Insightful Expands: What’s New and What’s Next – 2025

My Interest Email Alerts

In addition, we released My Interest email alerts. This one is for you, Record Managers, but also everyone else on your team. Record Managers, if you follow your organization and obituary, you can get notified whenever your organization is mentioned in an obituary.  

NOTE: – For those working in higher education, your alumni typically mention you in the obituary; for most other organizations, this is a great source of understanding why donations are coming in if the grieving family forgets to notify you.   

This feature has been a game-changer for staying on top of other topics that matter to you as well. Here’s what we’ve delivered:  

• You can now add topics of interest, such as “Major Donors in the Northwest” or “RFPs in Illinois,” and receive curated news alerts tailored to these areas. Our expert editorial team works behind the scenes to make sure they query our extensive news sources just right to deliver the news you want  
• When you Follow an interest, a NEW indicator highlights unread content, helping you focus on what’s new every time you log in.  

We want to make sure you’ll never miss important updates on your key priorities. To make sure you get those daily alerts, just hit ‘Follow’ on your interest. 

Latest News Persistence

We know that staying on top of the latest updates is critical. We heard from so many of you that the daily alerts are great… when you’re not sick or you’re not out for a long weekend or a well-deserved vacation. Here’s what we did:  

• Insightful now keeps the latest news visible for up to two weeks, even if you’re out of the office.  
• We’ve added read/unread tracking to help you quickly identify what’s new and prioritize accordingly. If you’re in the office and checking things daily, you won’t be bogged down by old news; but if you’re not, we ensure you never miss important news about your donors, no matter your schedule.  
• Obituary alerts work the same way, too  

Lists and Assignments 

 A small but mighty improvement to streamline your workflow:  

• Email alerts now display additional context, such as lists or assignments, next to each prospect’s name.  
• Latest News profile listings also include both pieces of information  

You are now able to see which profiles are tied to specific initiatives or team assignments. It’s that much easier to figure out who you need to notify or what to prioritize for review – a small change that makes a big difference.  

Team Setup and Collaboration: This 2025 feature is already live and available for all of you Admins – you can now set up follows for other team members, so you can streamline onboarding of new users; you can also unfollow on behalf of users, helping to ensure a seamless transitions when you have staff turnover or role changes.  

Coming soon, as soon as next month actually, you’ll start seeing Article Previews in Profile Email Alerts: you’ll be able to preview the first three articles directly in email alerts, making it easier to decide what to prioritize. We heard from many of you that it’s often not enough to know that a name appeared in the news – especially if you’re following someone like Jeff Bezos who likely has news every day. Seeing some article snippets will help you also get more of the context of what awaits in Insightful. 

At that same time, you will see a new Admin setting allowing you to select to show only higher confidence obits –similar to the setting for higher confidence news articles, this setting can be turned on to allow Insightful to select only those obituaries that match up to your prospect by name AND an additional piece of key information, whenever available. think of it as Insightful’s pre-verification of your record.  

Shareable article URLs: We will be adding the ability for you to share an article using a link that allows any user to access the article without requiring a login. Many of you create newsletters for your teams and others within the organization, and this should help you with that process. 

At Insightful, we are fortunate to be working with an amazing group of customers that are willing to share their feedback and use cases with us. We have evolved the application so much in response to your suggestions.   

• In the second quarter, we will work on adding functionality to our integrations. For RE NXT customers, we added non-constituent records last year, so all your important relationships are in Insightful helping you get the most targeted results. Next, we’ll simplify the work of adding fundraising assignments and importing your lists.  
• For those who import files to power Insightful, we made some improvements to that process this year as well by eliminating the need to wait for the import to complete; and we’ll continue to look at more streamlining and automation capabilities in the future.  
• Long term, we’re continuing to look for ways to help you get even more out of the news and obituaries in Insightful, so we’ll be exploring ways to identify important insights, names and relationships, and ways to let you act on those insights.   

These updates will continue to build on the solid foundation we’ve established in 2024, ensuring Insightful continues to be your go-to solution for staying on top of all the important news and obituaries.   

“Insightful recently alerted us about the passing of one of our biggest donors. The family had not published an obituary, so we weren’t aware of this important update until we received the funeral home notice from Insightful.” 

— Anne Wilson, Associate Director, Relationship Insights, Oregon State University Foundation