More ways for donors to give, a dashboard built around you, and one login per person. This release adds PayPal, Venmo, digital wallets and bank account gifts to your payment pages, a customizable Scholarships dashboard, one account for people who wear several hats, and SpringIQ CoPilot and AI tools that can make the changes you approve.

Donors can now give with the payment methods they use every day, in a few taps on their phone.

New ways to pay

- PayPal and Venmo > one-time or monthly gifts.

- Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link > one tap on phones and saved browsers.

- US bank account > donors give straight from their bank, with a lower processing fee than card. If a bank returns a gift, the donor gets an email letting them know.

"Help cover the fee" now uses the right rate for the method the donor picks.
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Set it up

1. Contact your Customer Success Manager to turn on the new payment methods for your school.

2. To accept PayPal and Venmo, go to Settings > Payments and connect your school's PayPal business account.

3. Use Payment Methods settings to turn each method on or off.

Also new on your payment pages

- Embed your giving page: copy an embed code and place your giving page right on your own website.

- Choose your default page: if you have several giving pages, pick the one AwardSpring links donors to, for example from "Give again" buttons.

- See how every gift was paid: each online gift in Giving Records shows card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, PayPal, Venmo or bank account.

- Split gifts name every fund: Giving Records, receipt emails, thank-you letters and tax receipts list each fund and amount. Split gifts aren't offered on monthly gifts.

- PayPal refunds and disputes show on the gift and come out of your totals.

Every admin can now arrange the Scholarships dashboard around the numbers they watch most.

Customize your dashboard

Click Customize in the dashboard's title row, then:

- Remove > take off the widgets you don't use.

- Add > pick widgets from the catalog.

- Arrange > drag widgets into order with your mouse or keyboard, and choose a size for each.

- Set options > choose a period or other settings for each widget. Your options save with your layout.

Click Save to keep your changes, or Reset to default to bring back the standard layout at any time.

What to expect

- Your layout is yours alone and follows you every time you sign in.

- On a tablet, your saved layout shows in two columns. Customizing works on a desktop.

- For now, the customizable dashboard covers the Scholarships view, and the catalog holds the dashboard cards you already know. We plan to add more widgets and views in a future release.

- Prefer the classic dashboard? You can still choose it for yourself.

A student who also reviews, a reviewer who also gives, a graduate who becomes a donor: these are one person, and AwardSpring now treats them that way.

Sign in once, pick a role

A person with two or more roles sees a role choice page when they sign in, and a Switch role option in their account menu. Their permissions follow the role they picked.

No one decides their own application

Whatever role someone signs in with, they can't review, score, award or deny their own application.

Archive instead of delete

- Archive account and Restore account are in the profile's more-actions menu. You can also archive a single role, for example a former reviewer who is still a donor.

- Nothing is deleted. Archived accounts are left out of email and message audiences, reviewer, admin and donor pickers, matching, imports and reports. Reports offer Include archived when you need them.

- An archived student can't apply.

Merge duplicates

Pick two student accounts, choose the one to keep, preview what will move, and resolve any conflicts before the merge completes. Duplicate donor records merge the same way.

Emails that find the right person

- Keep secondary emails on an account, so the next gift or import finds the right person.

- When an email belongs to an archived account, you can give it to a new person without touching the old account's history.

- When a new role arrives for an email that already has an account, AwardSpring adds the role to that account instead of creating a copy.

Bulk updates that used to take a week of clicking can now take one sentence and one confirmation.

Two ways in

- SpringIQ CoPilot > the SpringIQ chat built into AwardSpring. Available on the Enterprise plan.

- MCP Access > connect the AI tool your school already uses, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to AwardSpring. Included with Enterprise, and available as an add-on.

What it can do

Describe the change in plain words, for example "update the payout date in all 400 scholarship descriptions." It can:

- create and update donors and gifts in bulk

- set up donor and gift custom fields

- change scholarship details, wording and qualifications across many scholarships

- build application questions and add before-applying questions across scholarships

- manage people and departments

- act on a donor question's answer, for example "add a follow-up task for every donor in that list"

You stay in control

- Every change is shown in full first, and nothing happens until you say yes. A proposed change waits 15 minutes, then expires.

