This September brings new tools for managing rooms and resources, improvements to volunteer scheduling, and several updates across accounting, group chat, reporting, tasks, follow-ups, and the member directory. Let’s take a look at what’s new.
New Feature: AI Branded App Studio
If you thought about a branded app and hesitated because of the setup process, now is the time to take the next step. Now it takes minutes rather than days to build and request your app to be listed on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
The new AI-powered studio lets you automatically get information from your website or from your answers to a few questions and create your store listing based on it. You can create app pages and content cards, then automatically create listing screenshots from your live app. The Studio will also let you send the app to our team, who will submit it to app stores, track progress, and keep you updated via the Studio and by email. Most apps go live within 7-14 business days from store submission. Once your app is published, you can see it in both app stores and share it with your community.
ChMeetings in the ChatGPT Store
Now you can easily connect ChatGPT to ChMeetings, right from within the ChatGPT Store. You can gain insights into your ChMeetings data just by asking ChatGPT questions in plain language. This is much easier than our MCP connector, but maintains the same security measures, including that ChatGPT only has read-only access to your data. Keep in mind that in order for this feature to work, your data still gets processed by OpenAI.
New Feature: Rooms and Resources
You can now manage rooms and event-related resources under Events > Rooms and Resources, then reserve them for one-time or recurring events. There are conflict warnings when a room or resource is already booked or when requested quantities exceed availability. Reservations can be adjusted for individual dates within a recurring event, and you can assign managers to handle reservations.
Faster Volunteer Scheduling
The Volunteer Calendar has been redesigned with a clearer view of roles and dates, organized by collapsible volunteer teams. Response indicators show whether volunteers have accepted, rejected, or are still pending. You can manage volunteers directly from the calendar and download the schedule as an Excel file in either calendar or list format. The previous Volunteer Sheet has been retired.
Volunteer Reminders have been enhanced so you can now send up to 3 reminders per role, each with their own configuration; as well as decide whether the reminder applies to all roles, or just the selected role.
Additionally, you can now find people to assign to Volunteer Teams based on their groups. People can be added to volunteer teams through bulk actions in People and Form Submissions.
Other Volunteer Scheduling updates include Volunteer Availability Labels, so you can avoid assignment conflicts; Improved Volunteering Permissions for clearer member access to other volunteers, including in relation to teams; as well as a Better Designed Signup Sheet
Group Chat
Group Chat now supports searching and filtering conversations, with options to filter by group and sort by recent activity, name, or group.
You can also share messages and photos to other apps. Additionally, when creating a conversation, ChMeetings now warns you if another conversation with the same name already exists within the selected group.
Accounting and Contributions
The Accounting Reconciliation workflow now includes a Reconcile button directly on the Account page, and additional guidance for first-time reconciliations without a beginning balance. The save-for-later process has also been improved: Statement details and selected transactions are now retained so you can resume reconciliation later with all previously processed information already saved.
There is also a new Fund By Month report available under Contributions > Reports. It shows the amounts available in each fund, month by month, for a selected period.
Follow-Ups and Tasks
You can now bulk update follow-up dates for multiple records.
In addition, Tasks now have more bulk actions, including Add to Project and Update Status.
Member Directory
Two new family-related merge fields are available for printed member directories:
- OTHER_FAMILY_MEMBER_NAMES – displays the full names of family members other than the parents, one per line.
- OTHER_FAMILY_MEMBER_NAMES_INLINE – displays their first names on one line, separated by commas.
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We’re very excited to bring these features to you. If you’d like to share feedback or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team, who are here to help. For more frequent updates, we invite you to check out our Release Notes page.
