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Tips & Tricks
Tips & Tricks are short, quick pieces of advice on how to better use the Control Panel. Sometimes, we have small suggestions that don't fit neatly into any kind of help article. You'll find them here!
Mailing Tags
An often-unused, but rather helpful feature of mailings are free-form informational tags. For example, you can tag all of your fundraising mailings with the tag "fundraising" and then easily find them later via the Manage Mailings "Advanced Search". When creating a mailing, just type your labels into the "Tags" field under the "Mailing Name" section.
Shortcut Everything!
You can create a top-level shortcut to any page in your Control Panel. Shortcuts make a great way to shorten long, ugly URL's, especially those with lots of sourcing. For more info, see "What is a Shortcut?".
In Honor Of…
Contribution Forms can have the option for users to submit donations "In Honor Of" or "In Memory Of" others. When creating a fundraising page, just click the tab labeled "In Honor Of" and set the "Send Honoree Email" option to "Yes".
Action Chains
Action begets action. Never leave a user with nothing to do. Create "daisy chains" of action forms to keep your constituents engaged. Example: once a user signs a petition, send them to a tell-a-friend form asking their friends to sign the petition too.
Personalize Your Responses
A good way to connect with your constituents personally is to make use of personalization in your automated responses. Signups, invites, and contribution forms all have special variables available to customize automated responses based on what the user entered.
Tag Your Action Takers
A good way to target your action takers later is to make sure you always use the "Add to Constituent Group" option when creating action pages like signups, invites, or contribution forms.
Uploads and Cons Groups
A great way to keep track of multiple constituent uploads is to make sure you create a new constituent group specifically for your upload. You'll be glad you did later on.
Tax Receipts
If you're a non-profit organization, you can give your users the ability to download tax receipts after they donate. When editing a contribution form, under the "Amounts" tab, check the box labeled "Allow tax receipts?".
Keep Tabs on New Releases
Want to know what features are in the newest release of our software? Click the "Messages" link at the top of the Control Panel to get the latest.
Save Your Searches
A handy way to save time when running constituent searches is to save the complicated ones. You can also share your saved searches with other admins. To learn more, see "How do I save a constituent search?".