Today, we released a complete redesign of the GivingTools checkout experience. Not only will donors no longer have to enter a password to make donations, but they also won’t have to select road signs from a bunch of pictures!

What we’ve done: we’ve merged the second and third steps of the checkout experience into one step. In this new, consolidated step, donors fill out your custom fields, enter their email address, provide billing details, and select their payment method. They can also review their donation finally before hitting the checkout button.

No password is needed, not for the first gift, the seond, or the 200th. You will still need a password to access your account history, though. This update will add a new level of convenience that many have requested without reduction of the security of your data. In fact, your data is more secure through our passwordless system than using the old system!

We’ve also removed the captcha requirement. Instead of prompting every donor to pick out road signs, we created what we like to call the “Advanced Fraud Detection System.” While its implementation details are a trade secret, what we can tell you is that if it detects a bad guy, it’ll make them mine cryptocurrency! Furthermore, this tactic is easily scaleable. The more “badness” it detects, the more computational power will be required to continue. We hope that this method will ensure that legitimate donors will never have to complete a captcha and will experience a more streamlined checkout experience.

Previously, a donor’s account could only have one recurring payment method. This caused concern as manually entering a recurring gift would end up overwriting the donor’s existing recurring payment method. Furthermore, we required donors to log in first to prevent anyone from overwriting the donor’s account. To solve this problem, we added the ability for each gift to designate its own payment method. This allows manual entered gifts to use a separate payment method as well as allowing anyone to make a gift and not risk modification of the donor’s account.

With this update, we’ve also added the long-awaited recurring receipts! For each installment of a gift, the donor will receive a receipt outlining the gift’s history, total billed, and the tax deductible amount.

More convenience. Higher security. We’re working hard to constantly improve GivingTools, and we appreciate your feedback!