Many Pies

Many Pies

Thursday, January 16, 2014

NetCommunity - fix acknowledgement page after donation

One of the retrograde steps (in my opinion) that was made to Blackbaud NetCommunity at one of the previous upgrades was to make it so that after someone had given they were kept on the same page, but that the donation part was replaced with some acknowledgement text. So before they gave it would look like this:
Please give!
Amount: ___
Name etc.

and then after

Please give!
Thanks for giving etc.

I thought this was impossible to fix with Javascript because I couldn't find a way to get a script to fire while the acknowledgement is displaying. However there is a workaround on the Knowledgebase. The workaround it gives only works if you have one text part on the page. However if you have more than one text part at the top of the page you can use a class to do this instead of an id so you have:
Then in the HTML for the custom acknowledgement put this:


Another problem with this change is that you can easily see Google analytics for after people have given, so if anyone has any tips, please share.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Virtually sitting at a meeting table

I'm taking part in some meetings via video conference at the moment. (This picture is from when I did it a couple of years ago, this is what I looked like as I was "sitting" at the table with the other people. I didn't know my photo was being taken so this is my concentrating face.) The meeting is with the steering group of the Polder Consortium. We're looking at how we can help all the organisations in the Wycliffe Global Alliance take part in seven streams of participation, mainly through a technological viewpoint.

Part of the reason we are able to do this is because of the expanded scope of the Polder Consortium to include other things than just identity issues. However identity, and trust are essential foundations for organisations working together, so they will play their part.

Thursday, January 09, 2014

Old Bible Translators and Maori tattoos

At our weekly staff meetings (now monthly since our move to the new office) we would often have someone talking about their work with Wycliffe, usually in some distant country. Often people carry on into their 60s and 70s before they stop. These older people (older than me anyway) would have great stories to tell, and there would obviously be so much more they could say, given the number of years they have been doing the work. Apart from their usual wrinkles I would wonder why their exploits left no obvious physical trace. There was no sign of the days waiting in line to get visa or travel permits, or some other government documents approved, the days and weeks they'd spent travelling along muddy tracks in their 4x4s, the months and years they'd spent patiently working through a translation with speakers of the language.

It put me in mind of Maori tattoos which I thought (until I researched for this post) were about what had happened to you, but I now know are about your social standing by birthright and also about "the quality of their personal participation" (see that linked webpage). You could imagine a translator getting a tattoo after they worked on a New Testament, or Old Testament - maybe one dot or line per verse (7,959 in the New, 23,214 in the Old), or more realistically per chapter (1,189 in the whole Bible). It's not uncommon that when someone has finished on such a project that they then move onto being a consultant for other projects in the same area of the world. So they might be involved in several more projects in their remaining working years. So the first tattoo would need to not be too big!