Embedding content in lessons and news posts

You've long been able to embed content from external sources—YouTube, Vimeo, Scribd—in news posts and course lessons. We recently made this feature even better: you can now embed content from 17 different services. Here's a look...

Auto-embeds

Auto-embeds work simply by pasting the content's URL right in the text of the post or lesson. This works with YouTube, Vimeo, Scribd, and now Prezi, a service that lets you create and share presentations.

First, copy the URL of the media you want to include from one of those services.

Next, paste it right into the news or lesson editor.

Once you save, Populi does the rest: the content is now embedded in your post or lesson!

Iframes

An inline frame—or iframe—is a way to embed one web page within another. We've been cagey about those in the past because, when done poorly, an iframe can present a security risk. But seeing that our users were needing more flexibility in this area, we decided to "whitelist" a number of trustworthy sites and services. So, you can now use embed codes from any whitelisted service to incorporate external content in news and lessons—without anyone having to worry about security.

Here's how to embed content using an iframe:

First, grab the embed code. Different services have different ways of doing this and give you different appearance options—and some, like Spotify, require a paid account to get the embed code. Whatever you do, make sure you get the embed code, and not some sort of "share this" link!

Then, open the HTML source editor.

Paste the embed code directly into the HTML source editor and click Update.

You'll see the embedded content right in the news/lesson editor—and, of course, in the finished product when you click Save.

The whitelisted services are Google Docs, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Scribd, Prezi, Soundcloud, Rdio, Spotify, Twitch, Vine, TED, Slideshare, Imgur, Box, Crocdoc, and Quickcast. If you have another service you'd like to us to add, send us a support request and we'll take a look at it.

Donations!

New in Populi Financial: Donations.

Donations lets you keep track of fundraising campaigns, accept online donations, record other contributions (checks received in the mail, etc.), and, of course, generate reports on any of this activity. Paired with Populi's communications and contacts features, Donations helps you manage your school's relationships with its donors—while giving you brand-new ways to help get money in the door. Here's a look at what you can do...

Online donations

If you're set up with credit card processing, you can start accepting online donations. Online donation pages give you options for what amounts your supporters can donate, which funds they can donate to, and whether donations received through that page should be connected to particular campaigns and appeals. You can embed your pages on your website or email newsletter and customize their appearance with your own custom CSS. Online donation pages are a great way to make donating to your school easier than ever.

Campaigns and appeals

Campaigns and appeals help you track your progress towards your fundraising goals. Appeals are fundraising communications or events used to solicit donations—anything from a "Remember to Give" postcard to a fundraising golf tournament. You can link donations to campaigns and individual appeals; Populi can also calculate the return on investment by comparing costs with results. Campaigns help you gain insight into what approaches work—or don't—when it comes to fundraising.

Donor profiles

The new Donations tab, available on organization profiles and the Profile > Financial tab, collects all the information you have about a donor's activity. You can record new donations, link to past donations, and print yearly summaries.

Reports

Reporting includes the new donations Dashboard, which summarizes donor activity, and the Donations and Donors reports, each of which feature the upgraded report filter. The new filter includes some built-in report filters that let you quickly find commonly-desired information—Donors who donated last year but not this, for example. It also lets you save your filters as custom reports that you can share with other staff or keep for your own use. Report actions let you do a number of tasks—including printing receipts and summaries, tagging your donors, and exporting your report to XLS.

Communications and contacts

Of course, Donations works in concert with Populi's existing communication and contact features. Want to email everyone who donated to the Library? Want to put all of your alumni donors on a Communication Plan? Want to tag businesses that have donated in the past three years? Want to print envelopes and mail out summaries before tax season? No problem.

Learn more

Read about how to set up and use the new Donations features in the Populi Knowledge Base.

Also, a special thank-you to the customers who participated in our limited beta roll-out of Donations. You really put it through its paces and gave us some great feedback, and we truly are grateful for your insight!

New file uploader, digital library resources, enrollment verification letters, and more

The developers have been drinking their coffee and eating their energy bars, and as a result, Populi now does dozens of new things it didn't do a few weeks ago. Where to begin? How about with the...

New file uploader

The new file uploader lets you drag-and-drop files—up to two gigabytes in size—right into your browser window to upload them into Populi. It's available to all users wherever you can upload files: everywhere from ID photos, activity feeds, and course assignments to applications, page layouts, and library resources (among many other places).

Digital library resources

You can now offer digital resources through your Library. Simply upload the files to the resource, and they'll be available for viewing and downloading to your patrons.

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Enrollment verification letters

You can now print proof of enrollment letters for your students. For that matter, your students can print them, too! To get you started, we've included a customizable Enrollment Verification document in Communications > Page Layouts. Contact Populi Support if you'd like us to fix up your enrollment letter layout.

2-25-15 e verification

New tuition schedule options in Data Slicer

You can now use the Data Slicer to add, remove, or replace the tuition schedules for groups of students.

2-25-15 manage TS

PDF exports

What used to export as an .odt file—transcripts, custom statements, etc.—can now be exported as a PDF.

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A zillion other things have gotten out there over the past few weeks. If you care to find out more, have a look at our Release Notes.