- It only sees and changes what you could change on AwardSpring's own pages. Your permissions and department limits still apply.

- Every change is recorded in the record's history under the person who approved it.

- Making changes is turned on separately for each school. To turn it on, contact your Customer Success Manager.

- Conditional Additional Requirements: an Additional Requirements question can appear only when an earlier answer calls for it.

- Open applications at a set time: choose the time of day an application period opens and closes, not just the date.

- Recommendation reminders: recommenders with an outstanding request get reminder emails on a schedule.

- Special Funds applicants from a list: choose applicants from a student list instead of one at a time, or point a scholarship at a student group that stays up to date.

- Explain Special Funds codes: students see what an access code is for, and you can tell them how to get one.

- Gifts sent to your accounting system: schools that connect QuickBooks Online or Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT can have gifts sent automatically. PayPal and Venmo refunds are reversed there too.

- Gift IDs on receipts: every gift has a unique ID you can show on receipts. Payment IDs can appear in gift and ticket emails, and you can search payments by that ID.

- Processing fees on the gift: each gift records its own processing fee, instead of a separate fee row.

- Log a gift from Giving Records: Add Gift, Pledge and Recurring now open the same "Log a ..." dialog you use on a donor's Activity tab, with a donor search.

- Record IDs in reports: scholarships, students and funds have an ID you can see and report on.

- Audit History for awarding: see who disbursed an award, who published or hid a scholarship, and who or what closed a follow-up.

- Reviewers in Lists & Segments: build a list of reviewers for an award cycle and email them.

- Award and denial messages are separate permissions: decide who can send award messages and who can send denials.

- Read-only scholarship Details: give an admin view-only access to a scholarship's Details.

- Safer award and denial sends: the Notify tab shows exactly who will get which message before anything is sent, so an awarded student won't get a denial and no one gets the same message twice.

- Award & Deny: see when each response was last updated, and open the full application in a new tab again.

- Create a review group faster: start a new review group from a one-field popup instead of an empty Details page.

- Scholarships list filters: filter by department and publish status, and your search and filters stay put when you come back from a scholarship.

- Bulk File Download: tick several questions from one search without the list resetting.

- Hide Apply buttons: a setting removes Apply buttons from scholarship listings, for schools where students misread them.

- Texting consent: a Super Admin confirms consent once before your school can text anyone who isn't an opted-in student.

- Reorder lists by keyboard: every list you can reorder by dragging now works with a keyboard too.

- Refreshed Settings: every Settings page uses the new layout, with one Save and Cancel, including Appearance, External Requests and Review Configuration.

- Newsletter editor on its own page: the newsletter template editor opens as a full page instead of a window over the list.

- Move the support chat: drag the support chat window out of the way.

- Pages you don't have explain themselves: instead of sending you back to the dashboard.

- Consistent side panels and filters: record panels, filter screens and expanding sections look and work the same everywhere.

- Fixed: Deleting an award cycle works when it copied global score cards from an earlier cycle.

- Fixed: Award cycle dates and times display correctly across daylight saving time changes.

- Fixed: Opening a scholarship's Details page no longer flags its application dates as errors.

- Fixed: A semicolon in "Emails to notify" no longer stops a scholarship from saving.

- Fixed: An empty award cycle shows the right scholarship count, and Create New Scholarship is unavailable until an award cycle exists.

- Fixed: Bulk copying scholarships uses the new cycle's review group and rubric, and no longer drops groups of 10 when the new cycle has no payment dates.

- Fixed: Entering zero for the number of payments in a bulk scholarship update no longer stops the details from saving.

- Fixed: A GPA qualification can't be set to a near-zero value that blocked other qualifications from saving.

- Fixed: You can deactivate a question after editing an option that has a follow-up question.

- Fixed: Students get the "Application Received" email even if a student import ran before they clicked Submit.

