Many of you have probably received the latest GiftWorks update automatically. If you have GiftWorks set to check automatically (recommended because we only support the latest update) it would have notified you already and hopefully it updated you without problems. If you don't have GiftWorks set to check automatically or you didn't get notified yet, just click the Check For Updates link at the bottom of GiftWorks and follow along. The update should bring you to version 2.1.112.00 which can be seen in the Help>About GiftWorks window. The official release notes have been published at missionresearch.com. Check them out to see what's been updated. One item that made it into the update at the last minute but is not in the release notes is described on Steve Fafel's website.

Vista is not officially released yet. Until then we cannot officially support customers running GiftWorks on the new operating system. However, we have been doing some testing with the latest release candidates of Vista and it looks like we shouldn't have too many problems (if any) adding support. If anyone is daring enough to try GiftWorks on Vista, make sure you are using the latest update that has been built to support Internet Explorer 7 and turn of Data Execution Protection. If you run into any problems please let us know via feedback to this blog. Please don't contact customer support with the issues because they won't be able to help you yet.

In this post I present an example add-in that adds a new report category and one new report to GiftWorks. Unfortunately there is way too much stuff going on here to explain everything, but the ambitious user should be able to make some headway with adding custom reports to GiftWorks. There are two files that are necessary to add a new report. You need to write an add-in file (newreport.xml) that defines the add-in and tells GiftWorks about the new report category and the new report. The other file (GRDF-donors-by-number.xml) tells GiftWorks what to display in the report. For this example to work, both files need to reside in the same directory.

newreport.xml 

   1:  <gml id="missionresearch_newreport">

   2:      <info>

   3:          <title>New Report</title>

   4:          <versions>

   5:              <version match="2.0" module="version2" />

   6:          </versions>

   7:      </info>

   8:      <module id="version2">

   9:          <objects>

  10:              <object id="Handler" type="vbscript">

  11:                  <![CDATA[

  12:                      Const CategoryKey = "my-reports"

  13:                      Sub AddNewReportCategory()

  14:                          Dim oCat

  15:                          Set oCat = App.Modules.GiftWorks.Reports.GetNewCategory

  16:                          oCat.Key = CategoryKey

  17:                          oCat.Name = "My Reports"

  18:                          oCat.Description = "These are my reports that I have built."

  19:                          App.Modules.GiftWorks.Reports.Categories.Add oCat

  20:                      End Sub

  21:                      Sub AddNewReport()

  22:                          Dim oReport, oCat

  23:                          For Each oCat In App.Modules.GiftWorks.Reports.Categories

  24:                              If oCat.Key = CategoryKey Then

  25:                                  Set oReport = App.Modules.GiftWorks.Reports.GetNewReport

  26:                                  oReport.Key = "donors-by-number"

  27:                                  oReport.Name = "Donors By Number Of Donations"

  28:                                  oReport.Description = "This report let's me filter my donors by the number of gifts they have given."

  29:                                  oReport.Path = App.Modules.missionresearch_newreport.Path

  30:                                  oCat.Reports.Add oReport

  31:                              End If

  32:                          Next

  33:                      End Sub

  34:                      Sub EventHandler(Ev)

  35:                          Select Case Ev.Key

  36:                              Case "reports-categories"

  37:                                  AddNewReportCategory

  38:                              Case "reports-categories-reports"

  39:                                  AddNewReport

  40:                          End Select

  41:                      End Sub

  42:                  ]]>

  43:              </object>

  44:          </objects>

  45:          <taskmenu/>

  46:          <handlers>

  47:              <handler id="reports-categories" object="Handler" />

  48:              <handler id="reports-categories-reports" object="Handler" />    

  49:          </handlers>

  50:      </module>

  51:  </gml>

This file should look familiar to those that have been following along with my blog. You can view previous posts to see how to install add-ins with GiftWorks. There are two lines that I'll explain. Line 26 assigns a key to the new report. This key corresponds to the filename of the GRDF report. Line 29 tells GiftWorks where to look for the report definition file. In this case it uses the Path property for the current module. "missionresearch_newreport" is the Id of this module as identified on Line 1.

download files

You can download both files: newreport.xml, GRDF-donors-by-number.xml

what's next

Like I said, I don't go into a lot of detail. The GRDF file can be very confusing so I'll wait for interest and/or feedback before I spend too much time describing its functionality. Please let me know if you want to see more about either file.

Steve Fafel, our development lead for GiftWorks, explains the best way to run GiftWorks under a limited user account in Windows XP.

This week we will being posting an automatic update for GiftWorks (the 5th update for GiftWorks 2006). The timing of the update is to prepare customers for downloading Internet Explorer 7 which will be sent out to Windows customers in upcoming weeks. Besides working with IE7, the update includes some bug fixes and a functional change to the way GiftWorks interacts with QuickBooks. Here are the major bugs that were fixed:

• For some customers, saved SmartList settings created in previous versions were causing errors.
• Labels and envelopes printing blanks has been fixed.
• In some cases, the importer would cause the database checkup to fail. This has been fixed.
• Database compacting errors have been resolved.

The functional changes to QuickBooks integration are summarized as follows:

• Individual Donors that have transactions will be posted to QuickBooks as customers.
• Accounts used in the posted transactions will be added to QuickBooks if they do not already exist in QuickBooks.
• Each journal entry will now consolidate the donation transactions, posting one line per asset account and one line per fund for each income account.

We will be detailing all the specific changes when the update has been released which will be this week. When we release updates to customers we do so gradually. This means some customers may get updates a day or two before others. You can avoid the wait and download the full, updated release from our website.

This week (November 7th - 10th) in Las Vegas, Mission Research will be exhibiting GiftWorks at The Sleeter Group 2006 QuickBooks Consultant's Conference. As I mentioned before, we have been named as one of the conference's Awesome QuickBooks Add-Ons for 2007.

I found a nice write-up about GiftWorks from Doug Sleeter in The CPA Technology Advisor. I've re-printed some of that article here...

GiftWorks by Mission Research is one of the most well-designed applications I’ve seen in a long time. This product does a great job of providing for virtually all of the donor-tracking features demanded by nonprofit organizations. GiftWorks manages donors, fundraising efforts and volunteers through a simple, well-designed user interface. Designed specifically for small to medium-sized nonprofit organizations, GiftWorks provides data management capabilities that are complete and far-reaching. The software meets and exceeds the administration needs of nonprofit organizations with donor tracking and mail production functionality and serves the needs of board members by generating insightful donor and donation reports. The unique “SmartLists” feature of GiftWorks allows customers to create lists of donors and donations based on sets of data criteria that the user defines. This feature makes it easy to create quick, automatically updating mailing lists and custom reports.

I've recently corresponded with a GiftWorks consultant Joel Schuman about using the GiftWorks API's to do some batch updating of his client's records and wanted to post a cool quote he allowed me to use.

"BTW, I don't think I've told you directly how much I appreciate and admire GiftWorks. In 33 years as a designer, developer, and consultant I've done many systems and installed or modified dozens of packages, and GW might present the best user experience I've seen."

Thanks Joel.

We recently found an article on TechSoup.com which told the stories of three different donor database users. One of them uses GiftWorks for their donor data. She says GiftWorks is great for the non-technical crowd. This is one of the keys to GiftWorks. We realize there is high turnover in non-profit orgs and getting new employees or volunteers up to speed is important. We try to make GiftWorks intuitive and usable without having to trudge through documentation. We mostly get it right. Marcie (from the article) also mentioned our technical support a couple times. We get a lot of compliments on our technical support. We have a great group of people in support.