Do you LOVE CSVs?

Well... importing a CSV into Disciple.Tools just got better.

Introducing: Contact Duplicate Checking!

I'll set the stage. I just imported 1000 contacts with email address into Disciple.Tools. Yay!

But wait... I forgot that I also wanted to import the phone number column as well. Ok, now let me DELETE the 1000 contacts and start again.

But wait! What's this?

I can upload the CSV again and let Disciple.Tools find the contact by the email address and update it instead of creating a new one! While I'm at it, I'll add a tags column to the CSV and a 'import_2023_05_01' tag to all the contacts so I can refer back to them if needed.

And here are some of the previous updates

Geolocate Addresses

If you have a Mapbox or Google mapping key installed,

Then we can add a few addresses to our CSV and have Discple.Tools geocode them as they come in. One advantage is letting us show the records on maps in the Metrics section.

Disciple.Tools has partnered with Crimson to provide a managed hosting option to our users. Crimson provides business-grade managed hosting solutions to organizations large and small while utilizing the fastest and most secure technology available.  Crimson also supports the mission of Disciple.Tools and has dedicated their company to directly influencing the discipleship movement across the globe.

Services & Features

• Data housed in US Servers
• Daily backups
• 99.9% Uptime guarantee
• Single Instance (inside a network), Single Site or Multi-site options.
• Option for a custom domain name (single site & multi-site)
• SSL Security Certificate – Encryption in transmission 
• Assistance with site customization (Not execution of customization)
• Tech support

Pricing

Disciple Tools Starter – $20 USD Monthly

A single instance inside of a network. No option for custom domain name or 3rd party plugins.

Disciple Tools Standard – $25 USD Monthly

A standalone site with the option for a custom domain name, 3rd party plugins. Can be upgraded to a multi-site (network) platform in the future.

Disciple Tools Organization – $50 USD Monthly

A network platform with multiple connected sites (up to 20) – allows for transfering of contacts and administrator oversight for all connected sites. Option for custom domain name, administrator control of 3rd party plugins for all sites.

Disciple Tools Enterprise  – $100 USD Monthly

Up to 50 network sites. Each site beyond 50 is an additional $2.00 USD per month.

Next Steps

Visit https://crimsonpowered.com/disciple-tools-hosting/ to set up your account. Once you make your purchase, sites are set up within 24 hrs.

Attention all Disciple.Tools users!

We are happy to announce the release of our new survey collection and reporting plugin.

This tool helps ministries collect and present the activity of their team members, enabling you to track both lead and lag metrics. With regular collection from the field, you’ll get better data and trends than sporadic and infrequent collection.

This plugin gives each team member their own form to report their activity, and automatically sends them a link to the form every week. You’ll be able to see a summary of each member’s activity and give each member a summary of their activity on their dashboard.

Additionally, this plugin allows you to work and celebrate together with the combined metrics summary on the global dashboard.

We encourage you to check out the documentation for more information on how to set up the plugin, add team members, view and customize the form, and auto-send email reminders. We welcome your contributions and ideas in the Issues and Discussions sections of the GitHub repository.

Thanks for using Disciple.Tools, and we hope you enjoy this new feature!

Thank you Team Expansion for funding a portion of the development! We invite you to give if you are interested in contributing towards this plugin or supporting the creation of more like it.

Curious about Magic Links? Heard about them before?

A magic link might look like this:

Clicking the link will open a browser page with anything from a form to complex application.

It might look like this:

The cool part: Magic links give the user a quick and secure way to interact with a simplified view without having to log in.

Read more about magic links here: Magic Links Intro

Magic Link Plugin

We’ve created a way for you to build your own magic like the Contact Info one above.

You can find it in the Magic Link Sender Plugin under the Extensions (D.T) > Magic Links > Templates tab.

Templates

Build a new template and select the wanted fields:

For more see the Magic Link Templates Docs.

Scheduling

Want to automatically send your magic link out to users or contacts on a regular basis? That is also possible!

See how to set up scheduling: Magic Link Scheduling Docs

Questions or Ideas?

Join the discussion here: https://github.com/DiscipleTools/disciple-tools-bulk-magic-link-sender/discussions

Prayer Campaigns v2

We are happy to announce that in this new version the Prayer Campaigns plugin is ready for Ramadan 2023 and Ongoing Prayer Campaigns.

Ongoing prayer campaigns

We could already create prayer campaigns for fixed time periods (like Ramadan). But more than a month wasn't ideal.
With v2 we have introduced "ongoing" prayer campaigns. Set a start date, no end end, and see how many people we can mobilize to pray.
Prayer "warriors" will be able to sign up for 3 months and then have the opportunity to extend and keep on praying.

Ramadan 2023

We'd like to take this opportunity to invite you to join in praying and mobilizing prayer for the Muslim world during Ramadan in 2023.

To mobilize 27/4 prayer for the people or place God has put on your heart the process involves:

1. Signing up on https://campaigns.pray4movement.org
2. Customizing your page
3. Inviting your network to pray

See https://pray4movement.org/ramadan-champions-2023/ for more details or join one of the existing networks here: https://pray4movement.org/ramadan-2023/

In October, we held the first ever Disciple.Tools Summit. It was a great experimental gathering that we intend to repeat in the future. We want to share what happened, what the community thought about it and invite you into the conversation. Sign up to be notified about future events at Disciple.Tools/summit.

We’ve captured all the notes from the key breakout sessions and hope to make them public soon. We used a framework of discussing the current state of a given topic and what is good about it. We then continued into a discussion around what is wrong, missing or confusing. Conversations that led us to several “We must” statements for each topic, which will help lead the community forward.

Starting in 2023, we plan to hold regular community calls to demo new features and use cases.

Avoid duplicates on form submittion

We've added a new option to reduce the number of duplicate contacts in your D.T instance.

Normally, when a contact submits their email and/or phone number a new contact record is created in Disciple.Tools. Now when the form is submitted we have the option to check if that email or phone number already exists in the system. If no matches are found, it creates the contact record as usual. If it finds the email or phone number, then it updates the existing contact record instead and adds the submitted info.

The form submittion will @mention the assigned to all record the form contents:

• More Robust Facebook Sync using crons
• Sync works on more setups
• Faster contact creation
• Using less resources

New Feature

Use shortcodes to display your webform on your public facing webside.

If you have a public facing wordpress website and have the webform plugin installed and set up (see Instructions)

You can then use the provided shortcode on any of your pages instead of the iframe.

Displays:

Attributes

• id: required
• button_only: A boolean (true/false) attribute. If "true", only a button will be displayed and it will link to the webform on its own page
• campaigns: Tags that will be passed on to the "Campaigns" field on the new D.T contact

See Campaigns docs form more information on how to use the campaigns feature

Chromium based browsers now come with an experimental Dark-Mode feature for every site one visits. This also applies to Disciple.Tools and if you want to make your dashboard look high-tech, this is your chance.

In order to enable Dark-Mode, follow these steps:

1. In a Chromium based browser such as Chrome, Brave, etc. write this in the address bar:
   chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark
2. In the dropdown, select one of the Enabled options
3. Relaunch the browser

There are several variants. No need to click them all, you can see them below!

Default

Enabled

Enabled with simple HSL-based inversion

Enabled with simple CIELAB-based inversion

Enabled with simple RGB-based inversion

Enabled with selective image inversion

Enabled with selective inversion of non-image elements

Enabled with selective inversion of everything

Remember you can always opt-out by setting the dar-mode option back to Default.