Back to UpdatesKaizen, Applied: Platform Improvements in Ovrture This Summer
The work started with data tables.
Sites, Reports, and the Record Portfolio are where you spend your day inside Ovrture, and on a laptop screen, those tables ran past the edge of the browser window. Fixing that meant looking closely at how the platform gets used day to day, and once we started looking, these tables turned out to be one of several places where small friction had quietly accumulated.
Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, and it’s one of Ovrture’s company values. Over the last three months, our effort to embody Kaizen produced roughly twenty-two platform improvements and enhancements. If you are a client, you have seen most of them arrive one at a time. Now, stepping back to view the project as a whole, you may notice just how much has been removed, whether it was an extra click, step, scroll, or confusing label. Below, you’ll find a summary of our progress so far, and we hope you will feel the difference every day as you use the platform.
Screens that fit the way you work
Tables now fill the width of your browser and adjust as that window narrows, so nothing spills out of view. You decide what stays: show, hide, resize, reorder, or pin any table column. When a table is the wrong shape for the task, switch to the new Cards view and each site, report, or record becomes a single card carrying all of its data in one place. Your filters and column choices stay put across your session, so a table you set up once stays the way you set it up.
Beyond the tables themselves, the platform layout itself has been modified to remove unnecessary visual information. Every page used to open with three separate rows of header content, pushing your work down the screen. These are now condensed into a single compact row. In practice, this means more of your screen is occupied by your actual work, allowing you to scroll less and get more done.
Alongside these, we implemented about a dozen other refinements to the visual and navigation elements of Ovrture, including consistent naming across navigation and page headers, special content folders you can tell apart at a glance, and previews that open the way they do everywhere else on your computer.
Your fiscal year by default, any fiscal year in a click
Institutions differ not only in the dates of a Fiscal Year, but also in how they name it. A shop running FY2026 starting July 1, 2025 names the Fiscal year by the year it ends. A few areas in Ovrture defaulted to filtering to the current Fiscal year to save time, but the platform always labeled the Fiscal Year year it begins, which meant the platform and the institution were pointing at the same period under two different names.
There is now a Fiscal Year Convention setting, which allows you to make sure the platform’s idea of “current” matches yours. Choose your institution’s Fiscal Year naming convention, and the default year follows for creating new reports, table filters, and the Portfolio’s current-year report link, saving you clicks every time you access those pages. Existing reports and data stay exactly as they are.
When you need to look wider, Reports, Surveys, and Analytics tables now let you select “All” fiscal years without clearing your other filters. Comparing a record’s reports across years, or checking what went out over three cycles, takes one filter change instead of a filter setup you rebuild from scratch.
Room for the data that had nowhere to go
Every advancement shop carries record data that does not fit a standard field, and it usually ends up in a spreadsheet beside the platform rather than inside it. Records now include ten Flex fields for exactly that data, and those fields can feed custom content panels.
One client is using them for unit-based salutations. A record’s greeting now changes depending on which school or unit is doing the asking, which is the kind of personalization that used to require either a separate build or a manual pass.
In the same spirit, special handling notes now attach to the record itself. Add a note to the new Handling Notes field, and a badge appears next to that record’s name whenever anyone on your team builds a site or report for that record. The context that used to live in one person’s inbox (or head) now lives where the next person will see it.
Fund data, on its own
You can now pull a PDF of a single fund’s fiscal year data, covering details, performance, and impact, with no donor record attached.
This suggestion came from a client who needed to hand a dean the fund’s story without a donor wrapped around it. Fund stewards and program leads want the same thing, and now every institution on Ovrture has it.
Certificates that renew themselves
Ovrture is moving SSL certificate management from manual CSR sharing to automated renewal via AWS Certificate Manager, and the migration is underway across our client base. Certificates are issued and renewed automatically, with no private key sharing and no annual renewal work on the client’s side after a one-time DNS validation. The paid annual certificate service is replaced at no charge.
If your system has not migrated yet, your client engagement contact will schedule a one-time validation step, a single DNS entry, and the renewals take care of themselves after that.
Coming soon: analytics that work, found where the work is
Clients told us which numbers they actually wanted from engagement data, and that these metrics were hard to find, if not missing entirely, from our platform’s analytics pages. We rebuilt our platform’s presentation of analytics around this feedback. Sites, Reports, and Surveys each get their own dashboard located within their respective menus, so you can view engagement as part of your regular workflow.
Each dashboard opens on three figures: how many items you created, how many were opened, and how many held someone’s attention long enough to count as engaged, with open rate and engagement rate percentages. Below that, engagement breaks down by how long people stayed, how many times they visited, and what device they used, so the shape of your audience is legible at a glance.
The same data now additionally lives with the pieces it describes. Engagement columns are coming to the tables themselves, so you can sort your reports by who has opened them and who has not, then act on that list without leaving the page. A new “Count as Engaged after” setting lets your institution define how long a visit has to last before it counts as “Engaged”, allowing you to separate those who really spent time with what you sent versus those who only opened and glanced.
The dashboards answer the wider question. Filter by record tags, date range, record owner, and more to see how any group is engaging. Because tags are Ovrture’s built-in segmentation, the groups you already maintain become the groups you can report on: a gift officer’s portfolio, a reunion class, a giving society, a single campaign priority. The same view then zooms out to your entire constituency.
How we make the list
Five of these updates started with client requests. The single-fund PDF, the Flex fields, the fiscal year setting, the survey submission flow, and a video display fix each began as a support ticket or a comment on a call.
If something in Ovrture takes more clicks than it should, share what you’re experiencing with Gideon Rosen or me. We’re always evaluating what platform improvements we should make next.
And if it has been a while since you have seen Ovrture, we would be glad to show you the current version.
Remy Erkel
Assistant Account Executive, Client Engagement
Remy Erkel
Assistant Account Executive, Client Engagement
As part of the client engagement team, Remy continually engages with key contacts to ensure smooth adoption of Ovrture, helping fundraising teams become expert Ovrture users. He guides clients through every step of the onboarding process, helping new users get up-and-running and ensuring that experienced users can make the most of Ovrture’s powerful features. Remy believes that anyone and everyone can be a digital expert with the right support and training, regardless of their previous technology experience.
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