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:

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!

ROI Solutions Releases Donate Now!

Create & customize web pages directly in Revolution Online

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

An organization’s web presence – including branding and look and feel – is a critical part of its strategy and its organizational identity. “Organizations spend a lot of time and effort to create a specific design, and need that design to be applied across the entire spectrum of their interaction with constituents – especially on a component as important as a constituent donation page” said Gina VanderLoop, CEO of ROI Solutions. “The donation pages must fit seamlessly into the rest of the website. That was our paramount consideration in developing Revolution Online Donate Now! – to allow the pages to fit perfectly with the ‘look and feel’ of an organization’s existing site. At the same time, constituents are becoming increasingly sophisticated web consumers. They need to know that their personal data entered is being handled securely”, VanderLoop continued.

ROI Solutions was one of the first enterprise database software providers to offer a full featured “Open API” in 2007 and that allowed clients to connect forms on their websites directly to Revolution Online with the data coming directly into their own membership/donor database. “We saw a great need to expand our offering for organizations that were often times hiring outside consultants or other vendors to manage donation sites, and that was costing them a lot of money and lost time in getting those transactions and donor information back into their own database”, said VanderLoop.

ROI Solutions will offer its Donate Now! site at no charge to its clients.

Aside from no cost to its clients, which is significant, there are other great benefits. The ROI Donate Now! site administration is easily accessible via the User Interface directly in Revolution Online allowing users the ability to create and customize an unlimited number of pages. This allows ROI clients the ability to manage their own sites directly without needing to build and support the difficult and sometimes expensive infrastructure associated with PCI/DSS compliance. This also allows data to come directly into your database real-time without the need for special uploads or sync processes with another outside system. All of your data is together in one place where it should be.

ROI Solutions supplies the necessary high-strength SSL encryption and compliance certification that are important to providing a safe and secure online environment for constituents. In addition to industry-standard PCI-DSS compliant web security ROI’s multiple web servers support high availability through round-robin dispatching with dynamic failover.

Whether you want to collect one-time donations, enable donors to sign up for multi-part contributions, event sign ups, or even manage an ongoing sustainer program, Revolution Online Donate Now! will do it all for you.

Please contact your Technical Account Manager for a demonstration and a real sample page set up for your own organization’s site.

You might think the summer months are quiet — vacations, sun, beaches, backyard cook-outs and all that “fun” stuff. But I’ve learned something in my many, many years of working with programmers. If I open the blinds on their windows, give ‘em a few iced lattes and a couple of tofu dogs, those guys think they’re on vacation and they don’t stop doing their development work.

As you can see from this month’s update, there’s been a LOT going on behind the scenes. I am very proud of these new features — all of which have been developed at no additional charge to our customers. In fact there’s so much to tell you — I might even re-send this update out a few times in case you are on vacation, although I would imagine these updates make great beach reading….

Enjoy!

Introducing FLEX Lists

This is gonna be big. Trust me.

Starting NOW, you will see a new little widget sprinkled throughout Revolution Online giving you the option to [SAVE AS FLEXLIST] and it looks like this:

And even inside the QueryTool, you have an option to do a query and save the output as a FLEXLIST.

When you select this option, you are prompted to name your list.

And then here’s where the magic happens. Once you’ve SAVED your FLEXLIST from anywhere in the database or via the QueryTool, you can now do some amazing things with these lists. Using the “Combine Lists” tool, we give you the ability to work with your own FLEXLISTS directly in Revolution Online. You can merge these lists together, find unique records that appear on both lists, as well as subtracting records that appear on one list from the other. You can then save the resulting records to another FLEXLIST.

But wait….there’s MORE!

We even provide you with a FLEXLIST TOOL that allows you to perform certain functions against these lists — such as: assigning flags, comments, contact history or assigning major gifts projects.

Ticklers to Outlook

In addition to setting up ticklers and getting reminders on-screen as well as via email, now you can set them up to go directly into your Outlook Calendars. Just click the Outlook Appointment button.

Now, you can get on-screen reminders, emails sent directly to the specified email address AND Outlook Calendar Appointments. (You know what that means, right? There’s no excuse for forgetting my birthday).

Job Management & Tracking – Full Transparency

The ROI world has been quite abuzz lately with our new Job Management & Tracking System. If you don’t know what this is, read on….

