Our 2025 focus - building a stronger, smarter SwiftFox - with CEO John McLindon

Two years ago I visited Tel Aviv, a vibrant beating heart of technology and innovation. One evening I was sitting in a restaurant with a good friend, as he walked me through this just released platform called ChatGPT.

My mind was blown. A continuous conversation was being held with an app, and that app was using the entire internet as its brain. I was in a city where innovation is everywhere you turn, yet in this moment I was mesmerised by prompted responses on an iPhone!

It is incredible to think this was only 24 months ago.

In many ways, ChatGPT heralded the start of the wider public interest in artificial intelligence. AI has been around for years, but GPT put a platform you can touch and feel, an AI-powered personal assistant, teacher, and some-time advisor, in the hands of the average person.

So much has been written and predicted about the value of AI in the time since.

At SwiftFox, the focus of our dedicated AI Team has been on using artificial intelligence to produce valuable data insights for our clients. Features like predicting members at risk of leaving, contacts who may donate, the best time to send an email to an individual person. These features are aimed at putting to use the data our clients store in SwiftFox, producing insights for their teams to make more educated decisions.

In 2025, our AI development focus is shifting slightly. Our priority this year will be features that simplify the everyday work undertaken by our users.

Examples such as automatically generating summaries and action items for phone calls made through SwiftFox. Or creating SwiftFox Events in seconds, including automatically generating RSVP pages, ticket types and invitation emails. Our goal is for SwiftFox AI to be a user’s own personal assistant, helping slash the time currently taken to do many daily tasks.

This focus is revisiting that original promise of GPT, putting the benefit of AI in the hands of the average person - or average user in our case.

In addition to AI, it there is an enormous amount of work going on in 2025 on the fundamentals of SwiftFox. It’s not all big headline stuff (although there will be plenty of that), but significant improvements targeting several key areas for our users.

Turbocharging development

2024 was our biggest year of development yet. We released over 1,000 new feature enhancements, both big and small. 2025 will be even bigger! Each month, our talented development team will release a suite of big feature enhancements for SwiftFox, while each fortnight, we will also have a smaller release of general fixes and improvements.

Our new releases are always a fine balancing act. We appreciate users want to get enhancements in their hands as quickly as possible, but we also remain alert to the fact that too many releases, introduced too quickly, can affect reliability.

'SaaSification' - giving you the power to do more

A section of our roadmap is specifically focused on giving users more flexibility to make complex changes to their SwiftFox environment themselves.

Examples of this for the early months of 2025 range from the big, including enabling users to set and update their own subscriptions, plans and financial integrations, to the smaller, such as moving custom field sections and individual fields.

As we release these features, there’ll be Academy videos and help from our team of dedicated Account Managers also – to ensure that our users are fully supported to make these changes.

Prioritising existing feature enhancements

In recent years we have regularly released completely new features to SwiftFox, such as SwiftFox Automations, Membership Management, Invoicing, Tasks, Portals, the list goes on.

In 2025 we are adjusting our focus slightly, and our roadmap is prioritising enhancements to existing features. Some upcoming examples to look out for include:

·        Advanced List Builder: Expanded search abilities and simplifying our search flow.

·        SwiftFox Calls: Make and transcribe calls through SwiftFox, generate meeting summaries powered by AI, view sentiment analysis.

·        Automations: Delay the send time of your automations, and schedule automated journeys based on responses.

·        Forms: New embedding options for your website, in addition to iframes and our API, as well as further enhanced styling options.

Our 2025 roadmap is chock full of exciting stuff that wouldn’t be possible without the partnerships we have with our clients, who provide both ideas and inspiration for many of our new features.

The Academy

Last year, we added 61 new SwiftFox Academy online training videos. They received an even stronger reception than we had anticipated. Users love being able to watch engaging videos to learn in their own time, rather than needing to read a big document or schedule a meeting.

With this positive feedback, we plan to roll out our Academy content even quicker in 2025, to align with a massive roadmap rollout.

We will also be bringing back our Learning Webinars, which will focus on explaining popular use cases for our features. This is all about making it possible for users to take full control of our CRM – without needing a third party consultant for help.

More tailored industry-specific features 

One of the standouts of SwiftFox is our ability to provide industry-specific features, configured for our clients. Whether it's associations, member-based organisations, peak-bodies, charities, unions, or professional service firms, we love offering tools designed to meet the unique needs of these sectors.

Our continually growing expertise in these industries allows us to focus on delivering features that genuinely make a difference, such as specialised Accreditation Management or Advanced Member Engagement tools.

Unlike conventional sales or marketing CRMs that take a one-size-fits-all approach, we will further prioritise industry-specific features to ensure our clients get the tools they actually need. Our commitment to developing solutions for each industry is something we believe truly sets SwiftFox apart, and our skill in this area will further grow in 2025.

Faster implementation and onboarding

We have been doing a lot of work recently on enhancing our processes for implementing SwiftFox for new clients. We constantly review our users onboarding experiences, as well as analysing industry best practices.

One of our core principles is not outsourcing SwiftFox implementation to costly third parties, and we have brought on a number of experts to work with our team of dedicated Implementation Managers to continue streamlining the process of implementing SwiftFox.

Vigilance on data security

We are always working on data security; it occupies so much of our thinking. Bad actors never sleep, and they are getting more and more sophisticated. We were one of the early adopters in Australia of certification to ISO 27001:2013 and were pleased to have again been re-certified in 2024. But we are never satisfied when it comes to data security. This year we are working on new certifications which I look forward to updating users on throughout the year.

Closer partnerships with our clients and users

We’ve always believed that the closer we work with our users, the better our innovation. Clients are not just users of our CRM - they are partners in shaping SwiftFox’s future.

In 2025 we will work even closer with the organisations who rely on SwiftFox. This means listening to feedback, monitoring usage trends, and responding with features that meet needs as best as possible.

I describe our features as being 'co-created' with our clients, as they are built based on a combination of our team's expertise, our users’ ideas, and real-time usage data.

Our dedicated Client Team genuinely care about the success of our client's experience with SwiftFox. While there will always be competing priorities for our roadmap, we try our best to listen and respond with features that make the biggest difference.

Making a difference in 2025

As we dive into 2025, I am passionate about our focus being on making things simpler, smarter, and more tailored for our users. From streamlining daily tasks with AI-powered assistance, to refining and expanding the tools our clients rely on, every move we make is focused on delivering meaningful value.

At its heart, SwiftFox is a partnership between us and our clients. The feedback, ideas, and challenges will continue to shape everything we do.

So, here’s to the year ahead—one filled with hard work, innovation, and a shared commitment to making our clients’ work easier, their impact greater, and their goals more achievable.

We are already getting started!