Value

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We announced our current pricing back in February 2010. We've since supplemented that with a few optional items: SMS Emergency Notifications and File storage (the price of which has dropped several times the past couple years). As for Populi itself, well, we've added a thing or two, I guess. And all along we've held fast to the free essentials that make it all go for our customers: implementation, training, support—and, most important, our annual Christmas photos.

It recently struck us: our Pricing Page has remained all but unchanged for the past five years. Web companies commonly experiment with their pricing—adding new tiers, shuffling features around, annual subscription discounts, and so on. You could attribute this to the flexibility of web-based software; it's simple to justify a change in price for an easily-changed product. But such changes have never even crossed our minds. Populi's price has remained steady for five years. The service itself, on the other hand, offers vastly more than it used to. How'd that happen?

Concerning the price, we've never had a good reason to raise it. Every year, our infrastructure dollars have gotten us more—in terms of utility, service, and storage. We have Moore's Law to thank for that; the popular version purports that, every 18 months or so, computing power doubles in speed and drops in price by half. In turn, that has helped us scale up and take on more schools. That spreads our overall costs over an increasing number of customers. And finally, the revenue we take in gets plowed back into our people, our company, and serving our customers. Being privately-owned, there's no obligation to meet the preposterous financial goals of distant, disinterested investors.

Concerning the service, we've only ever had reasons to make it better. Our customers ask us for lots of good things that we want to give them. Some bigger schools need things we don't quite offer yet. The new feature we just released could use refinement. And then there's our own temperament. We’re relentlessly dissatisfied with Populi. No matter how good it is, how many features we add, or how well it all performs, there’s always some way to make it better. Now, it's not that our work is lousy. It's more that we've been given the opportunity to do this work—so why not swing for the fences?

So. We've never had a reason to raise the price, and have always been compelled to make Populi better. That's worked out well for us, and I'd wager, for our customers. Schools that came aboard in 2010 are getting a lot more than they signed up for. For that matter, so are the schools who signed up in 2011, 2012... even customers who came aboard six months ago now have something better than before.

We once likened the college software scene to shopping for a car. In a market cluttered with custom tour buses and shady used cars, Populi was the dependable Toyota minivan—affordable, room for everyone, and a great warranty. Now, imagine that you bought the minivan, and every six months or so, the dealer automatically upgraded it to the next trim level. Or installed a new motor. Or gave you a sunroof. All without you paying more or having to do anything.

That's pretty much the deal you get with Populi.

Donations from organizations, library updates, and other sundry improvements

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Some recent improvements...

Organizations can make donations

Yup, you can now record donations made by organizations. Just go to the org's profile, click the Donations tab, and then Record a Donation. The screen includes records of all previous donations, a breakdown by fund, and the ability to print a tax receipt.

You can also now export PDF receipts in bulk from the Donations report—for both individuals and organizations.

Multitude of Library improvements

We've improved the way Populi handles Library holds, making it easier for your Library staff to manage your resources.

  • Populi now sets the hold expiration date when you pull the copy, rather than when the copy was simply assigned to the hold. Previously, when setting the hold expiration date based on the assignment, this frequently resulted in holds expiring before the copy was even pulled.
  • The Holds report now shows you which holds do not yet have a copy assigned to them.
  • You can also now print a hold receipt to attach to the resource copy you've pulled.

Additionally, we've added three new fields to resources:

  • Acquisition Source (an Agent)
  • Acquisition Date
  • Replacement Price
Some other items

1-20-15 DA equiv

We improved the display of equivalent courses in the Degree Audit, clarifying how a course requirement has been fulfilled by the student's completion of an equivalent course.

Course equivalencies now impact both course and course group prerequisites. Say ENG101 and WRI101 are equivalents and ENG101 is included in the "Core" course group:

  • A student who passes WRI101 would qualify for courses that require ENG101 as a prereq
  • A student who takes WRI101 would qualify for courses that require the Core course group

On the API front, you can now upload files via the API, including to term-based custom student fields.

The Financial Aid API has several new calls:

  • getAidApplication
  • getAidApplicationForStudentAidYear
  • addAidApplication
  • editAidApplication

You can now set up Bookstore tax by ZIP code to accommodate schools in states that allow differing tax rates at the county level for online sales.

 

 

Making money on the internet

Nicholas Carlson's recent New York Times Magazine piece, What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs, is a fine overview of Yahoo's troubled two-year course correction. Most interesting, though, is how Carlson's understanding of the Yahoo board comes from how he shares its assumptions.

Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent.

Silicon Valley is "littered" with "has-beens" that "no longer innovate" but are nonetheless "turning a profit in the process". Marissa Mayer was brought on as CEO so Yahoo could keep "from suffering this sort of fate".

Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries.

E-commerce and marketplaces. Gadgets. And for everyone else, advertising. These are the three ways people have figured out how to make money on the internet. If you're not making piles of dough off one of the three of these, you're a has-been. You're litter.

Or, it seems, you don't even exist.

Yet, hundreds of companies have figured out how to make money on the Internet by solving everyday business problems. They may not be innovative—they're usually built on advances made by others. They may not be flashy—rather than absorb attention, they disappear into the background so work can get done. They may not be "dynamic and wildly profitable"—they tend towards corporate stability because their customers require steadiness and reliability. But it's more than likely that, were their numbers made public (most such companies are like Populi—privately-held), this part of the internet economy would hold its own against the hotshot innovators whose raison d'être is to sell ads on gadgets you buy from e-commerce sites.