Feature Updates – March 2010
Emma Email Marketing
Those of you who pay attention to such things may have noticed that a few months back your ROI features update emails started to look a little different and at the bottom it now says “powered by Emma.” You may have asked yourself, who’s Emma? Does she work at the power company? Perhaps she lives in ROI’s Data Center and hand addresses the emails?
Actually ROI has partnered with Emma, an email marketing company, to allow our clients to send email to their constituents directly out of Revolution Online. We like it so much we are now using it ourselves not only for our features updates but also for our ROI University course listings. The programming types around here refer to that as “eating our own dog food.”
ROI’s connection to Emma allows you to contact any flexlist of records (well, as long as they have a valid email address). Revolution handles the data selection and Emma handles the sending of the email and the tracking of responses. The responses are automatically loaded into contact results so you can see who was contacted, whether they opened the email, and if they took any actions after opening. (Did we mention automatically? Yeah, as in “you don’t have to do an export from another system or run a separate sync process”).
And those of us in the ROI offices think Emma looks a little bit like a ROI CEO we know:
Donate Now! Enhancements
Every week it seems like a new client is using Donate Now!
We’re not sure what they like best about it. Is it the ease of setting up a donation page using the look and feel of their organization’s Web site? Is it the ability to accept one-time gifts and also allow constituents to sign up for monthly pledges? Maybe it’s the way that the gifts and pledges, not to mention new accounts, come directly into the database without having to export records from another database and then import them to Revolution Online. Regardless of why, there is no question people are using it and here is what’s new.
Horizontal Ask Strings – A client of ours came to us saying she read an article that said that horizontal ask strings in online donation pages increased giving by 10 zillion percent. First we said, “Are you sure about that 10 zillion number?” Then we went ahead and added the feature and you can now create both vertical and horizontal ask strings in Donate Now!
Custom Radio Buttons – Another asked if they could customize the ask amount radio buttons to say things like ‘$10 a month’ and ‘$20 a month’”. Did we say no? Of course not, we made it so. In fact you can create custom radio buttons for gift amounts or any other data you want to collect and we even threw in the ability to create custom checkboxes. Now how much would you pay? (You don’t have to answer that because you know Donate Now! and its usage is free.)
Automated Confirmation Emails – Then a client asked if we could send out automated confirmation emails when a user clicked the commit this donation button. Off we went and made this feature and now you can write a response email that is customized to each Donate Now! page you have.
And Donate Now! isn’t just for donations. You might have noticed we are using Donate Now! to host our online registration pages for ROI University training classes and it has really streamlined the registration process. Now when you receive your ROI University class bulletin (sent via ROI’s Emma email marketing) you can click on a link, open a registration page (which is ROI’s Donate Now! site), fill in your details and sign up for a class (for which you will receive an automated email confirmation). C’mon, we dare you.
More Tools in the Tool Shed
We’ve made some additions to the Tools tab to allow you to do even more.
New Pledge Batch Types – In the Batch Input section, you can now create an Auto Pledge batch or an Auto CC Pledge batch. Creating a pledge using the Auto Pledge batch type allows you create a new pledge as you record that donor’s first payment. Creating an Auto CC Pledge batch allows you to add and process the first payment on a pledge using the credit card merchant account you already have set up through Revolution Online. For credit card pledges, future payments will be charged automatically. If your organization has pledges, please check with your ROI client services representative to get these batch types enabled.
Attach Documents to Source Codes – Every now and then you may want to go back and see what direct mail piece or telemarketing script was used with a particular source code. You can now attach a document and store it directly in Revolution Online. Any documents you attach to a source code are available in the promotion tree. Just click on the folder icon next to the source code to display all attached documents.
Save Upload Layouts – If you frequently upload files with the same layout, you can now save a layout in the upload tool and apply the layout to new files you upload. This saves you the step of reviewing the field definitions each time you upload the file.
Upload Excel Spreadsheets – We also recently added the ability to upload Microsoft Excel files through the upload tool. Excel files will work the same way csv and fixed format files have always worked, just upload your file, review and edit the field names and data types, process the upload and then use one of the many upload procedures available to load your data into Revolution Online.
At this rate we might need to get a bigger shed.
Did you know?
You may have noticed that all primary addresses in Revolution have congressional district information listed with them. We are doing that through a company called Mobile Commons which has made that data freely available through their API. Congressional districts are retrieved based on the geocode (longitude and latitude) of the primary address.
