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New Features & Updates
New Features Added to Novi AMS & Other Recent Updates
New Member Creation Options for Admins, Differing Email Update Message, MailChimp Updates, and much more!
New Member Creation Options for Admins, Differing Email Update Message, MailChimp Updates, and much more!

Release Notes Sprint 86

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

In This Sprint's Release Notes:

New Features

  • Additional Options for Admins Creating New Memberships

  • Notification For Differing Contact Email/User Account Email 

Product Updates

  • MailChimp Individual and Company Name Mixing

  • MailChimp Interest Group Name Change

  • State/Province Requirement Change

  • Twenty-Five Row List Option

  • Non-Members Automatically Removed from Recent Signups

  • Updated Limited Admin Limitations

  • New Verbiage for Invalid User Accounts

Register for Novi Roundtables!

  • Dates & Topics Below

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New Features

Additional Options for Admins Creating New Memberships

Have you ever created a new membership on the backend and wished you could keep the record in a pending/un-approved status? If your bylaws require board approval for all new memberships, then you know what we're talking about! 

We're excited to announce that the "Create Membership" modal now has additional options for Auto-Approve and Send Welcome Email

Having these options on the backend gives the admin more control over what Novi will do after the "Save" button is clicked.

The options for Auto-Approve and Send Welcome Email will default to ON if the selected Member Type has those settings.

If new memberships require approval, admins now have the ability to change the Auto-Approve option to OFF from the backend (Note: This does not change frontend functionality - only admin additions). This will put the record in a Pending status and will also show in the Recent Signups list. 

Additionally, you can choose to send the welcome email to admin-added members as well. Previously this only applied to members added via the frontend. These updates will give you much more flexibility when creating your new members from the backend. Be sure to have any of your association staff who work with member records to check it out!

>> For more important information on the new options, check out the information on creating a new member

>> For more information on member type setup, check out the following information on member type settings, requiring approval for new memberships, or enabling the welcome email.

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Notification For Differing Contact Email/User Account Email 

Have you ever changed a member's professional or personal contact email address but forgotten to update their user account login email as well? If so, that might have resulted in the member contacting you thinking that their login email was changed, since the emails are different. 

To help alleviate this confusion, we've added a new message that will appear when a professional or personal contact email address that was previously matching the user's account email is changed to something else. 

For Example: Let's say that John Smith has a professional contact email AND an account/login email of johnsmith@company.com. If his professional contact email is changed to a different email address, the message will appear. 

However, if his contact email was johnsmith@company.com, his login email was johnsmith123456789@gmail.com, and the professional contact email is changed, the message would NOT appear.

If you (the admin) are updating the contact email, you'll see...

If the member is updating their email from the Member Compass, they'll see...

Note: This is just a prompt for transparency. Novi will not automatically change the emails to match. To update the Account Email, additional steps must be taken:

  • Members who see this message on the frontend will need to contact association staff to update their Account Email (login), as they have in the past. 

  • If an admin sees this message, they should ask the member if they want to change their Account Email (login) to match their new contact email address. If yes, then the admin should make the update on the Settings tab of the member record.

Keep in mind, some of your users may login to the site using Social logins or with a personal email address for other reasons. This is totally fine. The contact emails and login emails don't need to match and you don't necessarily need to change their login email unless it makes sense to (ex: the user left the old company the login email relates to) or the user requests it.

>> More info on how to remove or change a user account and the difference between a contact email and a user account email.

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Product Updates

MailChimp Individual and Company Name Mixing

Recently, we've made several updates to email syncs to help make them both more efficient and transparent for you. One of the highlights being that if company and people emails match, their names won't ever mix. For example: "John ABC Company"

In the previous release, that updated that process for new emails moving forward. Now, the update in this release should take care of contacts that you have in that state historically the next time your group syncs! 

>> Read more about the previous updates in the Sprint 82 release notes and Sprint 84 release notes.

MailChimp Interest Group Name Change

You'll notice that the term "MailChimp List" on group and event list sync sections has been changed to "MailChimp Interest Group." This is to alleviate any confusion between your main Novi AMS list in MailChimp and your individual groups synced over. MailChimp also refers to these as Interest Groups, so this better aligns the verbiage between the systems. 

Please note, this does not affect any current functionality in the MailChimp sync.

>> Need a MailChimp refresher? Learn more about the MailChimp and Novi AMS integration.

State/Province During Payment Requirement Change

We want to ensure that all of your members are empowered to use the website as it was intended. For our associations with international members, we've made an update that will make more logical sense regarding credit card payments. 

Historically, the State/Province field during credit card payments has been required. We've removed the requirement on that field, since that does not apply to international folks. 

Quick side note - This won't affect proper credit card validation if you're worried about that!

Thank you to the American Association of Applied Linguistics AAAL for sharing this idea with us!

Twenty-Five Row List Option

A quick update that we've added the option to show 25 rows in a list on the backend of the website - such as on your Accounting > Transactions or Members lists. 

Our recommendation when completing batch actions, such as Non-Renew and Credit for multiple members, is to do 25 at a time, so this will make that simple and easy!

Non-Members Automatically Removed from Recent Signups

Recent Signups is a great tool for admins to view new members and signups in the system. For new dues paying members, you may know that you have the option to either Approve or Deactivate the record. 

However, thanks to great feedback from the Southeast Florida Apartment Association (SEFAA), we've made an update that takes records converted to a non-member and automatically removes them from your recent signups list.

This way, if you want to keep the "not approved" member in your system for tracking purposes, but don't necessarily want to make them inactive by deactivating them, all you need to do is update their record to a Prospect or Non-Member record. This will automatically clear them from the recent signups list.

>> Learn more about Recent Signups and how to convert a record to a Prospect.

Updated Limited Admin Limitations

Member Fields and Custom Fields are critical fields in Novi that affect everything from the information you collect from members, to dues running correctly, group calculation, and a variety of other important functionality. 

Keeping this importance in mind, we've made an update to limited access' admins limitations that removes their ability to update custom or member fields. In fact, they will not be able to access the section at all. This ensures that your general admin users are the ones making these important changes.

New Verbiage for Invalid User Accounts

If by chance, you happen to remove a user's login account or merge their record away while they are actively logged in to the site, this process has been streamlined. We will now alert the user that their account has been removed on the next page they click on. 

This will prompt them to log out and attempt to log in again, or, to contact you.

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Upcoming Novi AMS Roundtables

Join the Novi team for our weekly roundtables where we host roundtable discussions on various topics relating to using Novi with your association peers, share updates on these topics, and periodically showcase new related features. 

To sign up, click the link below for a topic that you're interested in!

April 2019

  • April 17: QuickBooks Payments - Are you using QuickBooks Payments? If so, have you been frustrated by some deposit records being automatically created in QuickBooks while others are not? Join us to learn more about the solution we've found and how it might affect your workflow.

  • April 24: Website Content - Come ready to learn and share great website content ideas!

May 2019

  • May 1: Developer Demo - Join our engineers for live demos of some of our newest features. Be prepared to ask questions and to help distill operational best practices with your peers.

  • May 15: Automation with Zapier & QuickBooks Online - Find out how we use Zapier to automate a number of our internal processes, ultimately saving us lots of time. After a quick demo, we'll have a roundtable discussion, brainstorming how associations might be able to leverage the power of Zapier within their organization.

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