Manage Planned Giving

A lot of users are using Revolution’s Major Gifts Console, so we extended the functionality of the console to Planned Giving – right in its own tab called PG Console.

Similar to the Major Gifts Console, you can create planned giving projects, assign and manage tasks. And you can even use the Planned Giving Prospecting Tool to identify potential donors…

… and then add the results to a handy flexlist and use the Planned Giving Project Wizard to assign projects to all your planned giving candidates.

Similar to the way that Major Gifts projects work, Planned Giving projects can be assigned to solicitors and managed through the PG Console. All individual project information will also display on each prospects account.

In addition, Revolution Online’s Planned Giving Console allows you the ability to create and manage Planned Giving specific to your organization’s offerings such as your plan type and allowable asset types – giving you the complete flexibility to house your planned giving programs based upon the way you run your Planned Giving Programs. Contact your Technical Account Manager for more information or to schedule a training.

Update Major Gifts and Planned Giving Projects on the Road

You just came out of a meeting with a potential major donor, you don’t have a commitment but you have a lot of new information and some thoughts on how you might approach them in the future. You probably already know that you can email a comment directly into Revolution by sending to your mail2db address and including ID: account_number. Now in addition you can send an email that will automatically become either a planned giving research note or a major gifts research note.

Here’s how it works:

For example, to add an email as an account comment, a major gift research note and a planned giving research note:

In the above example the email will display as an account comment, a major gifts research note and a planned giving research note in account 469.

To use this feature, all you need to do is add a couple of code values in Revolution so let your technical account manager know if you are interested.

Did you know?

Your users can now select their own “start page” by going into the ADMIN TAB and selecting the “Set Personal Options” for the Preferred Start Tab. There is a drop down that allows users to select which page they want to have as their own start page. When they select the Tools Tab, that will be the first page they are brought to upon login. See below:

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.

In case you missed last month’s special announcement…

ROI Solutions released Donate Now! This feature allows you the ability to create custom web pages directly in Revolution Online. Donate Now! provides the ability for you to collect and process constituent donations and other information directly from visitors to your own website, with results coming directly into your own database in real-time without the need for a special sync process or exports from another system.

To read more about this feature, please visit: ROI Donate Now!

Already several groups have created their own pages – ranging from simple ’sign-up’ forms to one-time donations and monthly sustainer forms — with results coming directly into their own database — at no additional cost for hosting or management of these pages. And as always, many of our users have had great ideas and suggestions which have been incorporated into this feature so be sure to check the Revolution Online NEWS Tab for updates!

Credit Card Refunds

Yeah, we know….refunds are no fun.

But sometimes you just have to do it. And we know that your internal process for doing such wasn’t much fun either. So we enabled the ROI Credit Card Processing System to process refunds — directly from a donor account or through the batch processing system; whichever is easier for you.

Now when you are in a situation whereby you need to refund someone’s donation, you can click the REFUND button (providing you have proper security to do so, that is). Once you click the REFUND button, you are prompted to enter in the refund batch header and then this automatically creates a “refund batch” in the system for you. Once that batch is locked, the refund is processed through your payment provider and ROI takes care of the rest by refunding the transaction and the payments directly in the donor account.

[Note: this feature only works for those ROI customers that are using our payment processing system -- and where the donation has actually settled with your bank. So you can't refund donations that weren't processed, of course].

Shhh, it’s a secret….

It’s tough to keep a secret, it really is — especially with you smarties. You guys notice everything! In software, we think it’s important to use our own product – like for real, not just test stuff. Kind of like owning the ‘hair club for men’ and being a customer. Or that Remington Razor guy…you know the one who liked the Company so much, he bought it. Well, we ROI folks are always using our own products and this month’s ROI News is no exception so I might as well highlight it.

And so you might have noticed that this month’s ROI News looks just a little bit different from previous updates. And if you actually read these updates, chances are you’re gonna notice the small little text at the bottom of this email…something about email marketing by some company….

So I might as well just come clean. Yes, it’s true. And yes, it’s coming. But for the real update, you will just have to wait.

FlexLists

Last month, I told you about FlexLists and I promised it would be big and it is.
This little widget is sprinkled throughout Revolution Online giving you the option to [SAVE AS FLEXLIST]. And even inside the query tool, you have an option to do a query and save the output as a FLEXLIST. The capabilities are fabulous and it’s really great to see how folks are using this feature.

In addition to being able to send your queries and lists to FlexLists, you can also see the details directly within a record — allowing you the ability to see which FlexLists they may be be included in. And as well, you can selectively remove or add records to any of your already existing FlexLists.

Custom Layouts

In addition to being able to look at a listing in Revolution Online, you know you can “subscribe” to that listing (to have it sent to you via email on whatever schedule you desire) and you can export those results as well as save it as a FLEXLIST (see above). In addition, we allow you the ability to create custom layouts for your views. Just click on CUSTOMIZE and choose your options.

Within the menu, you will see any layouts you’ve previously created plus the option to create new layouts.

A Month in the Life of ROI:

In the past month, Revolution Online:

processed 1,573 interactive reports
processed 799 scheduled/automated reports
processed 60,064 search queries
processed 1,740 scheduled/automated queries
processed 402 file uploads
processed 723 upload processes
processed 8,661 user logins
processed successful 1,043 “Mail2DB” records
sent 3,033 informational email messages to users
sent 2,120 major gift ticklers to users
sent 2,078 messages to the outbound api queue
received 1,866 messages to our inbound api queue
handled 672,732 individual interactions with users
….and that was a quiet month!