You can now link people to donations using a soft credit. A soft credit lets you acknowledge someone for a donation besides the actual donor. For example, a wealthy tycoon donates $50,000 to your scholarship fund and you want to make sure that when you thank him, his wife is included in the acknowledgement. Or a donation comes in from a local corporation thanks to the efforts of a graduate who now works there—you can now give her the soft credit for the donation. Soft credits are awarded on a donation page right below where you link the donation with the donor. The Donors report and its communication actions have been updated to respect soft credits as well.
This was one of our customers' top requests for Populi Donations, and we're very pleased to get this out to everyone.
Populi Bookstore has a bunch of great new features this morning. As part of a general rewrite, we gave Bookstore improved return/refund processing, discount codes, and better inventory management (plus lots of interface improvements and upgrades). Here's a look at the new stuff:
Returns and refunds
Bookstore now makes it easy to process returned items and refunds (let's be honest: it was not easy before). Returns are handled in Point of Sale: just click Return Items, scan or search for the items to return, and connect the returns to the original order. You can handle the entire refund right there, too: just pick your refund method from the drop-down (you can even refund to a student account) or use the refund to reduce the amount of a new purchase. Bookstore now also handles credit card refunds—it contacts your processor and reverses the charge without you having to do anything.
Discount codes
Discount codes let you offer your customers price breaks on items and shipping costs. You can specify a dollar or percent discount, whether the code applies only to certain items or customer types, minimum order amount, expiration dates, and more. Codes can be applied by customers at the online checkout or by you at Point of Sale. So now you can offer, say, free shipping on all online orders over $50, or give faculty and staff a 10% employee discount on books and apparel.
Inventory improvements
Bookstore now features a number of improvements to inventory management.
Each item segment now has better inventory tracking. Inventory batches let you record when you received a new shipment and the cost-per-item. Adjustments let you correct inventory for things like loss/damage or clerical errors. Each sale and return is also figured in so you know for sure what's in stock.
The new Inventory tool in Admin lets you add inventory batches for any item, while the Returned Items report lets you manage which returned items go back to your stock and which are counted as shrinkage.
On the accounting side, new settings let you specify your inventory cost flow method (FIFO or LIFO) as well as accounts for purchases, shrinkage, and COGS.
Of course, all those lovely reports have been updated to take all the new data into account.
We're really happy to get these Bookstore improvements out to our customers. They give you more control over your inventory, make everyday tasks easier for your Bookstore staff (and your school's accountant), and let you offer even more to your customers.
Also new in Populi: Library Shelf View. Shelf view shows you what's in the physical vicinity of the resource you're currently looking at. Just scroll to the bottom of any resource page and there you'll see it; click the left/right arrows to wander your way through the library shelves. The view is ordered by call number and makes it easy to discover resources you might not have thought to search for.
There are a lot of new buttons and links in Populi today, and just about all of them say... Text.
Texting is now almost as common in Populi as email. Formerly, it handled emergency notifications and password retrieval for staff and faculty (of course, it still does that!). Now, it does a lot more. Need to tell a prof's students that he's out sick and class is canceled? Text his students right from the course roster. Wanna send a quick thank you to your $100-$250 donors? Use the Text donors button in the Donations report. Have an accepted applicant you want to tell the good news? Now you can send her a text right from the accept application dialog.
The new features give your admissions staff swifter ways to communicate with leads. When an inquiry or applicant fills out the initial form, they can verify their mobile/text number on the spot. You can then respond to their questions via text, and they can reply in turn. And when you accept an applicant, you can import her verified number right into her profile.
We want to make communication at your school as friction-free as possible, and we're really pleased to give you these new texting features. If you'd like to get your Populi user account set up to receive text notifications from your school, read this article. And if you want to keep an eye on how many texts your school has sent so far this month, have a look at Communications > Campus Notifications (remember that additional texts are 2¢ each).
We recently released a couple new academic reporting tools.
Attendance report
The new Attendance report in Academics > Reporting lets you look at every detail of every attendance record at your school. You can look at attendance by student, by course, by term, and even get a report of all your attendance data—every term, every course, every meeting, every student. Use the spiffy new reporting filter to narrow down your searches and then export anything you find to XLS or CSV.
