Service for Account Verification Texts

• We now offer a free service that can handle all multi-factor authentication texts for you. (That means, no third-party setup required!) To use the service, you must be based in the US. You will not be charged for the SMS number or the texting volume.
• If you already have texting set up, you can still use our service for authentication texts. All other texts will be sent from your outbound SMS number. Could save you a few bucks! Or, you can continue using your number to send all texts from MinistryPlatform.
• Interested? Check out Service for Account Verification Texts to enable this service today!

Frequencies

• We replaced Pledge Frequencies with a table simply called Frequencies. All the values (available under System Lookups > Frequencies) are the same: Annually, Monthly, Weekly, and so on. This renaming better represents the ways that frequencies are used across MinistryPlatform.
  Important: The Pledge Frequencies table will be deprecated in a future release. If your system uses this table in any custom work, a SPoC can update that reference or reach out to Support for assistance.

Audit Log

• When you secure a record (that is, when you click Secure from the Actions menu), the Audit Log now displays details about when the Record Security record was created.
• When you use the Assign Participant tool to associate an Event Participant record from the Default Contact to a new or existing participant, the Audit Log now keeps that activity with the participant. That way, you can see "Updated:" entry on the relevant record.

Contributions

• There's a new page where you can see upcoming scheduled donations! Go to Contributions > Projected Scheduled Donations.

Faith Formation

• Many Catholic parishes collect information for faith formation registration. To provide you with a starting point, we created a form called "Faith Formation" under Custom Forms > Forms. Feel free to customize it to meet your needs using the Form Editor Tool, then display it on your website using the Custom Form Widget.

Filtering

• In Catholic instances, Milestones and Care Cases now honor the global filter.
• Sub-pages now honor their target page's filter! This means sub-pages (the tabs on open records) only show records that are within the filter criteria of the target page. If you don't want a sub-page to be filtered, just make sure it references an unfiltered target page.
  Note: Remember, permissions are granted to sub-pages through a security role. A SPoC will need to adjust user permissions for any sub-pages that reference a filtered page. For more information, see Page Permissions.

Personnel

• Catholic dioceses can now use the Personnel Audit Overview page to monitor changes made to Contact, Household, and Address records for personnel. The default view on this page shows changes in the last seven days. For even more awareness, you can create a notification from those views.

Publication Subscriptions

• MinistryPlatform receives unsubscribe and resubscribe requests from SendGrid... but what if someone unsubscribes using SendGrid then resubscribes later using a widget or the Platform? Now, MinistryPlatform communicates resubscription information to SendGrid so the person is removed from the suppression list. That means no more manually updating SendGrid! This sync runs every four hours.
  Note: Removing a person from Group Unsubscribes in SendGrid will not trigger the webhook that updates the Unsubscribed field for the subscriber on that publication. If you do that, you'll need to update the field in the Platform.

Sacraments

• You can now send emails to individuals that include merged details about their sacraments! SPoCs, to do this, we updated the Contact ID Field on all sacrament page records.

Views & Charts

• We updated the Needs Geocoding view related to household addresses based on the CloudServices criteria. See the details on Geocode Utility.
• Now, in non-Catholic instances, there are two fix views to help you identify which donations may not have been updated by the routine due to an issue. That way, you can review and update them as needed.
  • Fix: No Pledge Assigned checks for reasons that a pledge could not be assigned, such as donations older than 90 days, donations before the first installment date, inactive pledges, programs missing a pledge campaign, and more.
  • Fix: No Pledge Created checks for reasons that a pledge could not be created, such as pledge campaigns that do not have Auto Create Pledges set, donors set to the default contact, donors with Always Pledge Credit assigned, and more.
  Note: If you are using a Catholic instance, these views were previously available.
• We moved the chart for Total Donations by Program Congregations to the Scheduled Donation Distributions page.
• If you have PocketPlatform, you can now enjoy new charts under PocketPlatform > PocketPlatform Analytics and PocketPlatform > PocketPlatform Analytics Summaries in the Platform! These charts show engagement by platform, engagement by screen, and users by day.

Schema

• We added schema to support future Volunteer Connect features. Keep an eye out for Connect Suite release notes with details!
• We added schema to enhance file security in the future. Keep an eye out for Platform release notes with details!

Reminder: Member and Family Wording

Earlier this year, we let you know about a change we made for new customers. In Catholic instances, the term "Member" was replaced by "Participant" and the term "Family" was replaced by "Household" to better align with the associated tasks. Learn more about our Platform Terminology Changes.

Coming Soon

In the next Life Apps release, we plan to change the names of Care Life and Group Life to Care Connect and Group Connect. Volunteer Connect and Need Connect already follow this pattern. These will be collectively known as Connect Suite. We'll announce when that change occurs, but for this release, we went ahead and updated the bookmarks in the Platform to "Connect Suite (LifeApps)". If you have a custom name for your bookmark, you can change the name manually when you're ready.