We're recently added monthly donation functionality for organizations with premier or higher Paypal accounts.  To turn this feature on, organization must create at least one monthly donation tier.  To create a tier:

1. Log into beex.org
2. Edit your organization's profile
3. Go to the bottom of the page, fill out the amount you'd like to charge for monthly donation, the name of that donation level and click add.
4. Click submit.

All subscriptions are for 12 months and run entirely through the Paypal system, so we don't handle the money or take any fees.  Your organization will receive alerts from Paypal when people begin their subscription and every month as each transaction is processed.  These emails contain the contact information of each 'subscriber'.  Subscribers will also be displayed on your organizations profile page in the 'supporters' area.  People can cancel their subscriptions through their Paypal accounts.

We're going to develop more functionality around this monthly donation feature so please tell us what you'd like us to add in the comments section of this blog post or through the 'feedback' tab on beex.org.

Good luck recruiting monthly donors!

The September update is live.  Here's some of the new stuff.

• Complete review of all copy.  Now more things make sense.  Yay!
• Users can now administer organizations without signing in separately.  This change was long overdue.
• Search now includes organizations as well as users, challenges and clusters.
• We've got three new widgets.

Let's talk about the widgets

First off, they're all color customizable.  Our sizes are currently fixed, but they should have dynamic widths in the next two weeks.

Widget #1: Searchable Cluster Widget

This widget displays all the challenges within a cluster and provides a search field so you can easily find specific challenges by their title or the challenger's name.

Widget #2: What Will You Do?

This widget has a blank "I will ________" statement.  When a user fills it out, it brings them to a challenge page with the 'I will' and benefitting organization already filled out.

Widget #3: How People are Supporting Us

This widget displays all the challenges and clusters benefitting a specific organization.

For next month...

• Tiered organization profiles so you don't have to do research to figure out who's tax-deductible and who isn't.
• Cleaner design for personal and organization profiles.
• Widgets for individual challenges and clusters.
• Image cropping.
• Subscription based funding.
• Deeper cluster management functionality.

The new BEEx was launched (very quietly) last month.  New design, more robust functionality and more user friendly features topped the list of improvements.  Now that the last remaining bugs seem to be squashed, we can get to the fun part: adding features and functionality.  As we get more comfortable with our development process, we plan to incorporate you more deeply into the fabric of our technology planning, but for now, we'll just write posts about it.

BEEx uses a 2 week scrum development process.  Scrum is simple: we sit around a table listing features we'd like to add and rating them on a 1-3 scale of importance.  Then the technology team rates each task on a 1-3 scale of difficulty.  The most important, easiest to do stuff gets done first and the least important most difficult stuff gets done last.  Every two weeks we review how we did.  After working with a myriad of complex development systems, this is the only one that has worked for us.  Everything can be managed on a spreadsheet.  Go figure...

Anyway, here's a list of items that we'll be tackling over the next two weeks:

• Updating nonprofit registration copy in response to confused user feedback
• Add picture cropping functionality
• Create user class who administer organization profiles
• Incorporate cause tag selector for organizations and people
• Create organization classes for 501.c.3 nonprofits and other organizations
• Add nonprofits into search results
• Enable people to subscribe to organizations
• More sophisticated organization selector mechanism
• Our first widgets

That's a lot of stuff to tackle.

We'll be back at you in two weeks with an update on how we did and what's up for the next cycle.