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Platform - Released October 16-17, 2023

We have a big project in the works and needed to make a few schema changes to get the backend ready. More on that in the coming months! Until then, enjoy these improvements to several areas of the Platform.

You Asked for It, We Did It!

We know you're full of great ideas! So check out the Idea Board and add a new idea or vote for the one(s) you love.

  • Fixed an issue related to the Select All checkbox at the bottom of multiple Platform pages. If you clicked Select All then manually cleared some or all of the checkboxes, it caused the selection to misbehave in certain situations, like when completing tasks.

Care Cases

  • Fixed an issue where the Current Care Cases view wasn't displaying the Case Manager.

Participants / Members

  • We added a standard view where you can track participant/member engagement. It's based on things like recent event attendance, giving, and serving. Check it out in your system! Go to the Participants or Members page, and select "Engagement" from the View drop-down menu.

Pledges

  • For pledge campaigns, sometimes it's appropriate to send a statement or invoice and sometimes it isn't. And sometimes, a pledger may request a statement. To help you determine whether one should be sent, we added a field on pledge records called "Send Pledge Statement". Catholic instances will see this on pledge records, and non-Catholic instances can enable it through Field Management if needed.

  • Fixed an issue where a pledge's Last Installment Date was being calculated incorrectly if Installments Per Year was set to 1 and Installments Planned was greater than 1.

Schema

  • To prepare for exciting features we're working on, we made some schema changes. Don't worry about these too much (we'll tell you all about it later), but you may notice a few new pages and fields.

    • We created tables for "Schedule Statuses" and "RSVP Statuses".
    • There's a new column called "RSVP Status ID" on Event Participant records.
    • We added a new payment type called "Qualified Charitable Distribution". You'll see this option in the BMT now, and we'll be adding it in future reports. Note: This type is intended for use in 2024 and will be incorporated into the Standard Statement for the 2024 tax season. For 2023, we recommend you stick with your current process for tracking IRA distributions.
    • There's a new campaign type called "Annual Appeal".

User Accounts

  • Users are now required to enter an email address when they sign up for a MinistryPlatform account. This way, integrations flow smoothly since many of our partners require email addresses.
    Note: Need to see which users don't have an email address? Go to Administration > Users, and open the view called "Fix: No Contact Email (excludes deceased)". Make sure everyone with a User Name also has a Contact Email listed.
  • When setting up an account or resetting a password, users can now choose to receive their account verification message via email or text message. (Before, if users had both an email address and mobile phone number, they received a text message by default.)

User Interface & Usability

  • On record insights, we improved the look of scroll bars so you can see more of the information you want. And now, the scroll bars are hidden until you hover over the insights panel. That way, they only display when you need to use them!

  • Date fields on records no longer require you to enter slashes in between the month, day, and year! Just enter MMDDYYYY in any date field, and the Platform adjusts the formatting for you. (But remember, when searching date fields in columns, "what you see is what you search", so you'll want to include the slashes.)

Developer

  • This Nuget package was updated: https://www.nuget.org/packages/MinistryPlatform.Wrapper. If you use MinistryPlatform.Wrapper, please be aware that it has changed.

Note:

Reminder about Supported Browsers: Before accessing Widgets and other MinistryPlatform applications, make sure your browser is up-to-date. Otherwise, you may see errors.

The technical details: TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 are no longer supported for our services. To use our applications, the browser must be on TLS 1.2 or higher. For this reason, we suggest using the most updated browser version.