Because ROI Solutions operates as a full service provider in addition to application hosting, we offer our clients data extracts and programming upon request. In fact since our founding back in 1999, we’ve processed over 12,000 “job requests.” These requests have historically been sent to your technical account manager for implementation and logged into our internal Job Management & Tracking Database.

NOW the Job Management & Tracking System is ONLINE and located in the “Jobs” Tab including full history of every request every submitted:

Within this tab, you will be able to submit any requests directly through Revolution Online and track its progress to completion. There you can attach documents (such as mail plans and comments) and see Real-Time progress on your requests and as well pick up any files directly online.

In addition to being a nifty management tool, we offer full history of all request ever submitted to ROI Solutions – including your prior mail plans, counts, and extracts — all online! Full transparency and history in all of the requests submitted on behalf of your organization.

Secure Upload – PCI/DSS

You already know that you can process credit card and EFT gifts through Revolution Online. Those gifts can be keyed in or they can come in from your website using the ROI Open API. But what about those “other” places you get donations from…like from other Vendors? You know, those files they put on an FTP site and then you have to retrieve them and so something with them ???? Well, now you can use the ROI Secure Upload Feature to get them into your database — safely and securely — meeting all PCI-DSS rules and requirements.

Using the New Secure Upload Feature, we allow you the ability to upload sensitive credit card data directly into Revolution Online for immediate processing of payments.

Located in the Tools–>Commands Section of Revolution Online, select the Secure Upload option:

From there, the on-screen widgets will step you through the process of uploading your file allowing you to enter in the password protection and encryption information.

…And then depending on your organization’s business rules, once inside Revolution Online, these transactions can be handled in any way you desire — including automated processing of the donations and credit card/EFT processing.

Did You Know?

ROI has a Facebook Page and it’s a great way to keep up on the inside scoop on many development features. Click the below link to find us and become a fan.

You can also follow us on Twitter:

1. choose the [SAVE FLEXLIST] command at the top of your search results lists
2. choose the [SAVE FLEXLIST] command at the top of most tables that contain
3. constituent information throughout the application — such as the account clean-up functions on the TOOLS tab, the prospecting lists in the MG Console, or pretty much any other list of constituent records.
4. choose the Save the results to a FlexList option when you execute any QTool query.
5. you can even add the members of any account to any existing FlexList from the individual donor view and edit pages, just click the and images at the top of the page.
6. every user also has an automatically-created “recent accounts” list that contains all of the accounts you have worked on recently, kept up-to-date as you work.

When you create a FlexList you can give it a name and a detailed description — so that you can remember what it was. Then the fun begins.

The tools in this section let you go back and manipulate your FlexLists in interesting ways.

1. list maintenance: use this tool to review your lists, change their names and descriptions, delete lists you no longer want, give copies of your lists to your closest friends, and refresh the list by dynamically re-executing whatever command was used to create the list in the first place. (Admins note: There’s a second version of this tool built especially for you, that lets you manipulate FlexLists created by anyone in your organization!)
2. list output: this tool lets you view and export the contents of your lists, and add almost any other database elements to the output listing. You can create as many collections of output fields as you like, name the collections, and easily apply them to other lists you create in the future.
3. combine lists allows you to mix and match.
   1. Add two lists together to create a third, larger list using the “UNION” operator.
   2. Find accounts that any two of your lists have in common by using the “INTERSECTION” operator.
   3. Remove accounts in one list from any of your other lists with the “MINUS” operator.

   You can name and describe each of these new combined lists, and operate on them the same way you can with any other lists.

4. flexload tool: if you’re familiar with our Upload Tool, you’ll see right away what FlexLoad is all about. It gives you the ability to take a list, and apply some common database operations to all of the accounts inside it.
   1. Assign a flag
   2. Write a comment or research note
   3. Create contact history records

   It’s easy for us to write new database operation scripts, so if you don’t what you need, just ask.

* Open APIs are used by many of our clients to connect their ROI Revolution database to their organizational website, thus having information and updates as well as donation informatio coming directly into their databases real-time and online.

