We've all been there. You wrap up a great meeting, jot a few notes on a napkin or dash off a quick email to yourself, and then… life happens. By the time you sit down to log it in the CRM, the details are fuzzy, the follow-up dates are gone, and that promising lead quietly slips through the cracks.

The truth is, most meeting notes never make it into the CRM — not because people don't care, but because the process asks too much. Pick a subject. Choose an activity type. Set a status. Link the right contacts. Fill in the description. That's a lot of fields standing between a quick note and an actual record.

Smart Capture changes that.

Just Paste Your Notes. AI Does the Rest.

Smart Capture is a new AI-powered tool that lets you take your raw, unstructured notes — from a meeting, a phone call, a hallway conversation — and turn them into a fully structured activity record in seconds.

Here's how simple it is:

1. Open Smart Capture (from the Create New menu, the Activity Admin sidebar, or the Mobile Dashboard).
2. Type or paste your notes exactly as you have them.
3. Click Process with AI.

That's it. The AI reads your notes and automatically extracts a subject line, activity type, status, due date, linked contacts, linked organizations, and action items. You review everything, make any adjustments you'd like, and save.

For example, paste in something like:

"Met with Sarah Kelling from Happy Coffee to discuss partnership opportunities. Will follow up next week with a proposal."

And Smart Capture will return a structured activity with "Partnership Discussion — Happy Coffee" as the suggested title, "Meeting" as the type, a due date set for next week, and Sarah Kelling and Happy Coffee already linked — matched right from your contact database.

Smart Contact Matching

One of the things that makes Smart Capture especially useful is how it handles names. The AI doesn't just look for exact text matches — it cross-references names mentioned in your notes against your actual contact database, matching on full names, partial names, and even phonetic variations. Write "Jon" and it will still find "John."

When a name is ambiguous — say you have three contacts named Mike — the review screen gives you a simple dropdown to pick the right one. And when a contact is matched, their linked organizations are automatically pulled in too.

You Stay in Control

Smart Capture is designed to save you time, not to make decisions for you. Every AI-generated suggestion goes through a review step before anything is saved. You can edit the subject, change the activity type, adjust the due date, or swap out a contact match. Nothing is committed until you say so.

Available on Desktop and Mobile

Whether you're at your desk or wrapping up a meeting on the go, Smart Capture is available in both the desktop admin and the mobile admin dashboard — so you can capture notes while they're still fresh.

What's Coming Next

Right now, Smart Capture displays extracted action items for your reference. In Phase 2, those action items will become assignable sub-activities with their own due dates and assignees. That means a note like "John will send the proposal by Friday" won't just be captured — it'll become a tracked task that you can assign and follow up on.

If you've ever spent twenty minutes formatting a web page or composing an email in a content management system (CMS), then you know how important the content editor is. It's where blog posts take shape, announcements get polished, donation letters are drafted, and email campaigns come together. For many admins, the editor is one of the most-used tools in the entire platform.

With that in mind, we're pleased to announce that CitySoft now includes a new web content editor, replacing the previous editor that had been part of the platform for many years. The new editor is faster, more modern, and designed to make the everyday work of creating and editing content noticeably smoother (especially when combined with our new AI "Content Assist" feature - see previous posts for more detail).

What You'll Notice

A cleaner, more intuitive toolbar. The new editor toolbar is well-organized and responsive. Buttons are grouped logically, and the toolbar adapts to the size of your browser window. If you've used any modern word processor or online editor, the layout will feel familiar immediately.

Better handling of pasted content. The new editor automatically detects when you're pasting rich content and gives you a clear choice: keep the formatting, clean it up, or insert it as plain text. No more hunting for a special "Paste from Word" button — just paste normally and the editor takes care of the rest.

A built-in image manager. Uploading and managing images is now handled directly within the editor through an integrated file browser. You can upload new images, browse existing ones, create folders to stay organized, and insert images into your content — all without leaving the editing screen.

Improved special character support. For organizations that create content in French, Spanish, or other languages with accented characters, the editor now includes a special character picker right in the toolbar. Characters like é, ñ, ç, and many others are just a click away — no more copying and pasting from external sources or memorizing keyboard shortcuts.

