September 2016: Improved Security and Scheduling

This month's release is going to introduce new features and redesigns that will provide a better and more secure online giving experience, and ease your Sunday morning stress with improved volunteer management tools. This upcoming Thursday, September 8, we'll be rolling out these exciting new changes — and we think you're going to love them.

SCHEDULING

As a church leader you have the unique opportunity to encourage, influence, and empower those who step into a serving role. That’s why we’re excited to offer our updated scheduling tool that can help you stay organized and communicate effectively with your volunteers and leadership teams. We want to make it easy for your church to continue growing and being effective in ministry.

IMPROVED SECURITY IN GIVING

This release also includes an updated financial payment system to further ensure that you and your givers' account numbers and financial information are protected and safe.  While our giving system, as you currently experience it, is truly secure, we believe the steps we are taking now will enable us to provide an even more secure giving experience for you and your givers well into the future. 

What has changed?

Any time you need to enter an account number (debit/credit card or checking account), you will enter the new payment system.  Your initial gift setup (logged in and logged out) will look the same, but prior to entering the account number, you will be transitioned to a new page in the payment system.  This payment system page will hide all menu navigation, as it is a standalone secure page for you to submit your gift or payment.  After you've submitted your payment, you will be returned to the familiar confirmation page.

The same change applies with form payments. After you complete your form, if it requires payment, you will be moved to the payment system to enter your account information and submit the form. If you are a Form Admin, you will see all of your same payment options within the payment system (e.g., Pay Later, Paid by Cash, Paid by Check, etc.). After submitting the form, you will be directed to your form's confirmation page.

An additional benefit of updating the security of these pages is we were able to put in better validation for your information. Before, when you entered in your credit/debit card number, our system would not verify it was a valid number until you tried to submit your payment. Now, the system will validate your phone number and your debit/credit card or ACH information in real time to verify you have entered the right number of characters to be a valid number. We hope this improvement will make the giving experience even better for your givers.

Why this change?

We take data security very seriously. The standalone secure page to enter payment information has become an industry standard when accepting account numbers, and we found it important to do the same for the best protection of your givers' information. This change will help move our company to a higher level of PCI Compliance, allowing greater peace of mind for you and your givers.

MAINTENANCE

API

• Individual_profile_from_login_password: The individual_profile_from_login_password API Service now uses the "POST" method instead of the "GET" method. You will need to update your integrations to pass the parameters via HTTP POST for this API Service.
•  Individual_id_from_login_password: The individual_id_from_login_password API Service now uses the "POST" method instead of the "GET" method. You will need to update your integrations to pass the parameters via HTTP POST for this API Service.
• Set_individual_credentials: The set_individual_credentials API Service now uses the "POST" method instead of the "GET" method. You will need to update your integrations to pass the parameters via HTTP POST for this API Service. 

Communication Settings

• When a user's 'Future Group Defaults' communication settings for text message are changed so the user always gets text messages from group leaders (the dropdown shows 'Send to me'), the user's text message settings were not being updated to get texts when the user was added to a new group.  We fixed this so that when the 'Send to me' option is selected in the 'Future Group Defaults' section for text messages, the user's text message settings are updated to get messages when the user is added to a new group.

Events

• When subscribing to a calendar (My Calendar, Campus-wide, etc.), some repeating events were not showing correctly. We've fixed the .ics feed to ensure these are coming through to your calendar (Google calendar, iCal, etc.) properly.

Metrics

• The "show all campuses" checkbox was not always narrowing the metrics down to the current campus context when unchecked. We now ensure that when unchecked, it adjusts the data to only reflect the current campus.