This release brings Your Dashboard, a smarter insights prioritization engine, Suggested Audiences with pre-built Smart Plays, an elevated Ask Edna with image generation, a consolidated plan structure, and a new Wiland integration.
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 now ranks what matters most, not just what changed
- 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:
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Drag and drop modules to rearrange
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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:
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Create a new board with the + control next to your dashboard tabs. Your first board is named My Dashboard.
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Name each board in its Settings panel.
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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 engine behind Avid's top insights was rebuilt for FOS 4.0. It now weighs more signals together, and ranks them by why they matter, not just by how much a number moved.
The signals include:
- The biggest change over six months
- How fast the change is happening
- The scale of the metric
- How the current month compares with the same month last year
- Strategic importance
- The audiences and metrics you have marked as important
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%.
For a full explanation of how the ranking works, see Understand how Avid prioritizes your Top 5 Insights.
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:
- Edna identifies the opportunity and builds the audience.
- A Smart Play is pre-built for that audience.
- 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 is 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
In Edna, open Organizational Settings to 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.
Organization brand content and resources moved out of Settings. Open Edna, then Organizational Settings, to manage your mission, brand terms, and resource URLs.
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?
Ask Edna by email
You will be able to ask Edna questions from your inbox. Reply to your Avid dashboard digest email, or send a message to edna@avidai.com.
Edna identifies your account and the client data you can access, then answers based on your existing permissions. If you work across more than one organization, Edna first asks which one, listing your most recently used organizations.
Reply to the same thread to ask follow-up questions. Edna keeps the context of the conversation, and can include a link that opens the conversation in the Edna app so you can keep exploring in product.
For security, Edna sends summary-level answers only by email. It does not attach raw data files, and opening a linked report still requires you to sign in.
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, Control AI image generation and Your Image Library, and Manage brand content and resources
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.
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.