Reliable HTML preservation. If your team works with custom HTML, icon libraries, or styled content blocks, the new editor respects your markup. It won't strip out custom classes, inline styles, or Font Awesome icons the way the previous editor sometimes did.

Link to platform content. The familiar tool for inserting links to your site's pages, documents, events, and articles is still available — now presented as a clean, integrated dialog rather than a separate browser window. No more lost popup windows hiding behind your main screen.

What's the Same

The new editor works everywhere the old one did — web pages, blog posts, email campaigns, individual emails, donation letters, and more. All of your existing content carries over without any changes. Pages you built with the previous editor will look and work exactly the same. You don't need to re-do anything.

The workflow is the same too. You'll find the editor in the same places you're used to, and the basic operations — typing, formatting, inserting images and links, viewing source code — all work the way you'd expect. The learning curve is minimal. If you've used the old editor, you'll be comfortable with the new one within a few minutes.

Coming Soon: Autosave

We know that one of the more frustrating experiences is losing work because a browser tab was accidentally closed or a session timed out before you clicked Save. We're working on an autosave feature that will automatically preserve your in-progress edits in the background. If something goes wrong, your unsaved work will be waiting for you when you come back to the editor. This feature is in development and will be available in an upcoming release.

A Foundation for What's Next

Beyond the immediate improvements, this upgrade gives us a modern foundation to build on. The new editor's architecture supports features like an inline text selection toolbar — highlight text and a compact formatting toolbar appears right there — and the potential for richer editing modes down the road. We're also exploring premium capabilities like enhanced paste handling for complex documents and smart autocomplete features that could help speed up content creation even further.

For now, though, the focus is on the fundamentals: a fast, reliable, pleasant editing experience for the content you create every day.

How to Get Started

The new editor is being rolled out to client sites on a module-by-module basis. Your admin team can enable it for specific areas of the platform — such as pages, blog posts, or email — and continue using the previous editor for others, allowing for a comfortable transition at your own pace. Once you're confident with the new editor across all areas, a single master switch enables it platform-wide.

If you have questions about the new editor, want to enable it for your site, or just want to see it in action, don't hesitate to reach out. We're happy to walk you through it.

Writing content is one of the most time-consuming tasks for any organization. Blog posts, fundraising appeals, product launches, donor thank-you letters, event announcements, email campaigns — the writing never stops. And for organizations where everyone wears multiple hats, finding the time and energy to produce polished, compelling content can be a real challenge.

That's why we're excited to introduce CitySoft's AI Content Assist. It's a writing assistant that lives right inside your content editor, ready to help whenever you need it.

How It Works

Anywhere you write content in Community Enterprise — blog posts, web pages, emails, event descriptions — you'll see an AI Assist button next to your editor. Click it, and a simple dialog opens with two modes: Generate and Rewrite.

Generate Mode: Start From a Description

Have a blog post to write but staring at a blank page? Generate mode is your starting point. Just describe what you need in plain language:

"Write a blog post announcing our Annual Spring Gala on April 12. Highlight the silent auction, live music by The Jazz Collective, and that tickets are $75."

Select your content type and preferred tone, click Generate, and in seconds you'll have a well-structured first draft ready to review. If you like it, insert it directly into your editor. If it's not quite right, click Try Again or adjust your description and regenerate.

Rewrite Mode: Improve What You've Written

Already have a draft but it needs work? Rewrite mode lets you select content in your editor and improve it with a single click. Choose from quick actions like:

• Improve clarity — Tighten up the language and flow
• Make shorter — Condense without losing the key points
• Make longer — Expand with more detail and context
• Change tone — Shift from formal to casual, or professional to heartfelt
• Fix grammar — Clean up spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues

You can also type custom instructions — "Make this more urgent" or "Add a stronger call to action" — for specific adjustments.

