September Community Updates: Product first!

1. Customizable Contact List

Have you ever wanted to post an update and be able to choose who receives it? Well now you can! From the Promote section (step 4 of the campaign creation process), you can now easily import contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Address Book and an excel file.

You can also see a list of all the contacts you imported, as well as all of those who contributed, followed you and unsubscribed from your emails.

Using the on/off switch, you can create customized lists of people to send your updates to.

2. Blog-Like Updates

So you want to tell a story to your supporters but you want to include multiple pictures and throw in some bold and Italics? No problem! From your campaign page and athlete profile, you can now write an update as long as a blog post, and as visually appealing!

From your athlete profile, simply click “add” next to the updates title. If you have a campaign running, this will be posted on your campaign page as well. Of course, this will also be sent to all your supporters, followers and contacts (or just the ones you chose to send them to).

New update box: add photos, videos, and formatting!

A few athletes have already started taking advantage of these new blog-style updates, and the results are awesome! Here’s a great example from Canadian Fencer, Marissa Ponich.

3. Easier Team Creation and Management

If you’re creating a team campaign, we just made your life a lot easier! From your dashboard, you can now send a message to all your members, choose whether the team member’s campaign shows the same rewards and sponsors as the main campaign, as well as activate or deactivate a member’s campaign at any point.

You can also edit their description or quickly copy the main campaign’s description to their campaign. By default, the member campaigns take the main campaign description.

4. Faster campaign and athlete page creation

As busy athletes, we know you need to spend more time training than sitting at your computer. That’s why we removed some mandatory fields in our campaign creation process, and provided templates for you to choose from for your campaign description and athlete bio.

Note: We can’t do ALL the work for you (as much as we’d like to), so you’ll still need to personalize the templates to show the crowd who you are!

5. Offline contributions

As much as we would love for all contributors to go through MAKEACHAMP, we know that your aunt Susie or grandpa Paul might rather give you money in person. Whether a contribution was made offline or online, it’s important to show the crowd that you are making progress. That’s why we added the Offline Contribution button!

From the contributors section (on the black menu bar), you can now add an offline contribution. You can even subscribe the contributor to your updates! Obviously, no fees will be deducted from these “contributions,” but they will show on your progress bar.

6. Ability to receive contributions at all times

While working on a new version of the contribution process, we made it a whole lot easier for athletes to receive monthly or one-time contributions at any time. Once your campaign is over, there will always be a "contribute" button on your athlete page, so people can support you at any moment. Check out the pricing page for post-camaign fees.

If you do not want to receive contributions after your campaign, go to your settings and uncheck the box marked "allow contributions at all times."

If you are from the U.S. or Canada, we can now also send your funds directly to your bank account! To do so, make sure to fill out the Payment Information section in step 1 of the campaign creation process.

7. Video update improvements

If you take most of your videos on your phone, you're going to love this! You can now post your videos from your phone as an update on your MAKEACHAMP page, and post it directly on your Facebook and Twitter pages from there! Think about how much more free time you'll have, now that you don't have to go to multiple websites to post your videos :)

8. Tons of other small/medium/large changes

Like I said, we’ve been busy this summer, but I won’t bore you with all the details. Here are the highlights:

•  - Fancy new product page. Take a look!
•  - Spruced up home page
•  - New pricing page
•  - Videos can be uploaded to campaign, bio and updates from phone or computer
•  - Contributors can now be anonymous to the public and not to the athlete
•  - Comments can be deleted on updates
•  - Profile picture can be repositioned
•  - More statistics appearing on every campaign and athlete page (more to come)
•  - Improved timeline
•  - New design for the blog
•  - Fixed session issues

I know it may not seem like it, but we did take a few breaks this summer to enjoy the Montreal weather (in case you were worried).

A few of us went running with the Montreal Team In Training group. That’s our CTO and co-founder, Michael Shpigelman on the left.

The weather wasn't always great, but it was definitely beautiful near our office. 

If you have any comments or questions about the changes we made, or would like to suggest any new ones, please message us at . We would love to hear your feedback and know which features are most important to you!

From the whole MAKEACHAMP family, we wish you a hot and relaxing rest of the summer, and for those of you on the other side of the globe, we wish you a fun-filled winter :)