FOS 4.0 | The Latest Avid Update

With FOS 4.0, Avid becomes your fundraising agent. In earlier releases, Avid showed you data. In 4.0, Avid analyzes your program, finds the opportunity, builds the audience, and pre-builds the campaign play. You spend less time searching and more time acting.

What's in FOS 4.0

• Your Dashboard a personalized home page you build by pinning what matters
• Multiple dashboards a dedicated board for each program, campaign, or role
• Smarter Top Insights prioritization 15 to 20 signals now rank what matters most
• Suggested Audiences Avid finds the opportunity and builds the audience for you
• From Suggested Audience to Smart Play a pre-built campaign play, ready to launch
• Ask Edna, elevated a dedicated AI home with new settings and live account answers
• Privacy by design how Avid protects donor information inside Edna
• The five Avid plans a consolidated plan structure, already live
• Avid + Wiland a two-way prospect audience integration

Your Dashboard

Your Dashboard is your personalized home page inside Avid. Pin charts, reports, audiences, insights, and more to one place, then come back to a board that's already loaded and ready.

Your pins, notes, and layout are only visible to you.

Getting started

The first time you open Your Dashboard, Avid asks about your main roles and responsibilities. Select up to 4 roles, for example Donor Acquisition, Major Gift Officer, Email & Digital, or Database Administrator. Your answer seeds a starting layout relevant to your work.

Pinning items

There are two ways to build your board:
 

• Pin reports and charts from Insights with the Add to dashboard control. Your exact filter settings are saved with the pin.
• Add modules from your dashboard's Catalog tab.

Customizing your layout

Once items are pinned, you can:
 

• Drag and drop modules to rearrange
   

  

• Resize any module
   

  

• Adjust per-module settings
• Remove any module

Module catalog

The Catalog tab includes these modules:
 

• Audiences
• Connections
• Countdown
• Daily Top Insights
• Date and Time
• Analog Clock
• Lockstep
• Notifications
• Pathways
• Quick Note

Every board also includes a User Info module showing your organization and plan.

Your board is saved and loads instantly. Avid does not re-run reports each time you open it.

Multiple dashboards

In FOS 4.0, you can build up to 5 dashboards and switch between them. Create a dedicated board for each program area, campaign, or season you manage, for example acquisition, major gifts, or a current campaign.

With multiple dashboards you can:
 

• Create a new board with the + control next to your dashboard tabs. Your first board is named My Dashboard.
   

  

• Name each board in its Settings panel.
   

  

• Share a board with a colleague from the Team Access tab in the Share panel.
   

  

• Send a recurring email digest of a board from the Schedule Email tab, on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence.

Smarter Top Insights prioritization

The prioritization engine behind Avid's top insights was rebuilt for FOS 4.0. It now weighs 15 to 20 signals, up from about 5, using the same methodology as Avid's propensity modeling.

The signals include:

• The biggest change over six months
• How fast the change is happening
• The scale of the metric
• Strategic importance

The shift is from "what changed" to "why it matters." Insights are now ranked and explained, so Edna can tell you why a metric that moved 1% outranks one that moved 5%.

On your dashboard, the Daily Top Insights module surfaces your highest-priority insights, each with an Edna Analysis explaining why it is a priority. You can choose how many insights the module shows.

Suggested Audiences

Suggested Audiences is the flagship feature of FOS 4.0. Avid analyzes your whole program, finds an opportunity, and builds a ready-made audience for you. A suggested audience is a group of donors matching a specific opportunity. Suggestions refresh monthly or on demand.

Each suggestion includes:

• A name and a plain-language description, for example donors positioned to upgrade to major giving through one-time gifts
• The evidence for why Edna suggested it
• Guidance on how to talk to that audience

When a suggested audience is ready, you receive a notification: Your suggested audience is ready for review. From the review screen, you can edit, save, or export the audience, or use it in a play (a campaign you run through Avid's Playbooks tool).

When you act on a suggested audience, Avid builds the next suggestion in the background.

Suggested Audiences also appear in the Audiences module on your dashboard.

From Suggested Audience to Smart Play

When a suggested audience fits a campaign, Avid pre-builds the play for it. A Smart Play is a proven campaign template that Avid tailors with AI to a specific audience and the reason it was suggested.

Here is how it works:

1. Edna identifies the opportunity and builds the audience.
2. A Smart Play is pre-built for that audience.
3. The play lands in your Playbook, ready to launch.

You do not need to build the audience or configure the play from scratch. Both arrive together.

For more on running plays, see Create a Play with AI and Launch a play with Playbooks.

Ask Edna, elevated

Ask Edna is Avid's AI fundraising assistant. Edna joins the main navigation with a dedicated home: one destination for your AI chat and all AI settings.

Edna helps you answer three questions about your program:

• What's happening? Ask what's going on in your program and get clear intelligence, not just a link to a chart.
• Why is it happening? Ask why a number moved. Edna surfaces trends, connects signals, and recommends an audience.
• What's next? Edna identifies what to focus on next, often before you ask. An audience is waiting, and a play may already be built.

AI settings

From Edna's home, configure how Avid's AI understands your organization:

• Mission Statement: a short description of your organization's mission
• Expanded Mission: additional context about your programs and goals
• Brand Terms: key brand terms, phrases, or terminology Avid uses to research news and stories for your organization
• Resource URLs: links that tell Avid where to look for your stories of impact

You can also upload your brand guidelines as a PDF. Avid uses it to generate mission and image library suggestions.

Image generation for everyone

AI image generation is on by default in FOS 4.0. You can turn it off at any time with the toggle in Edna's Image Generation settings.

When image generation is on, choose between two modes:

• Image generation is allowed: Edna can create new images
• Style and text edits only: Edna can edit existing images but not create new ones

You can also add Image Generation Instructions to guide the style of generated images.

Live account answers

In FOS 4.0, you can ask Edna questions about your Avid account directly. For example:

• When did my last sync run?
• What is my billing status?
• Who is on my team?

Plan-aware responses

If you ask Edna for something your current plan does not include, Edna points you to the upgrade path instead of returning an error.

For more, see Ask Edna and Control AI image generation and Your Image Library.

Privacy by design

Edna can answer questions that involve donor names, but your donors' personal information never reaches the AI model. Before any data goes to the model, names and personal identifiers are swapped for secure tokens. Edna reasons on the tokens only, and Avid restores the real values in your answer.

Additional protections:

• Edna only accesses data for the organization you are logged into.
• Using Edna requires you to sign in to an account that has Ask Edna enabled.
• Edna never launches anything on its own. Every play and outreach stays your decision.
• All data in transit uses SSL/TLS.
• Avid holds SOC 2 Type II certification.

The five Avid plans

Avid now offers a consolidated plan structure with five tiers. Each tier includes everything in the plans below it. This structure is already live.

Every client has one base plan. Add-ons sit on top of your base plan.

Avid + Wiland

FOS 4.0 introduces a two-way integration between Avid and Wiland, a prospect audience provider.

Here is what the integration does:

• Sync your data outbound: Avid securely syncs the donor data you choose to Wiland each month. This keeps the models behind your benchmarks and audiences current with your program.
• Receive prospect audiences inbound: Purchase Wiland prospect audiences and have them flow straight into Avid with no files and no manual imports, ready to target in Pathways and Playbooks.

The Wiland connection already exists in Avid today.

Learn more

• Release Notes
• Ask Edna
• Create a Play with AI
• What integrations work with Pathways?