Built for the Content You Actually Write

Content Assist understands that a fundraising appeal is different from a blog post, and a donor thank-you letter has a different purpose than an event announcement. When you select a content type, the AI tailors its approach:

• Blog Posts get engaging openings, well-organized body paragraphs, and a conclusion with a call to action
• Fundraising Appeals connect emotionally, articulate the need and impact, and include a strong ask
• Donor Thank-You Letters express sincere gratitude and reinforce the donor's relationship with your organization
• Event Descriptions lead with the key details — what, when, where, why — and make it compelling enough to drive attendance
• Emails are appropriately concise with proper greetings and sign-offs
• Web Pages are scannable and well-organized with appropriate headings

Your Voice, Your Control

Content Assist is a starting point, not a replacement for your voice. The AI generates a draft — you make it yours. Every piece of content goes through your review before it's published. You can edit, refine, and adjust anything the AI produces.

The tone selector helps the AI get closer to what you want from the start. Choose from Professional, Enthusiastic, Casual, Formal, Heartfelt, or Urgent, and the output will match.

What Our Clients Are Telling Us

The feedback from early users has been encouraging. Tasks that used to take 30-45 minutes — like drafting a fundraising email or writing an event description — are now taking just a few minutes. The AI handles the heavy lifting of structure and language, and our clients focus on making sure the message is right.

It's been especially helpful for organizations where writing isn't anyone's primary job. Not everyone has a communications director, but everyone needs good content. Content Assist levels the playing field.

Getting Started

Content Assist is available now for organizations with AI enabled in their CitySoft platform. If you don't see the AI Assist button next to your editor, contact us and we'll help you get set up.

All you need is an account with a supported AI provider (we currently support Anthropic's Claude, with OpenAI and Google Gemini coming soon). You manage your own provider account, so you have full visibility into usage and costs — which, for typical content creation tasks, are remarkably low.

What's Next

Content Assist is just the first of several AI-powered features we're bringing to Community Enterprise. Coming soon: a business card scanner for instant contact creation, AI-generated donor insights and summaries, document analysis, and more.

We're building AI into the platform thoughtfully — focused on features that genuinely save you time and help you do better work for your organization. Content Assist is the first step, and we think you're going to love it.

We're excited to announce a major new capability in Community Enterprise: artificial intelligence is now built directly into the platform.

Over the past several months, we've been working on integrating AI technology into the tools our clients use every day — and the first features are now live. This isn't a bolt-on or a third-party add-on. AI is becoming part of the core platform, designed to make the work our nonprofit and business clients do faster, easier, and more effective.

What We've Built

At the foundation, we've created a flexible AI integration that connects Community Enterprise to leading AI providers. We started with Anthropic's Claude as our first supported AI vendor, with OpenAI and Google Gemini coming soon. This multi-vendor approach means you'll have choices — whether you already have a relationship with an AI provider or you're looking for the option that best fits your budget and needs.

The integration is built to be secure and straightforward. Your API credentials are encrypted and stored safely within your existing platform settings, right alongside other integrations you may already use. If your organization operates multiple sites or chapters, each can have its own AI configuration — or share a single one across the entire organization.

The First Feature: AI Content Assist

The first AI-powered feature we've released is Content Assist — an intelligent writing partner that's available anywhere you create content in Community Enterprise. Whether you're writing a blog post, composing an email, crafting an event description, or drafting a fundraising appeal, AI Content Assist is right there to help.

It works in two ways. In Generate mode, you describe what you need — "Write a blog post announcing our Spring Gala" or "Draft a donor thank-you letter" — and the AI produces a polished first draft you can review and insert into your editor. In Rewrite mode, you can select content you've already written and ask the AI to improve clarity, adjust the length, change the tone, or fix grammar issues.

You choose the content type and tone that fits your needs, and the AI tailors its output accordingly. A fundraising appeal gets a different treatment than an event announcement, and a heartfelt tone reads differently than a professional one.

We'll have more to share about Content Assist in a dedicated post soon.

What's Coming Next

Content Assist is just the beginning. We're actively developing and exploring several additional AI-powered features:

Business Card Scanner — Use your phone's camera to snap a photo of a business card, and let AI extract the name, title, company, phone number, email, and address into a new contact record. No more manual data entry at conferences and events.

Contact & Donor Insights — Select a contact and get an instant, plain-English summary of their history with your organization: giving patterns, event attendance, recent interactions, and key notes. Invaluable preparation before a meeting, phone call, or donor visit.

