We haven't seen our point-and-shoot since the summer. Turns out we left it at one of our friends house and we just got it back. Going through the pictures on the card I found a couple from a golf outing some of us in the office participated in. The golf outing was in support of The New School of Lancaster. Steve, Jonny, Chris and myself had a great time. Here is one of the pictures from that day. Steve is the one who looks like he's out on a bad date with my golf bag. Jonny's in the back adding to the fun.

Yesterday we launched our new Consultant Partner Program on the Mission research web site. If you are a consultant you can sign up with the program and take advantage of the benefits which include up to 5 free licenses of GiftWorks, phone support, co-marketing opportunities, training and you will be listed in our consultant directory. More information about the program is here.

If you are a consumer and are interested in finding a consultant to get your organization up and running, you can find a consultant near you by entering your state into the Consultant Directory search.

In November, the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) launched their annual Fundraising Effectiveness Survey. This survey asks charities to compare their 2004 and 2005 fundraising results. The results of the survey are intended to enable non-profits "to compare their growth-in-giving results across a variety of measures with the performance of similar organizations." Russ Burke has published an article about how this helps your organization.

FEP partnered with over one dozen software firms in assisting their clients with the survey. Here at Mission Research, Chris Walker, a Product Manager donated some time to building a GiftWorks add-in that would automatically gather and send the survey data for GiftWorks users. This is a great example of how GiftWorks can be extended to support additional functionality. And truly it's not very difficult to do given the proper documentation (which is only available internally right now).

I'm very curious how the FEP survey was exposed by the other partnering software makers. If any readers have used the software by the other partners, please let me know your experiences.

This post is just a quick roundup of some other Mission Research blogs.

Add Attachments to GiftWorks' Emails
Steve explains how we've added attachment support in GiftWorks' mailings and how you can use them in your own mailings.

Create a SmartList of Individuals and Organizations
Mike explains some hidden functionality that allows you to create SmartLists that contain both organizations and individuals.

Help Define the Next Generation of GiftWorks Integration with QuickBooks
Jonny explains how you can help define the upcoming project to make GiftWorks better integrate with QuickBooks.

Also, for those of you that are having some problems getting GiftWorks to run properly, Steve introduces an online support tool you can run yourself to help diagnose the problems you are having. Please check that out if you are having problems.

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.

GiftWorks has been named one of 13 Awesome QuickBooks Add-Ons for 2007 by the Sleeter Group. GiftWorks was chosen from over 400 QuickBooks add-ons that are now a part of the Intuit Developer Network. Below are the reasons GiftWorks made the list:

• The product shows superior design, implementation, and features.
• The product has superior integration with QuickBooks.  It passes
  data to and from QuickBooks using best practices of the QuickBooks SDK
  programming interface.
• The product uses appropriate transaction types and field
  population for recording data into QuickBooks so as to preserve and/or
  enhance the standard reporting features in QuickBooks.
• The product conforms to good accounting and operating standards.
• Your company has shown outstanding customer support.  Your firm
  provides the highest level of support to both end users and consultants.
  This area is a key element to the overall satisfaction of an add-on
  product.

QuickBooks integration is something we are continually trying to improve. We have been working with external QuickBooks consultants and accountants to get the functionality right. We will be improving the whole accounting experience within GiftWorks in upcoming releases. Being named a Awesome Add-on means we're headed in the right direction. Thanks Sleeter Group. 

Updated 9/14/2006

Thanks to some helpful members of the IE7 compatibility team at Microsoft (specifically Keryn Mark), we were able to identify the reason GiftWorks was crashing. GiftWorks has code to keep IE from beeping every time a page changes which was causing the crash. I guess IE7 made some changes around calling the beeping function and our code was no longer valid--or most likely was never valid in the first place even though it worked. The good news is that we have a fix. The bad news is that it won't be available until the next update to GiftWorks which doesn't have a date yet. I will keep you posted.

For the past several months Microsoft has been beta testing a new release of Internet Explorer, version 7. As some of you may know, GiftWorks uses Internet Explorer internally for its user interface. Since the first IE7 beta, GiftWorks has not worked correctly and even crashes for some customers when they have the beta installed. We were hoping that the issue would have worked its way out by now, but Microsoft released their first release candidate (RC) of IE7 and the issue remains.

We are working with Microsoft to have this issue resolved for RC2, but you can actually help us raise the priority of this issue. For those that have installed IE7 beta, you were asked to join the beta program and provide feedback. Please sign in with your account at http://connect.microsoft.com and do a search for "GiftWorks". You should get at least one feedback item in the results. Please open that item and make sure it applies to what you're experiencing (typically a crash of GiftWorks), then submit a vote for the issue. Thanks and we'll keep you informed.

This is an example of what happens when you accidentally leave your cell phone on your desk when you're away at a meeting. This is Steve, our dev lead and curious little monkey.

"I'm sure Dave would just love a picture of me on his phone…"

Being a software developer I am very aware of the amount of effort involved in providing good help for software products. In small software companies, I would bet help is usually a second thought when releasing the product. In the first release of GiftWorks, we had one help topic that always gets us laughing. It went something like this "... this screen is used to configure your donor groups, click on the various buttons to see what they do...". Seriously, more funny than helpful.

So I should be the last person to be pointing out issues with other company's help, but this particular one caught my attention.

I won't mention the product's name. I would like to hear some feedback on the current help offered in GiftWorks? Anyone want to share their thoughts?

One of the things we do here at Mission Research to amuse ourselves is code-name our GiftWorks releases using names of rides at Hershey Park (we live forty minutes away from the park and most of us have been there too many times). For those not familiar with code-naming software projects, we do it here so that we can easily keep track of our projects. Sometimes we start projects without knowing what the actual released software will be called when it goes to market, but it's good to have something to call them instead of "that thing you're working on".

The naming convention for GiftWorks only started after our first release and typically we try to pick rides that capture the theme of the current release. Our followup release to the GiftWorks launch was code-named LADYBUG. It was a small release cycle and we thought the name was funny -- Scrambler is a kiddie ride. How old are we?

We followed up with project SCRAMBLER. That project was done in a hurry in preperation for our Demo.com show (check out the video at this link). Our next release was huge. We stuffed in as many customer requests as we could, as well as a mass mailing section and a bunch of other cool features. That release took us 9 months (which is a long time for a startup like us). We code-named it WILDCAT. For those who have never ridden that wooden screamer, imagine roping yourself to the back of an AMTRAK train for a mile or so. We all agreed, after the project was shipped, the name fit well.

At the end of WILDCAT, our co-workers thought it would be fun to take our dev team to Hershey Park so we could ride the rides. They secretly gathered all our families together and surprised us with a night at the park. Great idea! We had fun and got pics of us on the rides we used for code-names. See below...

 Mike and Chris on LadyBug

 Me and Steve on LadyBug

 Mike on Scrambler

 Steve, Chris, Carol and Megan on WildCat

We haven't decided on the next project name. We'll see...

Finally getting with the program, friend and co-worker Steve Fafel has started blogging. It took him a bit to get started, but now he can't be stopped. He's on the Web 2.0 freight train and won't get off. Now we just got to get him to put up his picture on the blog. Jokes aside, he's an interesting read so check him out.

http://stevefafel.com/blog

I started this blog as a way to add exposure to some of the work we are doing at Mission Research, as well as maybe provide some thoughts that other people may find interesting.

blog software

This blog software is called dasBlog which I really like and is used (and also partially written) by a blogger I enjoy reading -- Omar Shahine. The binaries and source code is available on SourceForge.