Gemini Updates, Simpler User Account Creation, and More!

Release Notes from Sprints 59-62

Melisa Smith avatar
Written by Melisa Smith
Updated over a week ago

Hello Novi family! 

In the past few sprints, we've been working hard "under the hood" to continuously improve performance across the sites, and we are so excited to share some of the more forward-facing items that we think you'll love! 

We're excited about the growth of our Gemini platform. As many of you know, this is the second generation of our Novi software, designed to allow us to ultimately speed up the development process. 

In addition, we've welcomed a number of new association partners to the Novi family who have hit the ground running with amazing ideas and passion for the positive change Novi is bringing to their organizations. 

The more of us that take this journey together, the bigger impact we can all have! Thank you so much for all of your ideas and feedback, they truly are the driving factor behind the features and functionality that you know and love on Novi.

If you'd like to know some details, please read on to learn about some of the highlights of what we've been working on for the last two months and how impactful your feedback has been!

Gemini Updates

First things first...what is Gemini?

If you haven't yet heard us excitedly mentioning Gemini, let us explain. Gemini is the internal code name for our second generation Novi platform.

Our first group of association partners made it clear that they wanted an AMS that synced with QuickBooks that worked the way they worked... and they also made it clear that they wanted it as soon as possible. We sacrificed scalability for speed and delivered on their request.

Gemini looks and feels much like 1.0, but under the hood, the new system is intended to prepare us for a future where scale, performance, resilience and maintainability is important.

What is the current state of Gemini?

We are ecstatic to announce that roughly 60% of our customers have been migrated to the new Gemini platform! We are migrating roughly two association partners per week, so if you haven't heard from us quite yet, expect us to be reaching out shortly.

It is important to note that with a goal of moving all customers to the Gemini platform in the near future, any new feature work has been done solely in Gemini (excluding critical bugs and important updates). Once your site has been migrated to Gemini, you will have these features as well. 

Note: For our associations just coming onto the Novi AMS platform who might be wondering, your site was created on Gemini, so no need for a migration!

New Gemini Features and Updates

Simpler User Account Creation

Simplifying processes for you and your members is one of our main focuses. To this end, we have pushed a few updates that make it easier for your members with an existing record to create an account on your site. 

The duplicate detection process will now pick up on email matching earlier in the process. As soon as an email is entered on the "Create An Account" screen, the email is checked against all individual records to see if it is a match on the main contact email for a record.  This should make the process smoother, faster, and with less room for error!

Many of our trade association partners have multiple records that share a single email address.  If more than one record is using the same email, the same duplicate detection we have had for years will apply. Learn more about the user account creation process here.

Additionally, we've also worked on ways to make the transition smoother for onboarding customer's members as they create an account to begin using Novi. We appreciate the feedback we received from the Georgia Society of Association Executives and Leadership Florida on these items. Your feedback has helped us greatly improve the user process!

In fact, we heard back from Leadership Florida that with these updates, in the first 3 days they were live, they had 500 people register for their user account and only 3 calls to their office - Amazing! Thanks for the teamwork.

Updates to Product Checkout (Especially For Donations)

We know that many associations are using our products section to accept donations for charity or for their government affairs efforts. We wanted to make that process as intuitive as possible for your members, so we cleaned up the checkout cart. 

Notice that in the checkout screen below, "Your Cart" and the sub-heading are now editable regions. If different verbiage will work better for your association's needs, any logged-in admin can update that text.  Just navigate to: {YourDomain}/products/checkout

A few other examples of this cleanup effort include:

  • If a donation is the only item in the cart, the table changes to say "amount" instead of "price."

  • If a donation is the only item in the cart, the quantity section is hidden.

While these updates might not sound big, we feel that any friction removed from checkout can make a HUGE impact, especially with something as crucial as donations.

Update To How Invoices Are Emailed

Though you may see remarkable similarities between the Novi Transactions page and the QuickBooks Online Sales page, Novi has a significant amount of additional functionality built in not only help you find what you're looking for, but also make sure it goes to the right email address when sending.

You might remember from training that invoices billed to a company are emailed to the billing contact. If there isn't one, it is sent to the contact email on the company's record details. Now, if neither exist, we've made an update so that invoices will be emailed to the primary contact. Learn more here!

Other Updates

Updates to the Novi AMS-QuickBooks Online Sync

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last several sprints working “under the hood” on our QuickBooks connection. Dominica at the Apartment Association of Greater Orlando has been a huge help in putting this API connection through the ringer. With her help and the help of others, we'll continue to find ways to improve our QuickBooks connection.

Member Engagement Report Parent Visibility

For those of you utilizing our Member Engagement report to find members who are (or are not!) engaged with your association, you are now able to see the parent member associated with a member, to have a more complete picture of your data within the report. The brainchild of the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, the Member Engagement Report might be worth checking out if you have a few minutes.

Update to Password Reset Verbiage

Some of you have reached out to us with the issue that members are attempting to reset their passwords but not receiving the password reset email. In some cases, it may be due to an email deliverability issue, which we likely help you communicate to the member. In most cases, it's actually because there isn't an account that exists for that user! 

For security purposes, we cannot let a member who is trying to login know if there is an associated account with an email address. In order to cut down on any confusion or emails to you, we have now changed the messaging on the password reset page:

The verbiage on the forgot password page has been changed from "Please check your email to reset your password" to "If a user account is associated with this email, reset instructions will be sent to your inbox."

Hopefully, this added guidance will eliminate some of the phone calls you may be receiving from members.

Logo Sizing Update

Attention marketers! As you're migrating to and becoming familiar with Gemini, note that the size of your logos have changed. This information is now also embedded in the member page, so no need to jot this down!

Both company logos and individual headshots have an optimal size of 300x300 on your website. To learn more or if you're not familiar with updating image sizing, check out this article or watch the video below for a quick tutorial on our logo sizing method recommendation.

(A big shoutout to Wendy with the Georgia Society of Association Executives for helping us create this helpful content!)

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