Document Analysis — Upload a PDF or document and ask questions about it. "What are the key requirements in this grant?" or "Summarize the action items from these meeting minutes." Let AI do the reading so you can focus on the decisions.

Smart Search — Ask questions about your data in natural language. Instead of building complex filters, simply ask: "Show me everyone who donated over $500 last year but hasn't given yet this year."

Meeting Notes — A streamlined mobile interface for logging notes during or right after a meeting, with AI that can clean up your rough notes, extract action items, and suggest follow-up dates.

A Mobile-Friendly Future

Many of these features are being designed with mobile use in mind. We know that your work doesn't always happen at a desk — you're at events, in meetings, visiting donors, and attending conferences. We're building a lightweight, mobile-friendly interface that gives you quick access to the tools you need most when you're on the go, without trying to squeeze the entire admin experience onto a phone screen.

Choose Your AI Provider

We believe you should have choices when it comes to AI. Some organizations may prefer one vendor over another for reasons of cost, capability, or existing relationships. That's why Community Enterprise is designed to work with multiple AI providers:

• Anthropic (Claude) — Available now. Known for thoughtful, high-quality responses and strong document analysis capabilities.
• OpenAI (GPT) — Coming soon. The most widely recognized AI platform with a range of models at different price points.
• Google Gemini — Coming soon. Competitive pricing with a generous free tier that may be especially appealing for smaller organizations.

Each client manages their own AI provider account and API key, so you have full control over your costs and usage. Your data stays between you and your chosen AI provider — Community Enterprise simply facilitates the connection.

Getting Started

If you're interested in enabling AI features for your organization, reach out to us. We can help you set up your AI provider account, configure the integration, and start putting these tools to work for your team.

This is just the beginning of what AI can do for your organization within Community Enterprise. We're committed to bringing you practical, valuable AI capabilities that make a real difference in your day-to-day work — not technology for technology's sake, but tools that genuinely save time and improve outcomes.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to roll out new AI-powered features.

When you manage donations for your organization, you need to see the big picture fast. That’s why we’ve added a new Donation Dashboard to the Donations module in CitySoft.

When you navigate to the Donations section in your admin, you’ll now see a dashboard at the top of the page with key metrics displayed at a glance — Total Revenue Raised, Unique Donors, Average Gift, and Total Donations. These summary cards give you an instant snapshot of your fundraising performance without running a single report.

Below the summary cards, we’ve added three interactive charts. The Donations by Year bar chart lets you compare year-over-year giving trends so you can see how your fundraising is growing over time. The Donations by Stage donut chart shows where your donations stand in the pipeline — from verbal agreements and proposals to pending payments and completed gifts. And the Revenue Trend chart tracks your monthly revenue over the last 12 months so you can spot seasonal patterns and plan accordingly.

You’ll also see a Top Donation Campaigns section underneath the charts, which highlights your best-performing campaigns at a glance.

But we didn’t stop there. We’ve also added individual Donor Metrics to each contact’s profile. When you click on the Donations tab for any contact, you’ll now see detailed giving metrics for that person — Lifetime Giving, Total Donations, Average Gift, Donor Status, Largest Gift, Most Recent Gift, Donor Tenure, and Smallest Gift. Below these cards, a Donations by Year chart shows that individual’s giving history over time.

Whether you’re preparing for a board meeting, planning your next campaign, or just checking in on your fundraising health, the new Donation Dashboard puts the data you need front and center. No more digging through reports to answer basic questions about your organization’s giving.

The dashboard appears automatically at the top of your Donations module. If you’d prefer to focus on just the donation list, you can collapse it anytime using the “Hide Dashboard” button.

Whether you are recruiting new members or closing deals, CitySoft provides sales CRM tools to meet your needs. 

With our Prospects module, you can track leads and prospects distinct from other contacts.  And, with our Opportunities module, you can create and track new deals and other opportunities through a sequence of deal stages.

Prospects can be specified by an administrator or flagged directly from a custom prospect or contact form that can be displayed on the website.  With our database tools you can track a wide variety of communications, activities and other data related to prospects and their relationships to deals and organizations.

