FutureFund Updates¶

Mar 2023¶

Organizations and Titles¶

For many schools, the FutureFund account is managed by several people spanning many organizations. It's not uncommon for a high school to have 6-7 participating organizations and each organization having several admins. The number of people in the User Manager starts to grow and it becomes increasingly difficult to know who belongs to which organization.

The User Manager supports organizations and titles for people with administrative access to FutureFund. These fields are optional and will allow people to associated with the District, School, or any Fund/Organization.

Guest Checkout¶

Guest checkout allows purchasers in the store to make a purchase or donation without having to set up a FutureFund account. This option is enabled in the Admin, under Store > Settings.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/store/setup

Last Purchased¶

FutureFund will display a notification in the Store when a purchaser has previously bought the same campaign. The purpose of this notification is solely informative and does not restrict the purchaser from placing the order. Its aim is to decrease or avoid duplicated purchases. This notice is not displayed during registration.

Feb 2023¶

Campaign Forms¶

Some campaigns require collecting additional information or acceptance of a waiver when a purchase is made. We've extended our Custom Forms to support store purchases.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/store/campaigns/configuring/

Campaign Descriptions in the Store¶

We've added brief descriptions to the campaigns listed on the store pages. If the campaign has a description, we will pull the first line or sentence to show on the listing page.

Admin Interface Refresh¶

Noticeable changes in the admin interface include: improved icons, moving the Help Center to the top navigation, context-aware links in the second-level navigation, improved performance, and slight color and border changes. We hope you will enjoy this refresh as much as we do!

Name changes: Pledge-A-Thon and Students¶

We've renamed our Pledge campaign type to Pledge-A-Thon. We feel this name is more reflective of it's use.

We've also renamed the Registration section to the Students section.

Jan 2023¶

Ask Parents for Teacher During Registration¶

When enabled, this option will ask parents to optionally provide the name their student's teacher during registration. This is useful when the parent's know their student's teacher at the time of registration.

December 2022¶

Inventory Items Left¶

When inventory tracking is enabled and the inventory is less than or equal to 20, the "only x items left" text is displayed.

November 2022¶

Customizing Emails with Sender Profiles¶

Sender Profiles allow customization of reply-to addresses and branding in emails.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/messaging/setup

Import Parents to Contacts¶

Parents can download contact information from the directory to their preferred contact application.

The imported contact includes parent information according to their sharing settings, the name of the school, and the parent's students with their respective grade and teacher.

Import Teachers¶

Teachers along with grade assignments can be imported into a school session.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/directory/setup/#importing-teachers

Membership Cards¶

FutureFund will create and distribute membership cards for use in common wallet apps pn phones (e.g., Apple Wallet) to members when memberships are sold.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/membership/membership-cards/

October 2022¶

Fund Improvements - Custom Payout Descriptor¶

When deposits are made, the name appearing on the bank statement is called the Payout Descriptor. Originally we defaulted to the name of the fund, however when the same bank account is used in multiple funds, this results in multiple deposits with the same name:

This was changed to include a unique number with the name:

This allowed admins to differentiate the deposits, but the name was rather obscure and required a look up to know which fund they belonged to. Today, we are allowing each fund to have a custom payment descriptor:

The payment descriptor can be changed when editing the Fund in Store > Setup.

Fund Improvements - Payout Failures¶

Payouts are suspended when we are not able to deposit funds into your account. The two most common reasons for this are:

• The bank account number is invalid.
• The bank account does not allow debits and the account has a negative balance. (this is the most common cause)

When this happens, you will need to contact FutureFund support to resolve the issue. We've added a message explaining the situation when viewing the fund.

Category Sales Report¶

The category sales report shows the gross sales by store category.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/store/reports/category-sales/

Email Attachments¶

FutureFund messaging supports email attachments. Admins can attach multiple files when composing a message.

Payout Bulk Export Tool¶

When reconciling many payouts, it is helpful to export a single file with the payout information aggregate vs. individual files for each payout. To support this, FutureFund provides a bulk export tool for the payout summary information.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/store/payouts/#bulk-export

September 2022¶

Donor Wall Toggle¶

The donor wall is a great way to recognize parent's donations when using fundraiser campaigns. We believe this is a great way to promote a positive fundraising culture while still respecting donor privacy. However, we also understand that some schools are not comfortable with this feature. In response to this concern, we've added a toggle in the Admin to control the donor wall visibility.

Payout Support for Refunded Fees¶

FutureFund payout reports provide an easy way to identify program funding from a single deposit. Activity that cannot be linked to a transaction is classified as an Adjustment. Historically, refunded fees were classified as an Adjustment requiring our support team to locate and identify the transaction. This behavior has changed and refunded fees will be properly identified in the payout summary reports.

