different fonts are now available for the entire letter.