- Fixed: Schools on the Now plan no longer see Additional Requirements, Notify Awardees and Tasks on the Scholarships pages.

- Fixed: A student's profile shows the after-awarding Additional Requirements section, and groups Additional Requirements questions under their own headings.

- Fixed: Empty auto-filled answers on a student's application show blank, instead of the question type.

- Fixed: Students who register on your prospective student page are saved as prospective students, even after correcting an error on the form.

- Fixed: Privacy policy links can be longer than 100 characters.

- Fixed: Reviewer assignment settings that said "saved" but went back to their old values now save.

- Fixed: Duplicate reviewer entries no longer stop a review from being marked Completed.

- Fixed: The reviewer scoring page shows instructional text formatted, instead of raw code.

- Fixed: A multi-panel review group copied to a new cycle and then disabled no longer keeps hidden score cards.

- Fixed: Smart Reports load faster, instead of re-running the search every 50 rows.

- Fixed: The Student Answers report runs at schools with very long question lists.

- Fixed: The Average Application Score column shows the score for the right scholarship.

- Fixed: Imports no longer break the conditional questions on applications students are still working on.

- Fixed: Imported answers match active answer options, not inactive ones with the same name.

- Fixed: Imported GPAs keep all their decimal places, like GPAs typed in by hand.

- Fixed: Leading spaces are trimmed from imported profile fields.

- Fixed: Negative amounts in currency or accounting format import correctly.

- Fixed: Importing an account whose email already belongs to another account is handled cleanly.

- Fixed: The import summary shows exception details after you resolve a merge.

- Fixed: Gift and pledge imports give a clear message when a constituent ID isn't found.

- Fixed: Donor external IDs no longer require Donor Enrichment.

- Fixed: Compose highlights invalid email addresses, including a pasted column header, instead of sending to them.

- Fixed: Pasting a long list of recipients, or a name, into the To field shows every recipient correctly.

- Fixed: Newsletters with large images save and send.

- Fixed: Scheduled emails show their merge fields filled in on each person's Activity.

- Fixed: Discarding changes to a scheduled email clears them, and long subject lines shorten neatly.

- Fixed: Text message notifications no longer fail with an occasional processing error.

- Fixed: Saving a blank texting opt-in message shows you the default text it will use.

- Fixed: A payment page gift whose payment fails no longer appears as paid on the Activity tab, Giving Records or the donor wall.

- Fixed: In-kind gifts with a $0.00 amount save.

- Fixed: Editing a gift in Giving Records keeps its Acknowledged mark.

- Fixed: Super Admins can be picked as a donor's Relationship Manager.

- Fixed: You can remove a donor's primary email, phone or address, not only replace it.

- Fixed: The donor profile Notes section is back.

- Fixed: The date of birth calendar shows the right number of days in each month.

- Fixed: PowerPoint files can be uploaded to a donor's documents.

- Fixed: Deleting a tagged person keeps the relationship on the other donor as plain text.

- Fixed: The "Generate gifts" checkbox on a new recurring gift starts unchecked, instead of copying your last choice.

- Fixed: Emails sent from Compose look the same as other logged emails on a donor's Activity, and keep their header when you scroll.

- Fixed: Activity dates accept only a four-digit year, and an activity's subject can't be cleared after it's saved.

- Fixed: The Impersonate User option stays in a donor's menu after you switch tabs.

- Fixed: The award paid out webhook sends the amount paid out, not the full award.

- Fixed: You can delete admins who uploaded files, saved a Scholarships list filter, or received a "ready for an award decision" notification.

- Fixed: Super Admins and department admins are no longer refused at the school sign-in page with "Missing student ID."

- Fixed: At schools with single sign-on, staff can find password sign-in more easily.

- Fixed: The Segments link is back in the People menu on the classic dashboard.

- Fixed: The collapsed left menu shows each item's name when you hover over its icon.

- Fixed: The Award & Deny menu toggle is back in its usual spot.

- Fixed: Image previews keep their shape instead of stretching to fit the window.