Now to be fair, I am writing this “white paper” from my perspective. I am the majority stockholder (owner) and President and CEO of ROI Solutions, Incorporated, a company I started 11 years ago. ROI Solutions provides integrated database hosting and management services to non-profit organizations. We don’t provide “installed” version of our software – never did; never will. And there’s a reason for that. And to be equally fair, when I talk about hosted applications for non-profits as an option, I am only speaking about my company and the product and services as well as pricing that ROI Solutions offers. While I have a pretty good understanding of the market place as a whole as well as individual companies (both installed and hosted), my vantage point is where I live on a day-to-day basis, which really drives everything we do at ROI Solutions.

Now that we have the disclaimers out of the way, a few technical definitions are in order.

1. Installed software (sometimes referred to as in-house applications) are software packages that are bought and installed locally within your office. Such applications can be installed on a single machine, or more typically on a server that then provides access to others via your network. The major point to note here is that for the purposes of this document, these software packages are maintained locally by you and your staff who are the “purchaser” of the software.
2. Hosted software is software that is hosted elsewhere – outside of your local environment and network. A lot of hosting software companies like to refer to their applications as either “Software as a Service” (SaaS) or “Application Service Provider” (ASP). I tend to not use the “SaaS” for the simple reason that “software is software” and “service is service” and software vendors shouldn’t confuse the two. But that’s my pet peeve.

Putting my software developer’s hat on for a minute: from a software development perspective, installed software implies a certain core design element that is related to the fact that once the software is deployed it must literally meet the needs of hundreds, or thousand of users. As such, the software becomes “shrink-wrapped” – essentially package-able to accommodate not only the initial installation but also the upgrade path. On the other side of the software coin, are the service bureaus: those companies that provide those ‘highly customized’ database applications that can be quite costly in terms of scalability.

By design, ROI Solutions is unique in the software arena. We offer a fully hosted ASP solution that is fully customizable to the unique needs of our individual clients at any time, or not. That is, our application is ready to go “as is” or, for those organizations whose needs change over time, it is scalable. We also operate as a full-service database provider and we give our clients full control over their own database for those clients that don’t “need us.” And we don’t sell our application by the “module” because it is my belief that everything should be included, not “sold separately.”

To understand costs, it’s important to understand how database companies make their money and I am going to let you in on a few secrets here:

1. Installed software vendors make their money on the initial purchase and ongoing maintenance/licensing and future upgrades of your system as well as by selling you extra “modules” which then require additional customization and implementation and additional licensing fees.
2. Hosted software vendors make their money over-time on hosting fees.
3. Database service bureaus make their money on getting paid for the work they do.

Outside of this, implementation specialists and consultants make their money on helping you figure out which database to go with and then, if they’re lucky on any initial and on-going implementations you may need down the road.

It is therefore important to choose wisely and to have a full picture of costs not only up front in Year 1, but as well over a 3-year and 5-year period. Only then can you fully understand the true costs of installed v. hosted database implications.

It’s probably now time for me to insert my car analogy here:

Question: Hey Gina is it better to lease a car or buy it outright?
Answer: It depends.

If you are someone that’s going to buy a car outright today – pay cash for it and drive it into the ground for 10, 15 years when you’re done with it such that that car has no real value other than donating it to the Boys and Girls Club then by all means that makes total sense. Buy it.

But in the database world, who wants to be driving around in an old car?

Pricing Considerations:

With installed software, most costs are “up front” for the initial purchase of the software and equipment that is necessary to run the application effectively. (And this doesn’t mean there aren’t on-going costs). That is once you decide to purchase an installed database application; you pay for the software and licensing up front. If your organization’s data is sizable, this may also mean necessary equipment purchases such as a dedicated or shared server to run the application and store the data, this can also be an up front cost. Since the software is purchased outright/upfront, an organization would do well to factor in the interest lost due to the cash outlay (where any large sum of money might otherwise be invested or gaining interest).

YEAR 1 — A simple costs formula for installed software:

Start-up costs + % of interest on the initial cash investment = Total First Year Costs.

Where start up costs include:
Initial software purchase
Extra “modules” purchase
Licensing fees
Customization expense
Conversion costs
Implementation costs
Training
Equipment/Additional Software expense:
Server
Operating Software
Backup
First year support costs

With hosted software, vendors typically charge a monthly fee that is based upon some metric. This can be a major benefit in terms of not having to come up with a significant amount of cash up front – by essentially amortizing your up front costs over time. For ROI Solutions, that price is based upon the number on concurrent users (simultaneous logins) and the number of total records on the file (active v. lapsed or in-active records).

