This developer demo delivered on a promise: every feature we showcased was voted on by you and your peers at Novi Summit 2025. You voted. We built.
The investment ended up well beyond what we originally planned. The Summit "You Decide" session started with a $500,000 budget, and we ended up putting roughly $1.5 million of design, engineering, and QA work into bringing these features to life.
Watch the Recording
TLDR Summary of Features
With time stamps for the recording above.
[01:46] The "You Decide" Story - How member feedback drives what we build at Novi.
[05:14 Smart BCC Emails (Available Now) - Log external emails directly to a record's activity timeline.
[10:33] Member Self-Service Event Registration Edits (Available Now) - Let purchasers and attendees update their own registration details from the Member Compass.
[15:39] Nested (Dependent) Custom Fields (Available Now) - Show follow-up questions dynamically based on a previous answer.
[23:44] Bulk Update Profile Data (Available Now) - Make mass updates to records from list views.
[29:18] Event Performance Report (Available Now) - A centralized view of event attendance, revenue, and ticket sales across all your events.
[35:27] Novi Navigator (In Beta) - An AI assistant for natural-language questions about your Novi data.
The "You Decide" Story
"You Decide" started at our very first Novi Summit in 2019 and has been a part of every Summit since. The idea is straightforward: we walk through a list of the top feature requests, you vote, and the ones with the most votes get built.
It's a session that lets you peek behind the curtain of our development backlog, and it's how we keep "for associations, by associations" from being just a tagline. In the last 12 months alone, you submitted 961 distinct feature requests, and we delivered 324 of them. The features in this recap are the 2025 winners.
Smart BCC Emails
Smart BCC lets admins log emails sent from Gmail, Outlook, or any other email tool directly to a record's activity timeline in Novi. So that prospect conversation, sponsorship inquiry, or committee follow-up no longer has to live in someone's personal inbox.
There are two ways to use it:
Universal Smart BCC is the everyday option. Grab the single email address from Association Settings > Integrations, save it as a contact in your email client, and BCC (or forward) it on any email. Novi matches the recipients to records in your database and logs the email on each matching timeline.
Customer-Specific Smart BCC is for the exceptions. Each record has its own unique Smart BCC address on the Settings tab. Use this when you want to log a thread to a specific record even if the recipient's email doesn't match anything in Novi.
Key Use Cases
Tracking conversations with a prospect you're trying to recruit
Logging sponsorship and event-related back-and-forth on a company record
Capturing volunteer or committee interest from members
Keeping a complete activity timeline without manual copy-paste
A few things to know
You need Novi admin access to use Smart BCC, and the email address you're sending from needs to match your Novi login.
Attachments don't carry over to the activity, so keep important details in the body of the email.
Always BCC the address (don't CC), and remember that Smart BCC activity is searchable in the Activity Timeline Report.
Member Self-Service Event Registration Edits
Affectionately known on our team as "attendee edits," this one has been a long time coming. Purchasers and attendees can now edit their own event registration details from the Member Compass, up to a date you choose.
The most common use case is the TBD attendee. Someone registers a golf team or buys a table for the gala with placeholders for the names, and now they can come back in later to fill in the actual people, no email back-and-forth required. Members can also update meal selections, contact info, custom field responses, and swap in a different attendee on a ticket they purchased.
Key Use Cases
Filling in TBD attendees after a team or table purchase
Updating dietary preferences and meal choices closer to the event
Correcting attendee contact information
Swapping in a different staff member when plans change
Setting it up
The feature works in two layers:
An association-level setting in Association Settings > Events > Registration turns it on by default for all future events and sets how many days before an event edits are allowed.
An event-level toggle on each individual event lets you enable or disable edits and set a specific deadline.
Worth noting
Members can edit attendee info, custom fields, and contact details, but they can't cancel a registration or change a ticket type. Those still come through your team. Family tree access rules and ticket eligibility validations still apply, so members can't assign tickets to people they wouldn't have been able to register in the first place.
Nested (Dependent) Custom Fields
Nested Custom Fields let you ask smarter, more dynamic questions on your forms. A follow-up question only appears when it's actually relevant based on how someone answered a previous question.
A simple example: your signup form asks "How did you hear about us?" Someone picks "From another member," and a "Referring member name" field appears. Someone else picks "Search engine," and that follow-up field stays hidden. Less clutter, cleaner data, better experience.
Key Use Cases
Asking for a referring member's name only when relevant
Showing a meal preference field only when someone says they're attending the dinner
Capturing guest information only when someone says they're bringing a guest
Adding directory filters that refine dynamically based on a previous selection
How to set it up
The parent field has to be a Set of Options (dropdown) field. The nested field has to already exist before you can attach it. And nesting is limited to one level, so a nested field can't trigger another nested field.
Nested fields are supported anywhere Set of Options custom fields work today: membership registration, the Member Compass profile, event registration and checkout, ecommerce, and directory filters. Census support is on the way.
One really important data quality note
Use a unique nested field for each context. If you nest the same "Other - please specify" field under two different parent fields, the data from one will get overwritten by the other.
For example, if "How did you hear about us?" and "What are your specialties?" both have an "Other" option, create two separate explanation fields, not one shared field.
