New in Populi: recurring donations and payments!

It works with both credit cards and echecks processed through Stripe. To get started, just set up a Stripe payment gateway in Financial > Settings and check off the steps listed in this article.

After enabling recurring donations and payments, donors and payers will be able to select whether to make a one-time or recurring monthly payment. To help you keep track of recurring payments, the new Recurring reports in Billing and Donations show you all the details, including amounts, timeframes, and payment methods. You can also manage a person's recurring payments on their Profile > Financial page.

Stripe makes it possible

We're really excited about what Stripe integration lets us offer our customers: easy signup, recurring payments, and better, more straightforward pricing than the other processors—2.9% + 30 cents for credit cards, 0.5% + 25 cents for eChecks. To get the most out of online payments in Populi, go to Financial > Settings > Payment Gateways and set up a Stripe account. It's easy to sign up and easy to try it out!

Update: This article was published back in 2015 and some of the pricing details may be out of date by the time you read it. For complete pricing details for Stripe, we refer you to their own pricing page!

We're excited to announce that Populi now works with online payments service Stripe. Stripe provides us with a superb, secure payments infrastructure. It gives you an inexpensive, nonsense-free payment gateway and merchant account. Their pricing is simple:

• 2.9% + 30 cents per successful credit card transaction
• 0.8% with a $5 cap per electronic check/ACH transaction*

That's it! It has none of the hidden fine-print fees the other processors butter their bread with. And signup is a breeze: you can set up a new account in five minutes and start accepting payments right away.

That's right—your school can get going with online payments in five minutes.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to Financial > Settings > Online Payments.
2. Click Add a payment gateway.
3. Select Stripe as the provider and click Connect to Stripe.
4. Take a few minutes to fill in the Stripe signup form.
5. Once you create your account, it's connected to Populi.
6. Start taking payments.

Convenience fees and gateway management

Stripe integration is part of our new release that improves how online payments are managed in Populi.

You can now charge a convenience fee for credit/debit transactions. Payment processors (and other middlemen) take a bite out of each transaction—sometimes as much as 5% when all is said and done. To help you recoup these costs, you can set up a percentage-based convenience fee. The fee is automatically applied at checkout when the payer enters the amount she wishes to pay.

The Payment Gateways tab in Financial > Settings lets you manage your gateways—including adding and updating your own Stripe and Authorize.net credentials. You can also specify how you use each gateway. For example,  you could route all tuition, fees, and donations through your Stripe account while sending your bookstore transactions through Authorize.net. If you have multiple campuses, you can even specify which gateway to use at which campus.

The new features give you a great new gateway option with Stripe together with more control over how your school uses Populi for online payments. To learn more, have a look at the Populi Knowledge Base.

* E-check/ACH through Stripe is currently only available to accredited institutions. Please contact Populi Support if you have any questions.

You've long been able to embed content from external sources—YouTube, Vimeo, Scribd—in news posts and course lessons. We recently made this feature even better: you can now embed content from 17 different services. Here's a look...

Auto-embeds

Auto-embeds work simply by pasting the content's URL right in the text of the post or lesson. This works with YouTube, Vimeo, Scribd, and now Prezi, a service that lets you create and share presentations.

First, copy the URL of the media you want to include from one of those services.

Next, paste it right into the news or lesson editor.

Once you save, Populi does the rest: the content is now embedded in your post or lesson!

Iframes

An inline frame—or iframe—is a way to embed one web page within another. We've been cagey about those in the past because, when done poorly, an iframe can present a security risk. But seeing that our users were needing more flexibility in this area, we decided to "whitelist" a number of trustworthy sites and services. So, you can now use embed codes from any whitelisted service to incorporate external content in news and lessons—without anyone having to worry about security.

Here's how to embed content using an iframe:

First, grab the embed code. Different services have different ways of doing this and give you different appearance options—and some, like Spotify, require a paid account to get the embed code. Whatever you do, make sure you get the embed code, and not some sort of "share this" link!

Then, open the HTML source editor.

Paste the embed code directly into the HTML source editor and click Update.

You'll see the embedded content right in the news/lesson editor—and, of course, in the finished product when you click Save.

The whitelisted services are Google Docs, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Scribd, Prezi, Soundcloud, Rdio, Spotify, Twitch, Vine, TED, Slideshare, Imgur, Box, Crocdoc, and Quickcast. If you have another service you'd like to us to add, send us a support request and we'll take a look at it.

New in Populi Financial: Donations.

Donations lets you keep track of fundraising campaigns, accept online donations, record other contributions (checks received in the mail, etc.), and, of course, generate reports on any of this activity. Paired with Populi's communications and contacts features, Donations helps you manage your school's relationships with its donors—while giving you brand-new ways to help get money in the door. Here's a look at what you can do...

Online donations

If you're set up with credit card processing, you can start accepting online donations. Online donation pages give you options for what amounts your supporters can donate, which funds they can donate to, and whether donations received through that page should be connected to particular campaigns and appeals. You can embed your pages on your website or email newsletter and customize their appearance with your own custom CSS. Online donation pages are a great way to make donating to your school easier than ever.

