How does Zeffy work? Get to know our feature request page.

If you’ve ever wished Zeffy could do something it doesn’t do (yet), Zeffy’s feature request page is here to help.

Wait. Zeffy has a feature request page? Yes we do. And we use it too. So, how does it work? Well, here’s a bit of a TL;DR:

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Step one:

Nonprofit organizations that use Zeffy's 100% free fundraising platform request a feature they’d really like Zeffy to offer.

Step two:

Other nonprofit organizations up-vote the feature requests they really want to see Zeffy work on.

Step three:

Zeffy looks at the most-requested features, our short and long-term goals and capabilities and chooses which features we’re going to implement.

Step four:

We get to work and keep the nonprofit organizations involved up-to-date on our progress by labelling which features we’re working on. (Under review, Planned, In Progress, Complete.)

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In short, Zeffy’s feature request page is how we know what features we should work on next and how the nonprofit organizations that use our platform know what's coming. And we take it seriously.

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Why Zeffy's feature request page works:

Zeffy’s feature request page works because we actually use it. We listen to the wants and needs of our organizations and we keep them up-to-date so they know which features we’re looking into (Under Review), which features we’ve added to our to-do list (Planned), which features we’ve started working on (In Progress), and which ones we’ve finished (Completed).

We’ve purposefully made it simple and transparent because we know that the people that understand which features and tools will actually be useful are the nonprofit organizations that use our platform—and that means we need them to want to tell us what they want and trust that we’re actually going to listen.

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Zeffy uses Canny to manage the feedback nonprofits give us.

At Zeffy, everything we do we do for the nonprofit organizations that use our platform. The world needs a lot of help right now, and we want to do our part by helping nonprofit organizations do theirs by not charging them any fees—not even credit card transaction fees. Canny helps us do that by letting the nonprofit organizations that use our platform tell us how we’re doing and how we can improve. We chose Canny because:

1. Nonprofit organizations can log in and request features.
2. Once your nonprofit has requested a feature, you’ll be kept up-to-date via email when new comments are made and anytime Zeffy completes an update.
3. Canny helps Zeffy be transparent by allowing us to label which features we’re working on and the progress we’re making.
4. Nonprofit organizations can check-in on our roadmap anytime they’d like to see how the features they’ve requested are progressing.
5. Canny helps us organize the over 611 feature requests we currently have by allowing us to merge similar requests, determine which ideas are feasible, assign feature development to the right team and keep everyone (team members and nonprofit organizations) up to date the whole time.

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How your nonprofit can use Zeffy’s feature request page:

Make a new feature request:

You can visit Zeffy's feature request page here.

Up-vote and comment on an existing feature request:

You can visit Zeffy's feature request page here.

The data that proves we mean what we say.

We asked Rowan, Zeffy’s Product Manager, for a little help with this section. (Thanks Rowan!)

How many nonprofit organizations use Zeffy’s feature request page?

We have 2458 users on Canny (the site that hosts our feature request page). This includes nonprofit organizations who have made requests, commented or upvoted on existing requests and Zeffy team members.

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How many active requests does Zeffy have?

There are 611 active requests, but this is constantly evolving. We keep an eye on the number of feature requests and read every request that we get and categorize it internally to help us prioritise every request.

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What criteria does Zeffy use to choose which features to work on?

Our main priority is to build features that will have a positive impact on the most nonprofit organizations. To determine this, we rely on a few different factors:

• How many nonprofit organizations we think will be affected and how much of an impact the feature will have.
• We look at whether or not it's technically possible.
• We try and gauge the effort it will take our development team and compare that to our current work load.
• Does the feature make sense for Zeffy and is it possible in the logic of our other capabilities and features.
• We couple all this criteria and feedback with the comments from our Customer Success and Sales Teams and our user research and interviews.

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How many features does Zeffy release in a month? Year? etc.

Good question! We started using Canny less than two years ago, and since then we've completed 125 feature requests. Some feature requests are bigger and more complex than others, but we usually release 2-3 times a week and each release will contain 1 or more features along with some maintenance, performance and bug fixes.

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A few popular features for nonprofits we’ve launched thanks to Zeffy’s feature request page.

To show you how well this process works and how far Zeffy has come, here’s a list of a few of the features we’ve released thanks to your requests on our feature request page. (There are some really useful ones.)

If you’re interested, you can see all our completed feature requests in our roadmap section under “Complete”.

A few VERY popular requests that we released:

• Yearly donations
• Cumulative tax receipts for monthly donations
• Tap to Pay (only available in the US for now)
• Early bird ticketing options
• Multi date/ Recurring events
• Ability to edit monthly donation amounts
• Adding images to e-commerce forms

Some surprising requests that we’ve released:

• Tap to Pay in the US
• Translation to Spanish in the US
• Ability to edit the size of images they upload on forms
• Variables in emails including name, dates for events, e=tickets and pre=filled forms

And, a few features requests that we’re working on right now (July, 2023):

• Getting a notification when a donor's recurring payment is past due
• Bulk Importing contacts and transactions directly in the dashboard
• Ability to move donations from one form to another

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