A lot of people spend their labor day weekends doing fun stuff outside, soaking up the end of summer. Those people have their priorities straight. I spent the majority of mine adding Apple Pay support to Charitocracy.

Apple Pay

If you have a recent iPhone, iPad, or MacBook Pro with Touch ID (fingerprint sensor), or an Apple Watch and a Mac, then you'll see a "Donate with Apple Pay" button whenever you'd otherwise enter in your credit card details. If it's your first time using it, you'll see a "Set up Apple Pay" button which brings you to your device's Wallet settings. That's where you add your credit card(s) to Apple Pay.

So why use Apple Pay? For starters, it's fun. Apple Pay pops up a little panel with a fingerprint button. All you do is tap your Touch ID sensor, or double-tap your Apple Watch button, and bingo. Transaction complete. But then Apple Pay is also more secure. Your actual credit card number is never used for transactions.

You can use Apple Pay for signups and increases to your annual donation amount. For example, if you want to double your donation for this coming year, hint hint! The most common use of Apple Pay will be "sweetening the pot" with extra one-time donations, simply because it'll be so quick and easy now.

Stored Cards

But the rest of you, do not despair! I've improved the donation process for you, too. Our credit card processing company, Stripe, already keeps your credit card information on file in their vaults in order to process your annual recurring donations. But now I've made one-time donations and annual donation changes use those stored cards, too.

As before, your credit card details still never make it onto Charitocracy's servers. (We don't want 'em!) But now we tell Stripe to use your stored card whenever you want to make a donation. No more re-entering your credit card every time! Of course you can still choose to supply a new card. Or if your stored card fails to work for any reason, we'll offer up the Stripe credit card entry panel you know and love. You can store a new one that'll be used for all future donations.

Please try it!

I tested it out the best I can in my sandbox with fake Stripe credit card, but please do let me know if it all works! Make it rain on Special Olympics in these last few hours with an extra one-time donation of as little as $1. Or if you wait until tomorrow, you'll be sweetening the September pot.

These donation improvements combined with our new "forever" logins should make Charitocracy dramatically more convenient!

Apple, the Apple logo, Apple Pay, iPhone, and Touch ID are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

The day has come.

Reminder emails will start going out at least 1 week in advance of each automatic recurring annual donation. So if you signed up on September 1st 2016, the first day we opened the site to the public, then you can expect a reminder email this coming Friday at the latest. Others will follow throughout the year depending on when you signed up.

Emails will tell you how to cancel your recurring annual donation, but will also encourage you to increase your donation instead. Taking no action simply means the same amount will be donated on your Charitocracy anniversary. And there's no need to wait for that email to perform either task. You can cancel or increase your annual donation any time, right from My Account in the Charitocracy menu. You can also update your credit card information if anything's changed, like a lost or expired card, so the automatic donation will go through without a hitch.

I'm hoping our renewal rate is high, and that donation increases will offset any donors we lose along the way. But I'll also be focusing on growth during our 2nd operating year. I have lots of ideas for this, and welcome any additional ideas you may have. Let's get that monthly pot over $1500!

The biggest pain point for donors at Charitocracy is having to log in. I get it. I'm a donor, too, and I have to log in all the time. If you can even remember your password, it's still an annoying stop along the way every time you want to vote or read about a new nominee. Annoying enough that you may have stopped bothering to even try. I don't blame you one bit.

Starting today, if you check the Remember Me button while logging in, Charitocracy will remember you forever. That is unless you explicitly log out, switch to a new web browser, a new computer or device, delete your cookies, etc. Everywhere you log in, though, it will remember you forever if you simply check the Remember Me button. I highly recommend it! (But I don't recommend it on public computers, such as those at schools, hotels, and libraries. You should log out of Charitocracy when you're done on those shared systems.)

Go ahead, try it now!

"That would be fantastic," you say, "except I forgot my password months ago, so I can't even log in the first time for it to remember me forever."

Fear not! Resetting your password is super easy. A failed login will provide you this reset link. Then check your email inbox (and if that fails, check your spam folder). And failing that, do not hesitate for a moment to email me and I'll personally help get you back online!

A related tip for those of you using Macs, iPhones, and iPads: iCloud Keychain is an easy way to share passwords across all your devices. Turn it on in your iCloud settings, and then after you log into a site like Charitocracy on one of your Apple products using the Safari browser, in future it will offer to fill in your password on that product as well as others using the same iCloud account. I bet Google has something like that for Chrome browsers, too, not to mention 3rd-party apps and services that serve a similar purpose.

That cross-device password storage combined with the Remember Me checkbox should mean never having to remember your Charitocracy password, and almost never having to log into Charitocracy ever again. No one will benefit from that more than I will!