YEAR 1 — The ROI Solutions simple cost formula:

Start-up costs + (monthly hosting fees x 12 months) = Total First Year Costs.

Where start up costs include:
Conversion costs
Customization expense
Licensing fees

Pricing Considerations – Staffing & Infrastructure Costs:

Now that you’ve figured out the first year costs in each area, you need to give some thought to staffing and management of the database system. This is one cost area often overlooked by many organizations when considering installed software. Will an installed software application require dedicated staff management? What about maintenance by your IT staff? Put a value on those and be sure to include benefits – those are a cost too.

Staff Management Time x # of staff x % of staff time spent x % of benefits/FICA
Staff Maintenance Time x # of staff x % of staff time spent x % of benefits/FICA

With hosted software, the Staff Maintenance costs (typically handled by the organization’s IT staff) go away and it is true that a significant amount of your staff management costs go down.

Now do the math for years 2, 3, 4, and 5.

With installed software, you can expect to pay annual support fees in Years 2, 3, 4, 5 for ongoing support and product upgrades. This is typically 25% of the original purchase price of the software. You should also plan to budget for the purchase of extra modules that may not have been included in the original software purchase and with that, additional implementation costs. The thinking here is it is better to think forward in case you “might” need such modules down the road, rather than be surprised of such an expense. In addition, if the installed software required initial equipment purchases, you should budget for equipment upgrades and support renewals in Year 4 of those purchases. (Most equipment purchases will give you a 3-year warranty). And then factor in the staff costs in management and maintenance for Years 2, 3, 4, and 5. Also don’t forget to budget for extra training sessions – on the chance that you have new staff that you need to train.

For hosted software, your math may be a little simpler, again by taking the monthly management fees x # of months to arrive at your yearly totals. But to be fair, don’t forget that if you require some level of staff management here, to include that as well as benefits. And as well, it’s never a bad idea to include some level of special programming expense in the event that your organization has some special opportunity down the road that requires some additional programming.

Once you’ve done this level of cost-analysis, you can begin to see the cash value of the initial investment made in Year 1 for installed v. hosted software and how these overall costs compare over a 3 and 5 year period.

A real example

Taking a real live example of a client that was on another installed software product before coming on to ROI Solutions and comparing their initial and longer term costs using actual expenses, the below is a chart illustrating the costs.

Most of their expenses were in the initial software purchases and then in subsequent purchases and implementation costs as well as on-going internal staff management of the system. After five years, their software package was basically the same as when they bought it while the ROI Revolution application had introduce many new features that the organization didn’t have until the joined us as a client. What’s not included in the above are the lost opportunity costs ranging from the investment in the original software package (money that could have been spent on other things such as programs) as well as their lack of ability to do some things with their database without incurring additional expenses.

ROI Solutions

As I said earlier, my company doesn’t offer an installed application. There are many reasons for this – the strongest reason being that from where I sit, it’s not cost-effective from the client perspective. At ROI Solutions all we do is live, eat, and breathe our clients’ data. Our clients have a lot of other work to do besides managing their own data so we take care of that for them. ROI Solutions handles all of the management and maintenance of the application – meaning our clients never have to think about upgrades, backups, and being on the latest version of software or equipment platforms or how to use their system. If they have new staff, or get stuck, they pick up the phone and get a real-live person on the other end – someone who knows their system and their data. This also allows our clients to be on the latest and greatest most up-to-date systems.

And because ROI Solutions doesn’t sell our application in “modules”, our clients are always offered the full suite of products day one with no extra or hidden costs down the road. This certainly takes the guess work out of future expenses. We also don’t charge for training. Ever.

Here’s an example of some of the standard features we offer day one with our hosted solution at no additional charge:

And throughout time, our clients still have the latest and greatest, most-up-to-date database application on the market – today, tomorrow and five years from now.

This new feature lets you configure your own personal default values for when you create new records, pledges, batches, comments, and Major Gifts Projects using various screens in the application. Located in the ADMIN Tab, under “Personalization:”

What’s cool about this is that it lets you specify personal options and preferences for a number of editable system elements:

To proceed, select one of the items in the list above to display the elements on that screen that you can personalize. Pick your favorite choices and click the save button; when you go to that screen to add something new, your favorite choices will be pre-populated for you.

