6 Updates to Contributions & Online Giving

We're excited to announce a slew of updates that have been made over the past few weeks to our contributions and online giving systems.  We've listed each of them below along with a quick description.

1) Customized giving statements can be saved as a template

When creating giving statements, there's times where you may want to store multiple statement configurations for different purposes.  For instance you may want one statement for end of year giving and another one for quarterly pledge updates.  This update allows users to create a statement, save it as a template, and easily flip back to it when it's needed.  For more information on how this works, see our documentation on giving statement templates.

2) Donors can leave a note with their online contribution

Churches can now customize their online giving pages to include a place where donors can leave notes and comments about the gift.  While in many cases allowing the donor to specify what fund they'd like to give is a better fit, there's times where there's so many options it doesn't make sense to have a fund for each (for instance, if a donor wants to support a specific student on a mission trip and would like to type in their name).  This update allows donors to leave a note with their gift.  The note is then automatically stored within Breeze.

While the comments section is hidden by default, it can be enabled by customizing your online giving page.

3) Church administrators can receive an email notification when someone gives online

Sometimes it's nice to know exactly when a gift comes in.  Churches can now opt to be notified by email whenever someone gives online.  By default this is off but it can be enabled by customizing your online giving page.

4) Searching contributions over a large timeframe returns results much faster

Previously, searching for a large number of contributions (such as all gifts in the last 5 years) could take a bit of time to return results.  We've updated our interface so that these large searches return much faster.

5) Envelopes filter expanded for searching contributions

When searching contributions given, we've updated our search filter to include more options for filtering by envelopes which includes:

• Searching for all people who gave who have envelope numbers
• Searching for all people who gave who do not have envelope numbers
• Searching for people who gave who have envelope numbers in a certain range

This can be accessed on the contributions search page.

6) Stripe TOS Update

While admittedly less exciting than the other updates, the company that powers online giving behind Breeze (Stripe) has updated their Terms of Use.  Clarity, consistency, and including new products are the main reasons for the update.  All fees and functionality that you're used to stay the same.

Have a favorite update here?  Does this list include something you've wanted for a while?  We'd love to hear about it in the comments below!