September Update!
Now that it’s been a couple months since the launch of Clover Donations, we thought it would be good to give you all a quick update on all that’s happening around our neck of the woods. August shaped up to be a lot busier than expected for us. It’s funny that even after all the launches we’ve done in the past four years, we still get caught off-guard by how much work we have to do after the new product or feature goes live! The combination of little fixes, streamlining processes, and working on new features can give us a never-ending amount of work to be done. But that’s OK! We’re so thankful to work on projects we love and believe in.
But all that to say, here is a quick update of what we’ve been working on over these last couple of months:
Clover Donations
After launching Clover Donations at the end of June, we’ve had an amazing response. We now have more churches and non-profits using Clover Donations than we thought we’d have in the entire first year, and you all have used Clover Donations to take in over a million dollars for your organizations! We’re so happy to be able to play a part in this, and hope that we continue to help more and more churches and non-profits in the near future.
In our next phase of Clover Donations, we’re going to be simplifying the application process as well as looking at all the requested features to determine what’s going to be a natural fit for our product. We’ve had some great comments and suggestions, so keep them coming!
To our customers in Canada… Bad news. We’ve looked into what it would take to set up Clover Donations over the border, and have come to the realization that it’s going to be nearly impossible over this next season. The combination of finding a trusted merchant services partner, the huge amount of system development internally to actually handle a different currency, and the fact that the electronic banking system is totally different has forced us to shelve our plans to offer our product in Canada for the time being. We’re so sorry, guys! If it’s any consolation, we’re pretty optimistic that as this crazy, archaic banking and credit card industry continues to evolve, more doors will open.
New Hires at Clover
Although we are still in the hunt for amazing developers, we have hired a couple new members to our team. Our new Product Manager, Eric, came on board last week and we couldn’t be happier. He’s already creating more efficient and strategic ways to create great products for you. We also hired Alexandra as our new Accounts Manager. Her role is to develop and take care of all of our new and ongoing relationships with denominations, large groups, and partnerships, as well as connecting with prospective customers and affiliates. We’re super pumped about having her on board, and think that she’s going to be great for current and future members of the Clover family!
Thanks for all the applications and interest in being a part of our team here. We had some awesomely talented people apply, and we’re bummed we couldn’t hire everyone! But if there are still any awesome developers out there, please hit us up at jobs@cloversites.com.
Clover in HTML5
Now that we have launched Clover Donations in HTML5, I know a bunch of you are looking forward to an update about Clover Sites in HTML5. As of now, we are still in the planning and design phase of the project. As we progress, we’re going to be looking for ways to keep you updated. We’ve been batting around the idea of creating a development blog about the project so you will be able to follow our work internally if you’d like. We’re planning on some pretty revolutionary stuff, and we would love your input and advice as we go along… So stayed tuned for more updates in the future!
That’s it for now. Things have stayed pretty busy around here, which we tend to like. Thanks for reading and for being part of our Clover family!
Posted on September 11th, 2012 under Company News by Jim with 18 comments.
18 Comments
Our church and staff are so grateful for your company and for you all! Donations has been such a great investment and has helped out our accounts manager immeasurably (well, actually very measurably thanks to the Donation Center, but you know what I mean).
We still love our Clover site as well! It would be awesome to have some of the same “advanced” tools in the Sites that are in the Donations designer. Crossing our fingers!
Again, thank you guys so much for all you do!
Very disappointing news on cloverdonations here in Canada!
We agree with you Steve! We hope something changes down the road.
An idea that would help the average / medium size church that can’t hire full time graphic designers would be to have an application built in so that you can add nice text over photo’s that you use for adverts etc. (Like Photoshop for simple people).
A lot of great clover sites have nice text and upcoming event info over their photo images.
This would be incredible if possible. It would make things fast if you have a quick announcement to make that you want to look great in image format.
THANKS!
Hey Mike,
Thanks for the suggestion. I wonder if you’ve noticed that a few of our designs offer this? Not as much like Photoshop as you might like, but we do have a handful of designs that allow for text over an image in the layout options. Feel free to call or email us for more information!
LOVE Clover! Clover nation! We did sign up for Clover but mainly waiting to see the following features added before large-scale use: 1) the user doing their own management of their own account , 1 – the user accessing and changing their own giving info (or see/print their giving history) at any time on their own (not relying on the admin to do it for them; this helps privacy and security for the user), 2 – being able to give to multiple funds under one-time gift amount at one time on one page (not redoing it for every fund for non-repeating givers), 3) the system sending an email to the admin of the amount and giver right after it is submitted/cleared (not just the giver – huge help for accounting purposes). All else of Clover Donations is phenomenal! Can;t wait till its ready!
Hey Mike,
I saw your comment and thought I’d reply. I’m the graphic design guy for our site. This might sound silly but I do all our graphics using Microsoft Powerpoint. After making the slide I export it as a jpg. I want Photoshop but don’t have it right now. If you are a mac person w/o photoshop I’m sure macs application similar to powerpoint would function just as well. Anyway, if you look at our site (www.zionfellowship.net) I think you’ll find that some pretty adequate graphics can be made using this technique.
Mike, you can do that in both powerpoint and in keynote (if you use mac), just import picture to slide, then put a text box over it, put in your text, then in power point it says under your file menu “save as pictures’…in keynote under file it says “export” then you select the picture icon….and there you have it…photos with text…i
I am so excited for the switch to HTML!
I just took over as the web guy for our radio station which uses Clover and it broke my heart when I realized that we couldn’t embed any coding on the pages.
If you are looking for a site to be your beta tester, drop me a line…
Sad to hear about donations not being available in Canada. We have been waiting awhile for it.
We are loving Clover Donations, but it would be very helpful if our church members could create their own accounts and actually be able to adjust their recurring donations. As it is now, they have to ask us to change their recurring donations amount and/or frequency and that can lead to awkward discussions.
We also have a few people that would like the ability to setup their donations with other options than are available (i.e. twice a month instead of every two weeks, etc.)
Thanks for this great product!
I was very disappointed when I called Clover today and found out that Clover does not support any of Church Community Builder’s (CCB) web integration tools. They have the source code already prepared to cut and paste so that we can have CCB calendar items automatically push to our public web calendar…except that Clover doesn’t support any third party additional features. That’s not only a bummer, it’s cause to look elsewhere. I hope you will consider third party web feature integration into your HTML5 upgrade!
With Clover Donations not yet (but hopefully sometime soon) available in Canada, what would your (Clover) best suggestion be for doing on-line donations north of the border – that is until Clover donations is available here
?
And Mike, in terms of taking a JPEG and adding text, we have found that Picasa is a lot of fun to work with! And it’s free!
Hey Jeff,
Not really sure what to suggest. If you find something good though, let us know. We’re happy to share it with our Canadian customers!
Hey Dave, Hey Jon,
If you can hang in there, this will most likely be a feature when we move to HTML5. We’re working on it and will keep you posted!
Hey Peter,
You may be hearing more about this very soon:) Keep your eyes on the blog!
I’m just wondering. When you guys switch to HTML5, will you offer designs that do not use scrolling text boxes? We love the service and the designs, I just not the biggest fan of the text boxes.
Thanks for all you do and Clover Donations has been huge for our church!
@Scott – yes! This is definitely a part of the plan. Thanks for the kind words! We just posted an update about Clover Sites here – be sure to check it out!