Active Volunteer Positions¶

FutureFund provides a great way to collect volunteer interests from parents during registration and beyond. We've added the ability to toggle the volunteer position from being displayed during registration. Before this, the only way to prevent a volunteer position from being displayed was to delete it which would result in losing the volunteers.

August 2022¶

Custom CSV Export¶

We strive to provide reports and analysis in FutureFund, however, we realize there are times when you need to analyze the data outside of our platform. We've always supported exporting data, however, we didn't provide the option to specify which data you wanted. We've added the ability to specify which data to export on select reports.

Import Teacher Assignments¶

We've added support for bulk uploading teacher assignments.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/directory/teacher-assignment/#uploading-teacher-assignments

July 2022¶

Campaign QR Codes¶

FutureFund supports QR codes for accessing registration, the store, and the directory. We've extended this feature to include Campaigns. To download the QR code, click on the Download Store QR Code link in the right sidebar when viewing the campaign.

Custom Form Elements¶

Added the following Form Elements to Custom Forms:

• Teacher Selector - Allows the selection of a teacher. Teachers are managed in the Directory > Teachers page. This element is not supported in Student or Parent registration forms.
• Student Selector - Allows the selection of a student from the current registration session. This element is not supported in Student or Parent registration forms.
• Parent Selector - Allows the selection of a parent from the current registration session. This element is not supported in Student or Parent registration forms.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/student/custom-forms/#forms-and-form-elements

Registration Progress Bar¶

We've added a progress bar to the upper-right corner of the registration page to provide a visual display of how far along they are in the registration process.

Improved School Session Management¶

1. Removed the concept of a school session being “Publicly Available”. Replaced this with better controls to open or close the sites (Registration, Store, Directory).
2. Updated the Make Default functionality to close the existing school session’s sites.
3. Redesigned the school session page to show the open/closed status of the sites.
4. Added a Close All Sites button to quickly close all sites in the school session.
5. Improved the school session form to a) allow easier access to open or close sites and b) improve the usability of the site being in live or test mode.

Safari 13 and 14¶

FutureFund typically supports the two most recent versions of web browser. We noticed there are still quite a few users using Safari 13 and 14.0.x (released in 2019 and 2020) and extend support to those browsers.

June 2022¶

Improved Registration Manager¶

The registration manager is the tool admins used to configure the registration pages the parents see when they register their students and make purchases. The old interface was a very simple list of pages which would break registration if the order of the pages was incorrect. For example, the sign up page must come before the checkout page. The new interface introduces a few new concepts of pre and post registration pages. This will greatly simplify the understanding of the registration pages. As an added bonus, when you hover over the question mark next to the registration page, it will list the campaigns and/or forms if any are present on the page. Before you had to click into each page to find the campaign you were looking for.

Multi-Level Memberships¶

The Multi-Level Membership campaigns are a great way to sell premium memberships for organizations offing a variety of membership levels.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/store/campaigns/multi-level-membership/

Leaderboard Report¶

The leaderboard report shows aggregate sales data by grade and teacher.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/store/reports/leaderboard/

Time Zone Support¶

Accounts have a time zone attribute used to populate new users that register for that school. Time zone awareness is used for reporting and displaying dates.

Dark Mode for Support¶

We’ve added support for dark mode on the FutureFund Support site for desktop and mobile users. Toggle between dark and light mode by clicking the toggle icon next to the search box in the header.

May 2022¶

Test Send Emails¶

We’ve added the ability to send a test email when drafting email messages to parents. The test email will be sent to the person logged in to FutureFund.

Drag and Drop Image Support¶

Images can be added to campaign descriptions, registration sections, and emails by dragging and dropping the image directly into the form.

Student ID Validation¶

FutureFund supports uploading student IDs for validation during registration. When this feature is enabled, the parent will enter the student ID and the last name. The system will look up this combination and if found, copy the first name, middle name, grade, and teacher if available.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/student/student-ids/

Registration Availability¶

Administrators can set the start and/or end date and time when registration will be available.

See: https://support.futurefund.com/student/setup/#registration-start-and-end-times

Campaign Availability¶

Administrators can set the start and/or end date and time when a campaign will be available for sale in the Store or Registration.

Volunteer Sorting¶

The volunteer positions are sortable by dragging the sort handle to the left of the position. Previously, volunteer positions were sorted alphabetically.

Sortable Tables¶

Many tables in the FutureFund Admin are now sortable by clicking on the column headers. Exported reports retain the same sort order.