What's New (April 20)

Congregant Portal and MobileMission
The Congregant Portal and an updated version of the MobileMission app are now available to all churches with Blackbaud Church Management. The Congregant Portal allows congregants to manage their giving, payment, and profile information, while MobileMission extends these capabilities to a mobile-native app.

With the portal and app, congregants can:

• Give one-time or scheduled gifts using a debit or credit card or drafted from a bank account.

• Save payment methods — or use ApplePay or Click to Pay — to avoid entering their payment information each time they give.

• View their lifetime history of giving, including cash or checks in collection envelopes.

• Update their name and contact info to keep the church office up-to-date.

• Small group leaders can email or text their group’s participants, take attendance, and view details about past and upcoming meetings (MobileMission only).

Before congregants can use the app or portal, an admin must configure settings in Blackbaud Church Management, such as giving options, confirmation emails, and support contact information. After you roll out the app and portal to your congregation, admins can manage user account access and troubleshoot sign-up issues. They can also manage updates to name and contact information submitted by users.

For a quick overview of the Congregant Portal and MobileMission, check out the Introduction to Congregant Portal and Mobile Mission video. For more information about how to set up the portal and app and roll them out to your church, see Get Started With Congregant Portal and Get Started With MobileMission.

Note: If your church already uses MobileMission or the Congregant Portal, please review your current settings in Tools, Settings, Congregant experience and Control Panel, Security to make sure they meet your current needs. For example, to provide a smoother onboarding experience for congregants, verify that you entered support contact information. Contact information appears in both the portal and app in areas where users may need help.

Church membership
To give you a better picture of a person’s engagement with your church across ministries and programs, you can now view the first and last dates they visited based on attendance information. On a congregant’s record, under Church membership, attendance from Small groups, Events, and Classes automatically populates the oldest and most recent dates in the First visit and Last visit fields. Previously, you could only manually track a congregant’s first and last visit from their record.

Note: If necessary, you can still manually update when a person visited if you capture the dates outside of Blackbaud Church Management



You can also use this information when you create lists of constituents, such as to identify congregants who stopped attending in the past few months or track when new visitors start attending. From Lists, Constituents, select Filters or Columns , and then choose Date of first visit or Date of last visit under Constituent basics.

Recurring gifts
To help you recapture revenue that may have otherwise been lost, you can now manually retry failed recurring gift payments.

When a recurring gift payment fails to process — and after all automatic retry attempts are unsuccessful — a $0.00 payment record appears in the donor's history. From the record, under Comments, you can view the reason for the failure and determine how to address it. For example, if the donor's credit card expired, amend the recurring gift to update its payment information.

After you address the reason for the failure, retry the payment from its record. At the top of the record, from the alert that appears, select Retry payment now .

• If the retry attempt succeeds, the payment record updates to reflect the new payment details.

• If the retry attempt fails, the comments update to show the most recent failure details.

For more information, see Retry Failed Recurring Gift Payments.

Giving statements
To send giving statements, you now select the donors from a new or existing constituent list. This gives you greater filtering power because you have access to all the filters in Lists, Constituents. For example, if you only want to send giving statements to donors who gave to a specific fund, you can create a constituent list for those donors, save it, then access it from Gifts, Giving statements.

From Gifts, Giving statements, search for an existing constituent list, select a date range, and then select Apply filters. Or to create a new list, select Cancel, Build a new list, and then create a new list with all the filters you want



After you select a constituent list under Giving statements, you can define the date range for the giving statements. This lets you to use the same constituent list year after year (or month after month for those of you sending statements more frequently). For more information, see Giving Statements Filters.