Our payment/contribution portal contains an area to designate someone to be notified about a contribution. That has been in place for years. In order to send that acknowledgment letter, the administrator had to pick a name (or names) from a drop-down list. With this enhancement, though, we now offer the ability to search names on contributions, rather than choosing from a pick-list.
Yes, the ability to search names on contributions. The new search box is right above the pick-list. Enter any portion of the last name of the person to be notified; pause one second; and the pick-list will be reduced to only those names that match what was entered.
Here’s a video that shows, first, someone entering a contribution. And, then, the back-office point of view.
We have a few things to offer toward improvements in the member portal setup.
If you’re unfamiliar with the member portal, please have a look at this article. This provides the basic information about setting up the ability for your congregants to perform self-service in a variety of areas.
This announcement explains some improvements, primarily in the ongoing operation of the portal.
One: We now sort the selected names alphabetically.
Two: We offer buttons to check-all or uncheck-all. So, for example, if you have a few new members that you want to set up, instead of having to declare a member attribute, you can list everyone, un-check all, and check that selected few.
Three: We’ve seen quite a few cases where congregants did not respond to the initial email contain their login information. Then, a few months later, they now want to take it for a spin. Until now, the program prevented an existing user from being set up a second time. Now, however, we purge anyone who has never logged in. That lets you resend a portal setup.
On the other hand, if someone has logged in, presumably that person has either retained the original complex password, or changed the password to one of their choosing. In either case, it would be a bad idea to unconditionally send a new password; and so we don’t.
Deep Dive for improvements to member portal setup.
If you email statement notifications, you can include a “link_to_pay”. This is a complex, encrypted link that takes the user directly into the portal, without explicitly logging in. If the user changes any family information, or makes a payment to a commitment, that is as good as logging in. Thus, that user will not be cleaned out, even if there is no explicit login.
Pull a statement — amounts owed and paid — for any date range.
Make a payment, while designating exactly how those funds should be applied.
Member search, by any portion of the last name and/or first name.
To these functions, we now add the idea of creating, updating, and deleting recurring payments. For the sake of completeness, let us mention a couple of prerequisites:
Your temple or synagogue must have an account with our gateway that offers both card and ACH. For more information on that topic, please send us a note at support@shalomcloud.com, and we’ll guide you through the setup process.
There must be a charge, debit, or amount owed, to which the recurring payment would be applied.
The following video shows, not only the new recurring payments function, but actually everything that the member portal can do. Feel free share this post and video, especially if you have members who may want to have an online account.