Bulk Update Profile Data
The new Update Profile Data batch action lets you make changes across multiple records at once, straight from the list views you already use.
You can update profile fields (custom fields and most member fields), parent member, member type, and membership dates. You'll find the Batch Actions > Update Profile Data option in:
Groups → Members
Member Details → Family Tree (people and sub-companies)
Committees → Members
Events → Attendees
Key Use Cases
Moving a group of contacts to a different parent company in one step
Updating a list of non-members to a prospect member type
Standardizing addresses across an entire family tree
Clearing out a custom field that's no longer in use
A word of caution
This feature is powerful, and bulk updates aren't easily reversible. A few things worth knowing before you dive in:
Updating expiration dates does not generate dues invoices, so this isn't a substitute for the renewal process.
Only Association Admins (including those with Special Accounting Privileges) can perform bulk updates. Limited Association Admins cannot.
Updates run one field type at a time, and you'll be asked to confirm before changes are applied. Progress is tracked in the Alert Center.
If you're planning a bulk change to member types or membership dates, write into the blue bubble first. There may be downstream implications, and we'd rather help you think it through up front.
Event Performance Report
The Event Performance Report gives you one centralized place to look at attendance, company engagement, ticket sales, and revenue across all of your events. No more bouncing between individual event pages or rebuilding the same spreadsheet every quarter.
You'll find it under Reporting > Events > Event Performance in the admin sidebar. At the top, five metric cards (Unique Attendees, Unique Companies, Tickets Sales, Events, and Revenue) update as you change filters.
What you can dig into
The report has three tabs, each with a Details and a Summary view:
Attendees - Details shows one row per attendee per event. Summary shows one row per unique attendee with total events registered vs. attended.
Companies - Details shows one row per company per event. Summary shows one row per unique company across all events. A Group by Top Level Parent filter rolls everything up under a parent organization, which is especially helpful if your database is family-tree-heavy.
Ticket Sales - Details shows one row per individual ticket. Summary aggregates by ticket name across all events.
Key Use Cases
Spotting which companies show up to the most events (and which haven't been in a while)
Comparing event performance year over year by date range
Pulling ticket sales numbers for sponsorship reporting or board presentations
Identifying your most engaged individual attendees
A few things to know
Filters are tab-specific, so if you switch tabs and don't see what you expected, double-check your filters. Date filters are based on the event start date, not the registration date. And the revenue number is an estimate based on Novi ticket sales. QuickBooks is still your system of record for financial reporting.
Reports export to PDF and Excel, and batch actions (mark attendance, generate invoices, send confirmations, and more) are available directly from the Attendees and Ticket Sales views.
Novi Navigator (In Beta)
Novi Navigator started life as a request from "You Decide" for a member profile summary button. As we talked with customers about what they actually wanted from that summary, it became clear that every person had a different answer. Some wanted a one-line executive briefing. Some wanted event history. Some wanted committee involvement. Some wanted CE credits.
So we built something more flexible: an AI assistant inside the AMS that you can ask for exactly what you need, in your own words.
What you can ask Navigator
Member summaries. "Give me a quick briefing on Rose before my meeting." Or "What should I talk to her about for the membership committee?"
Data queries. "How many current members do we have right now?" Navigator can also produce charts, so you can ask for a stacked bar chart of specific member types over the last three years and drop the result straight into a board deck.
Investigative questions. For example, "Why isn't this member in this group?" Navigator looks at the group conditions, looks at the record, and tells you which condition isn't being met. The kind of question that used to take 15 to 30 minutes to research now takes about two minutes.
Every response includes a Thoughts panel that shows how Navigator arrived at its answer. It's tucked away rather than front-and-center, but it's there when you want to refine a prompt or understand the reasoning.
What's coming
Workflows. Save your most-used prompts so you can rerun them quickly without retyping.
CSV export. Export query results so you can use the data wherever you need it.
Navigator doesn't replace the blue bubble
Associations are personal businesses. Our goal with Navigator is to amplify what your team already does, not to replace the human support you get from us. If Navigator gives you an answer that doesn't quite fit, or if you're not sure whether what you're seeing is a configuration issue or a data issue, the blue bubble is still the right place to land. Many nuances are easier to resolve with a person looking at the full picture.
Want to join the beta?
Message us through the blue bubble or email help@noviams.com to request access. We're working through requests throughout the week.
Want to go deeper on AI?
We're hosting a fireside chat on AI with Pete Zimek and Pete Bernardo on Wednesday, June 10 at 3 PM ET. It's an open conversation about how Novi is approaching AI, the guardrails we're putting in place, and where Navigator is headed. If you've got questions, skepticism, or ideas, bring them.
Additional Resources & Next Steps
Explore the five live features using the help articles linked above
Request Novi Navigator beta access through the blue bubble or help@noviams.com
Register for the AI Fireside Chat on June 10 at 3 PM ET
Share these features with your peers, and if you know an association that isn't yet a Novi customer, we'd love a referral through our referral program
Keep the feedback coming through the blue bubble. Every "You Decide" winner started as a customer request, and that's how the next round gets built too.
A huge thank you to the nearly 50 alpha and beta testers who shaped these features along the way!