Several of our users have asked for more detailed attendance reporting, and we're pleased to make this available.
Test question analysis
The new Analysis view in tests shows you the big picture of how your students are faring against your online test questions. The data helps you evaluate whether your test questions are enough of a challenge—or too much of a cakewalk—for your students. It can also help you pinpoint your students' strengths and struggles in a way that overall assignment grades can't.
For example, your students average 75% on the mid-term exam. Test analysis reveals to you that they bombed the short answers from one particular textbook (but otherwise did just fine), and that's what dragged everyone's grades down. So now you know that you either need to spend more time reviewing that text or ditch those questions when it comes time for the final exam.
Listening in on a sales demo the other day, it struck me: we no longer need to explain web-based software the way we used to. Back in 2008, a good chunk of Nick and Joseph's time was spent telling schools about the ABC's of web-based software: browser-based, hosted on our hardware, available anywhere, maintenance and updates on us. The Internet was not new, nor was Populi on the cutting edge of cloud-based software. But the notion of a small school getting real work done using the web was novel enough that we gave it a whole page on our website.
In 2016, the web is part of everything. It's not just that we're used to web-based productivity software—it's that the Internet is applied, seemingly, to all problems. Think of it: in 2008, the web was largely accessed via the desktop browser. In 2016, we use it just as often on our phones. And we use those devices not just to check email and look at websites, but to control network-connected things like light bulbs, refrigerators, and, wonderfully, diapers.
Image credit: Engadget
So, yeah, if the baby poops, we want the Internet to tell us. The web is enough a part of life that people will throw money at this idea expecting to make it all back. So of course schools now come to us taking it for granted that we're web-based. That means that the web is something that we now expect, a utility like electricity or running water that we don't notice unless it's not working. Benedict Evans observes this phenomenon:
Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those use cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.
Before everything had a network connection, you thought about the Internet more. But as it's shoved into every object imaginable, it becomes invisible. And that's when it goes unexamined. Unexamined things can change us in ways we will not see. We now expect the world to work a certain way, a way that replaces a brief sniff test on the diaper with a Bluetooth notification on the phone.
Here's how unexamined it is already. A moment ago, I said that we "expect the world to work a certain way" and you didn't notice. Earlier I wrote that "the web is part of everything", and you didn't care. I'm going to let Alan Jacobs take us to task:
“Technology is shifting our way of seeing the world.” “The internet really has changed the world completely.” Pray tell, what is “the world”? Seriously, I want to know what people mean by this. If “the world” has been changed completely, why does the silver maple outside my window still stand as it has for decades? Why is the gazpacho at Emilio’s as good as it was when I first tasted it, twenty-five years ago? Why does the prose of Sir Thomas Browne still delight me as it did when I first encountered it at age nineteen? Why do I still love my wife?
If you answer, “Well, that’s not what they mean by ‘the world,'” I counter, “Then what do they mean? Because all those things I just mentioned are in the only world that I know.”
Jacobs concludes:
No more essays about how “technology” or “the internet” is “changing everything.” They all say the same thing, which in the end amounts to: absolutely nothing. So let’s get down to cases. What technologies did you rely on today? What did they help you do? What did they allow you to avoid doing? What did they prevent you from doing that you wanted to do? Specify. As the proverbs tell us, both God and the Devil are in the details.
Another sage, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, once put it thus: "Intelligence consists not in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems." Jacobs' questions keep the problems in sight, and as the web is woven into every solution and the din of modern life, this is what we must remember when telling people about Populi.
What problems do we solve? What new problems might we create? Can we address new issues and things we can't predict? Will we remember the world apart from the web? It's where the low winter sun catches the roofmelt off the grain elevator. Where the cheese on a Humble Burger fuses just so with the sauce. Where Thomas Tallis wrote a 40-part motet. Where sons dash across the surf as the Pacific crashes into California.
Image credit: Humble Burger
Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink and his soul should enjoy good in his labor.