Profile Reports

You can build your own on screen displays for donor information by selecting the Profile Report within the navigation in any record. This lets you build dynamic on-screen displays with whatever information, in whatever order you want to see. Simply click on the Profile Report Option:

On the right side, you will see all of the options. Specify the items you want to have appear in your custom display:

You will notice that we even allow you the ability to select exactly how much information you want to see. For example, maybe you don’t want to see every comment going back to 1962, etc. Here you can enter in the criteria for how much information to display as well as the order in which it displays.

Once you’re done building your criteria, click “Process” to build your custom display. You can also save your report for future use in case you have a board member or someone that always wants to see particular information about a record the same way each time.

When you build your on-screen report, you can hit PRINT and it will print exactly as you’ve specified. Particularly useful if you have on the road fundraisers and need to give them the “skinny” on a particular donor they’re about to meet.

Upload Information

We ROI folks are freaks about documentation. You probably knew that from the User’s Manual, Online Video Tutorials, ROI News, Online Business Rules, Report Summaries, SQL Tools, SQL Functions, Online Schema View Structures, Field Level Descriptors, helpful hints and screen tips that are sprinkled throughout the system, and oh my goodness, I could go on and on….

But here’s something I didn’t know. If you are an uploader of sorts, and you click on this icon (otherwise known as “more than just a pretty icon”):

You get a listing of all of the uploads that are available in your domain along with details on exactly what the upload procedure does.

Did You Know?

At the bottom of every page in Revolution Online, there’s a little tiny text note. If you’re having problems after hours – you can click it and it will send an email to the ROI Staff who are on call. We don’t like to brag, but we’re a pretty responsive group — even in the wee hours of the morning. (And yes, I get these notifications too!).

I got an email last week from one of my client pals saying, “Hey Mama G – wouldn’t it be cool if ROI could make something whereby we could enter in a zip code and find all the donors within a certain radius?” The thinking was if they were doing an event or planning a trip, they could locate all the people nearby and invite them.

In nerd-language, this is called “Geo-Coding” and it deals with longitude and latitude coordinates (which we happen to store in your database for every record) and a thing called “higher-mathematics” …and something called the Haversine Formula. You know the one that goes like this:

That helps you to answer this question:

Finally a use for algebra! …and well anyway, it’s so much better than having to know all the zip codes or that CBSA-data stuff, isn’t it?
So we got our shiny cool glasses and a couple of chalk boards and got to work right away.

Now, in the MG Console you will find this handy little ditty:

This feature was brought to you by The Haversine Formula & Letter R.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a distraction watch this video

QTool queries….Set ‘em & forget ‘em

I know, try as you might, it’s hard to forget queries. But now, when you have a query that you like to run on a regular basis, you can use the new schedule function. This allows you to run a query on whatever interval you chose.
Just click the schedule icon:

Pick your desired schedule:

And sit back and relax. We’ll take care of the rest for you.

You will soon notice, that if your query uses any date selections, if you use the schedule option, we will prompt you to see if you want “relative” or “absolute” dates. This gives you the option of advancing your date criteria into the future with relative dates — or using the same fixed date each time you run the query.

Promotions

The promotion screens have some pretty nifty features that are worth highlighting. First of all, if you don’t know, the Promotional Screens are nothing more than groupings for your source codes which can be grouped by campaign, source type, contact type, and contact year — to help keep them organized. And what’s unique to Revolution Online is that rather than having a hard-coded display that you can’t change, we allow you the ability to customize this so you can change the view:

Like perhaps, let’s say you want to see it organized by Promotion:

…Or by Year (Calendar or Fiscal):

And within that, you can even select which years and columns you want to see:

The reason why this is nice is because then at whatever level you want to see, you can click on the branch in the tree-view navigation, select the summary or donation buttons to get a real-time view of your results.

Did You Know? >>MG Actions

Revolution Online gives you an easy way to manage your Major Gifts Projects & Actions. In addition to setting up Projects for groups of records through the Major Gifts Project Wizard (see Major Gifts Project Wizard) you can also mark Actions as completed through the MG Console. To do this, simply go into the Console, view your actions and use the handy little drop down wizard as shown below: