various - pledges, integration, xml

[rross@supernet.net]

Your recent email asked for suggestions for the next update. I hope that these will be helpful.

Donor Manager does a good job of tracking giving however it would be a good thing if you were better able to work with pledges. It would be beneficial to quickly evaluate each giver’s capabilities by reviewing such things as first gift, largest gift, last gift amounts as well as pledge start and renewal dates

Your recent email spoke of changes for labels and envelopes. Perhaps a better solution would be better integration capabilities with the MS Office suite of products. Forcing an export of data to a separate file and then importing that into Word is much more cumbersome than it needs to be. Allowing for better integration with Word (and it’s mail merge capabilities) would give much more functionality and with relatively little difficulty.

This whole integration issue should be carried out even further. Being able to examine the numbers directly with Excel would obviously be a terrific capability. Correspondingly, better integration with Outlook would be beneficial. Certainly it should be possible to track touches to/from Outlook in a more automated manner. Integrating with Outlook’s calendaring and task systems would likewise be a good thing. Relationship management should be more proactive with scheduling of future meetings, future phone calls, etc.

Additionally, you should probably look at xml as an export format. This should allow for better interaction with third party tools in the future.

[jmuehleisen]

Thanks for your excellent suggestions.

A few comments:

reviewing gifts, pledges, etc: tell me more what you'd like to see here. A report? A screen with a grid of data ? I'd love to hear your ideas.

re: Office Automation: I hope to add more of this in future versions. One thing you are likely to see is having the DM output its data for Word automation using a standard filename. That way the user can design any merge document (letter, envelope, labels, whatever) in Word and can point it to a single, prenamed export file. Then, you can fire up the DM, have it do it's query, and then merge to your heart's content without having repeatedly respecify merge fields, source file name, etc. Your ideas here would be helpful.

Working with Excel: The DM creates an Excel file everytime it exits. What fields would you like to see in that file that are not currently there?

Tracking touches in Outlook: tell me more what you'd like to see here. I'm not following the benefit of putting touches there (future follow up commitments, yes, I can see that ... I think that is what you are referring to).

XML export: you are absolutely right. You will see significant support for XML as the DM moves from Fox6 (with minimal XML support) to Fox9 (with huge XML support).

Great suggestions and ideas! Keep the feedback coming.

[jmuehleisen]

I just thought of something on your question about pledge analysis:

Take a look at the "Partner Giving Analysis" report (/Reports /Giving Analysis Reports /Partner Giving Analysis).

Is this something like what you had in mind? Or how could I make this more useful to you?