Campaigns and appeals

Campaigns and appeals help you track your progress towards your fundraising goals. Appeals are fundraising communications or events used to solicit donations—anything from a "Remember to Give" postcard to a fundraising golf tournament. You can link donations to campaigns and individual appeals; Populi can also calculate the return on investment by comparing costs with results. Campaigns help you gain insight into what approaches work—or don't—when it comes to fundraising.

Donor profiles

The new Donations tab, available on organization profiles and the Profile > Financial tab, collects all the information you have about a donor's activity. You can record new donations, link to past donations, and print yearly summaries.

Reports

Reporting includes the new donations Dashboard, which summarizes donor activity, and the Donations and Donors reports, each of which feature the upgraded report filter. The new filter includes some built-in report filters that let you quickly find commonly-desired information—Donors who donated last year but not this, for example. It also lets you save your filters as custom reports that you can share with other staff or keep for your own use. Report actions let you do a number of tasks—including printing receipts and summaries, tagging your donors, and exporting your report to XLS.

Communications and contacts

Of course, Donations works in concert with Populi's existing communication and contact features. Want to email everyone who donated to the Library? Want to put all of your alumni donors on a Communication Plan? Want to tag businesses that have donated in the past three years? Want to print envelopes and mail out summaries before tax season? No problem.

Learn more

Read about how to set up and use the new Donations features in the Populi Knowledge Base.

Also, a special thank-you to the customers who participated in our limited beta roll-out of Donations. You really put it through its paces and gave us some great feedback, and we truly are grateful for your insight!

The developers have been drinking their coffee and eating their energy bars, and as a result, Populi now does dozens of new things it didn't do a few weeks ago. Where to begin? How about with the...

New file uploader

The new file uploader lets you drag-and-drop files—up to two gigabytes in size—right into your browser window to upload them into Populi. It's available to all users wherever you can upload files: everywhere from ID photos, activity feeds, and course assignments to applications, page layouts, and library resources (among many other places).

Digital library resources

You can now offer digital resources through your Library. Simply upload the files to the resource, and they'll be available for viewing and downloading to your patrons.

Enrollment verification letters

You can now print proof of enrollment letters for your students. For that matter, your students can print them, too! To get you started, we've included a customizable Enrollment Verification document in Communications > Page Layouts. Contact Populi Support if you'd like us to fix up your enrollment letter layout.

New tuition schedule options in Data Slicer

You can now use the Data Slicer to add, remove, or replace the tuition schedules for groups of students.

PDF exports

What used to export as an .odt file—transcripts, custom statements, etc.—can now be exported as a PDF.

A zillion other things have gotten out there over the past few weeks. If you care to find out more, have a look at our Release Notes.

We announced our current pricing back in February 2010. We've since supplemented that with a few optional items: SMS Emergency Notifications and File storage (the price of which has dropped several times the past couple years). As for Populi itself, well, we've added a thing or two, I guess. And all along we've held fast to the free essentials that make it all go for our customers: implementation, training, support—and, most important, our annual Christmas photos.

It recently struck us: our Pricing Page has remained all but unchanged for the past five years. Web companies commonly experiment with their pricing—adding new tiers, shuffling features around, annual subscription discounts, and so on. You could attribute this to the flexibility of web-based software; it's simple to justify a change in price for an easily-changed product. But such changes have never even crossed our minds. Populi's price has remained steady for five years. The service itself, on the other hand, offers vastly more than it used to. How'd that happen?

Concerning the price, we've never had a good reason to raise it. Every year, our infrastructure dollars have gotten us more—in terms of utility, service, and storage. We have Moore's Law to thank for that; the popular version purports that, every 18 months or so, computing power doubles in speed and drops in price by half. In turn, that has helped us scale up and take on more schools. That spreads our overall costs over an increasing number of customers. And finally, the revenue we take in gets plowed back into our people, our company, and serving our customers. Being privately-owned, there's no obligation to meet the preposterous financial goals of distant, disinterested investors.

Concerning the service, we've only ever had reasons to make it better. Our customers ask us for lots of good things that we want to give them. Some bigger schools need things we don't quite offer yet. The new feature we just released could use refinement. And then there's our own temperament. We’re relentlessly dissatisfied with Populi. No matter how good it is, how many features we add, or how well it all performs, there’s always some way to make it better. Now, it's not that our work is lousy. It's more that we've been given the opportunity to do this work—so why not swing for the fences?

So. We've never had a reason to raise the price, and have always been compelled to make Populi better. That's worked out well for us, and I'd wager, for our customers. Schools that came aboard in 2010 are getting a lot more than they signed up for. For that matter, so are the schools who signed up in 2011, 2012... even customers who came aboard six months ago now have something better than before.

We once likened the college software scene to shopping for a car. In a market cluttered with custom tour buses and shady used cars, Populi was the dependable Toyota minivan—affordable, room for everyone, and a great warranty. Now, imagine that you bought the minivan, and every six months or so, the dealer automatically upgraded it to the next trim level. Or installed a new motor. Or gave you a sunroof. All without you paying more or having to do anything.

That's pretty much the deal you get with Populi.