Two New Fields for Member Records

We have added middle name and suffix to the fields available on the individual person records:

These fields are also available for update in the user portal.  Moreover, with the recent addition of the audit trail, synagogue administrators can now find the source of every update–the who, what, and when of updates to any of the family/member information.

 

Audit Trail

ShalomCloud now captures an audit trail of changes and deletions to certain critical portions of data–initially, Yahrzeits, Families, and Individuals.  This video shows how it works:

ShalomCloud Audit Trail from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

In a nutshell, the audit trail captures when the change occurred, by whom, what changed, a version number, and the content of each changed field both before and after the change.

On deletions, it captures the entire record that was deleted–thus enabling you to re-add a record if it were inadvertently deleted.

Find Individuals by Zip Code

There is one additional field included in the member query–current zip code.
current_zip

Zip had already been available in the Family/Household query, but this brings a little more convenience to gather info about individuals.

Couple of points:

It is not necessary to enter an entire zip–if you enter 1234, the program will find persons in 12340, 12341, … , 12349.

The term “current zip” means that the query is aware of whether that person is residing at the primary or secondary address.  For example, if the primary address is within zip code 12345, with the secondary address at 98765–if the person is currently at the secondary address, asking for 12345 will not include that person.

Track Contributions–Automatically

Now available–accepting and tracking Internet contributions:

ShalomCloud Handling of Contributions from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

  • Automatically stores information about the contributor–no need to download spreadsheets or copy and paste from emails.
  • Automatically enters financial activity into the system–no need to manually key the entries after the fact.
  • Offers the the option of including card processing fees.

Small enhancement to Household Query

Previously, when you selected Queries => Household (a.k.a Family), and you wanted to pull by billing status,  such as Active, Inactive, or Resigned, you were limited to

  1. selecting All,  or
  2. selecting one specific billing status.

With this enhancement, you can select as many statuses as you wish, by simply sweeping your mouse pointer over several consecutive items, or using Ctrl-click to select several non-consecutive items.

ShalomCloud Multi-select on Billing Status from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

 

Send Text Messages! (SMS)

Asked for, and now delivered–the ability to send text messages from ShalomCloud.

Apparently text messages reach over 95% of their intended audience, whereas email is doing well to reach 30%.  Therefore, for short, time-sensitive announcements (service time changes, reminders about classes and events), this might be your preferred channel for reaching a selection of congregants quickly and effectively.

ShalomCloud Text Messaging from Norman Snyder on Vimeo.

Finer adjustments on letter templates

If you’d like to specify custom margins on your hard-copy letter templates, that is now available.  The adjustment goes down to 1/72nd of an inch–in other words, to declare a two-inch left margin, you’d put 144  (2 x 72) as the left margin; to specify a one-inch right margin, enter 72, etc.

custom_margins

Some other minor additional capabilities:

  • Bold, italic, and bold+italic characters in any of the available fonts.
  • Ability to suppress ShalomCloud-generated headers.
  • Ability to suppress ShalomCloud-generated footers.
  • Ability to print current date in various representations, such as June 30, 2018 and 6/20/18.

Households by Date Joined

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

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

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