CitySoft's Opportunities module can be used to track traditional sales. In addition, you can track any other kind of deal such as grants, partnerships, in-kind donations, and more.  Opportunities are grouped and displayed by stages.  And, all communications and activities related to each opportunity are tracked and displayed on the same screen for easy usability.

Need to manage volunteers? We've got you covered.

CitySoft's Volunteer module allows you to flag, track, and manage volunteers within your organization and database.  Volunteers are displayed in their own module where you can use a wide range of features to track and manage volunteer activities, hours, reports, and more.

If you use CitySoft's Form Builder, you can create custom volunteer forms to display on the web.  When contacts submit the forms, they can be automatically flagged as volunteers and you are notified via email.  From there, you can use our database tools to assign, manage, and track volunteer activities throughout your organization and network.

Looking for an efficient way to track time for your organization? Look no further than Community Enterprise's Time Tracker! Whether you're managing volunteers, employees, contractors, or any other type of user, our platform makes it easy to track time in a variety of ways.

With our Time Tracking feature, you can track time by date, using start and end times or hours and minutes. This flexibility allows you to choose the method that works best for your team's needs. Plus, you can specify specific projects and tasks for time entries, making it simple to track time spent on different activities.

In addition to tracking time, you can also add detailed descriptions for each entry. This feature is especially useful for tracking volunteer activities, as it allows you to keep a record of the tasks completed and the impact they had on your organization.

Best of all, the Time Tracker is part of the overall CRM platform making it easy to manage all your data in one place. Combined with other volunteer management features in our software, our Time Tracker provides a comprehensive solution for tracking volunteer activities within your organization and network. Say goodbye to the hassle of manual time tracking or third-party apps that aren't integrated into your CRM and try our Time Tracker!

Zero percent inflation.  You don't hear that very often these days.  Many companies - including software and technology companies - have been raising their prices while reporting record profits.  Too often these business tactics are just another way to inflate management salaries and investor returns at client expense.  It doesn't have to be that way.  At CitySoft, we haven't raised prices since... never.  CitySoft has always been committed to providing great software, services, and support at very competitive prices.  If your organization or company likes to throw your money at over-priced software companies while spending hours and hours in project meetings, CitySoft probably isn't a good fit for you.  But if you want modern software, priced appropriately, with easy implementation and support, contact us any time.

We want to take a moment to show off our modern, clean admin user interface.  The UI is constantly being improved, so the screen shots below may be dated soon, but it's worth taking a moment to post a few images here.  It's been pointed out to us that some older screen shots of the user interface exist online which may give the wrong impression about our software.

If you are interested in seeing a more detailed look, a demo, or a free trial, please contact us.  And, you can see more detail about the platform here.

In the mean time, here is a current look at the admin UI Dashboard.

In addition, here is a view of the admin Contacts module landing page:

Here is an example of an individual contact profile within the Contacts module:

Good software does not need to be expensive.  But, it often is.  In addition to our very competitive platform pricing, it's important to note that CitySoft does not charge any transaction fees on top of the processor fees (which are usually around 2.2 percent per transaction).

Many software vendors charge additional transaction fees above and beyond the core processing fees.  This is common in platforms that support membership management, event registration, donations and stores.  If you are collecting fees online, these extra percentage points can add up to a lot of money.  We have had clients who saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by using our platform to avoid those extra transaction fees.

Don't hesitate to contact us to learn more and see a demo.

Following up on the previous post about our pricing philosophy, it makes sense to also mention our approach to contract term length.  That is to say, there is no term length. 

If a client wants to leave, they should be able to without any financial repercussions from breaking a long term contract.  Our goal is to only have happy customers.  And, if a customer is not happy, we want to make it easy for them to find a better fit for their needs.  Our belief is that happy clients will be long term clients and over time that will work out well for everyone.  So, if you want to work with us, that's great.  But, if we're not the right fit, we want you to be able to find a better option. 

Philosophy is a funny word to use about software pricing.  But, it may be fitting in this case.  Stated simply, we ideally want anyone to be able to use the software who wants to.  If you think our software is a good fit with your needs, we want to make it as available as we can.  And we don't want anyone to be excluded unnecessarily because of a price that is beyond their means.

