This release brings structural updates that make donor and financial workflows easier to navigate and manage within AwardSpring.
Donors have been elevated to top-level navigation, highlighting their central role in scholarship funding and advancement strategy. We’ve also enhanced donor communication templates with structured, year-specific giving history to support clearer, more polished outreach.
Together, these updates make it easier to navigate the relationships between Scholarships, Funds, and Donors and lay important groundwork for continued innovation in fund and donor management.
#1: Donors Now Available in Top-Level Navigation
“Donors” list now appears as a top-level item in the left-hand navigation for all clients, rather than being nested under Users.
Why we built it
Donors are central to scholarship funding and long-term advancement relationships. Elevating Donors in the navigation:
Makes donor records quicker and easier to access
Clearly distinguishes Donors from general system Users
Creates a more intuitive and organized platform structure
New navigation: Main Menu → Donors.
Donors are now accessible directly from the main navigation, making donor management more visible and easier to access. This update reinforces the importance of donors within scholarship funding workflows while streamlining how administrators view and manage fundraising efforts.
The Donors page displays a structured table of donor records, including:
Donor Name
Email Address
A search bar at the top of the page allows administrators to quickly locate donors by name or email, with results dynamically filtering as you type. The table also supports pagination, making it easy to navigate through larger donor lists while maintaining performance and usability.
In addition, administrators can now create a new donor directly from this page. Previously, donor creation followed the standard “Create New User” workflow. With this update, donors can be added from within the Donors area itself, streamlining the process and keeping donor-related actions in one dedicated location. Existing permissions and donor functionality remain unchanged.
#2: Enhanced Donor Giving History in Email & Receipt Templates
New template variables allow administrators to automatically insert a formatted, year-specific giving history into donor emails and receipts. Total donation variables have also been updated to reflect selected-year totals rather than year-to-date calculations.
Why we built it
Clear and accurate donor communication is essential for strong stewardship. These enhancements:
Automatically generate clean, bulleted giving summaries by year
Ensure donation totals align with actual gift records
Reduce manual effort when preparing outreach and acknowledgements
Support more transparent, professional donor communications
These improvements strengthen AwardSpring’s donor management experience while making stewardship workflows more efficient for your team.
These new variables are available under:
Emails → Templates → Donor Bulk Outreach Template → Variables
You will now see three year-based options:
Total Amount Donated, {{Current Year}}
Total Amount Donated, {{Current Year -1}}
Total Amount Donated, {{Current Year -2}}
Each of these variables pulls the donor’s giving history for the selected year and displays it in a clean, bulleted list format that includes Amount and Date for each gift. When inserted into a template, the system automatically generates the itemized list based on the recipient donor’s records in AwardSpring.
For example, if you are preparing year-end statements and want to include an itemized list of donations for the previous calendar year, you would select Total Amount Donated, {{Current Year -1}}. If the current year is 2026, the system will automatically pull and display all gifts made in 2025 for each donor when the email is sent. This eliminates manual compilation, ensures totals align with recorded gifts, and supports more transparent, professional donor communications.
These enhancements help advancement teams reduce administrative effort while strengthening stewardship through accurate, polished outreach.
#3 Reporting Enhancements for Greater Flexibility
We’ve introduced improvements to both Smart Reports and Stock Reports, including additional columns, expanded data points, and performance optimizations.
Why we built it
Reporting is essential for managing scholarship programs and ensuring accurate visibility into program data. These enhancements are:
Smart Reports: The Students + Scholarships report now includes the Donor List, Student Profile Notes, and Student Scholarship Notes.
Stock Reports: The Scholarship Details report now includes Donor List information, as well as two additional data points: Is Scholarship Hidden and Is Scholarship Active.
Stock Reports: The Reviewer Scores Detail by Group report now includes score details when the Multi-Panel Review feature is enabled.
These updates reflect our continued investment in making reporting more powerful and practical for your team.
Other Platform Improvements
Departments Relocated: The Departments tab has moved from the Users area to Settings → Scholarships → Department, aligning it more logically with scholarship configuration.
Updated User Profile Layouts: Student, Reviewer, and Admin profiles have been refreshed for greater consistency with the updated Donor Profile experience and overall UI design.
Improved Navigation: In several areas, we’ve added “Open in new tab” actions for select objects (such as Scholarship names) to make multi-tasking and navigation easier.
Renewable Response Visibility Fix: Resolved an issue where selected renewable responses were not displaying correctly for Donors.
Smart Reports Filter Consistency: Downloaded Smart Reports now apply the configured filters used in the on-screen view, ensuring greater accuracy and consistency between views.
AI Detection Score Consistency Fix: Resolved an issue where the AI Detection Score could appear inconsistent for the same student and question across different areas of the interface.