To accomplish this, we recommend prices for various sized organizations, based on our expectations about how expensive it will be to support them. But we ultimately leave it up to you.  It's more of an honor system approach that asks clients to pay what they think is a fair price that will benefit both sides.  Everyone needs to be a winner in order to build a good, long term relationship.

Software does not need to be expensive in most cases.  But, for many reasons, often the wrong reasons, it is.  CitySoft is trying to do things differently.  You can see all the details on our pricing page.

One of our long (long, long) term goals here at CitySoft Global HQ has been been to open source the whole platform, much in the way that Wordpress and others have (although perhaps to a greater extent than Wordpress).  It turns out that doing this right, or at all, takes quite a bit of preparation.  Besides all the code work, there ideally needs to be a lot of documentation, training material, and so forth.  And, we would like the platform to run on some different flavors of application servers and databases, which requires even more preparation.  And all this needs to be done while running a regular business with many client and platform development needs.

So, it's not a small enterprise.  That said, we've come a long way towards the goal and it is still a high priority for the platform.  Our goal is to make it more available and more valuable for more people and organizations.

And... we're back! After a long stretch of not blogging about our features and platform, we're restarting the blog to provide new information and detail about the platform, the features, how clients are making use of it, and anything else that comes to mind and might be useful and interesting.  Hopefully this will be a channel to provide useful information to clients and prospects.  Thanks for reading!!

In our latest build, we've started adding in the new HTML5 date picker widget.  Pictured at left, this new HTML5 feature is a nicer, slicker date picking widget than we had used in the past.  

For now, it is mainly supported in recent Chrome and Opera browsers.  But, eventually it will be supported in all major browsers as HTML5 becomes the default standard on the web.  So, if you are using chrome with our platform now, you will be able to take advantage of this new and improved feature.

Here at CitySoft HQ, we get pretty excited about software upgrades.  Today is exciting because we are announcing a big upgrade to our web editor (pictured at left) and file manager (pictured at right).  Both of these components are very important parts of our platform and both are licensed from one of the best web software companies around - CK Source.

In case you aren't familiar with web software jargon, the web editor (at left) is for editing web pages, articles and emails within our platform.  And, the the file manager (at right) is for uploading and managing images that are used within web pages.  We've used the CK Source web editor for years, but are excited to have their very latest version built into our platform.  Furthermore, this is the first time we've included the CK Source file manager in our platform.

You can learn more about CKSource here.

You can learn more about CKEditor here.

You can learn more about CKFinder here.

Customizing our free web design themes for a web site is a very affordable way to get up and running quickly with an attractive, contemporary design.  CitySoft offers a library of free web site design themes (here) which are completely open source and free.  Although we designed them for use with our software, anyone can use them.

When our clients use one of these themes for their website, there is usually a short process of customizing the theme for a specific client.  We thought it would be helpful to show an example of what a customized theme can look like at the end of the process.  

Recently, a long-time client (The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) re-designed their website using our Professional theme. They were happy with the final results, which can be seen here.  The initial theme (with no customization) can be seen here.  

CitySoft has added several new features to the Articles module that are worth noting here.

History and Rollback
The articles module now includes both History and Rollback features (as pictured).  The means that each time an article is added or edited over time, all versions of the article are saved in the database.  The older versions can be viewed from the article history screen.  And, at an time an administrator can "roll back" an older version of the article and make it the current version.  This history and rollback functionality also exists in the Pages module and with page sections.  These features will be added to more modules in the future.

Caching
Although extensive caching already exists in Community Enterprise, we have recently added some new caching features to the Articles module.  With this new functionality, articles are stored in cached versions on the server.  These articles can be retrieved and displayed more quickly than in the past, improving client and user performance.

A great new feature has been added to the Organizations module that will be useful to clients who use CE to track organizations and the contacts within those organizations.  Within an organizations record, in the past you could track primary contacts and regular contacts (e.g. employees) of an organization.  Now, you can also track former contacts of the organization (as pictured below).  This means that when an individual leaves an organization in your database, you can retain that historical information by simply changing their status within the organization record to "Former Contact."  The organization record will maintain a list of all former (as well as current) contacts.