Feature Updates – June 2009

Personalization. Not just for direct marketing.

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!).

Features Update – October 2008

ROI Releases QTool2…

We’ve introduced a new Query Tool for our users that allows you the ability to create more dynamic and comprehensive queries and outputs through Revolution Online. For more information, please see the Revolution Online Help Menu (and there you will also find an online video tutorial).

In addition to building queries for you, this new Tool offers other features such as:

  1. Personal “Tool Box” – providing an easier way to save elements or portions of any query for later use and re-use in building additional queries.
  2. Online summary information – displaying everything from the details of the query itself to when it was last run.
  3. Online file pick-up or email output with notification.
  4. Exposed raw SQL statements – providing you the “behind-the-scenes” detail (for those of you who like to “see” the SQL behind the query).
  5. Enhanced layout and file retrieve functions – giving you more flexibility in your outputs.
  6. Global “Exclusions” – providing client administrators the ability to set organization-wide exclusions to be applied to all queries.

And all of the features that existed in the Original Query Tool such as Copy to and Sharing Options as well as super fast results.

Just a reminder: This feature is provided to all ROI clients at no additional charge and specialized training is also free. Please contact your ROI Technical Account Manager. (And a special thanks to our Beta-Testers!)

We call them Flex Notes!

When you go to the donor account screen, in the commands section in the top right corner of the window, you will see a new icon that looks like a note tacked to a bulletin board:

Click the “note” icon to open an edit box where you can enter a note for the current donor account.

As you see. you are given the choice to show this note to just yourself, or to everyone in the client domain.

When you are done, click “save” — or click anywhere else on the page to cancel editing.

When you open an account that has a note on it, the donor name at the top of the screen is double-underlined the same way that the list items were underlined, indicating that the account has a note. You can see this indicator from every sub-function on the page, and from both the EDIT and VIEW screens.

In addition, you can manage all Flex Notes through the Tools Folder. There you can also create multiple Flex Notes for several accounts at the same time.

Introducing ROI Analysis

As a ROI client, you know Revolution Online can store as much information as you can gather, no matter what that information is. Having this kind of data warehouse — the ability to access all of your information simultaneously — makes analysis faster, easier, and more comprehensive than ever before.

Toward the goal of helping you understand the health of your file, ROI Solutions has developed a special suite of Client Analysis Reports that gets at the heart of your file – from every angle, encompassing all of the data elements you currently store directly in Revolution Online.

  1. Campaign, Contact, Contact Type and Demographic Analysis
  2. Donor File Key Health Analysis
  3. Loyalty/Retention Analysis
  4. Donor/Member Reactivation
  5. Upgrade/Downgrade Analysis
  6. Giving Summary Analysis
  7. Lifetime Giving by Acquisition and Source Type Analysis
  8. Upgrade/Downgrade
  9. Universe Analysis
  10. And more!

    ROI is offering a special one-time full file analysis to you and your organization at no charge. ROI Solutions and its team will provide your organization with a full picture of the health of your file from every angle. Contact your ROI Technical Account Manager for more information.

    Did You Know? >>Online Video Tutorials

    There’s a slew of online video tutorials located in the Online Help menu.

    If you go to the Help Contents to the item called “Show Me” there you will see the video tutorials we’ve created.


    Just sit back, relax and enjoy the show!

Features Update – June 2008

Client Chatter – Online User’s Forum

We love it. And we love hearing from you. And we think you all have great ideas and might also like to chat with each other.

So we’ve put together an online user’s forum site. It’s called the ROI Revolution Online Community Knowledgebase & Support, which we understand is a mouthful, so we just call it simply “ROI ROCKS” (Hey—we never said we weren’t self-serving and cheeky).

It’s located at http://roisolutions.com/rocks/. It’s free and all you have to do is register. There you can share your ideas, learn from other users and post questions. And certainly, you can talk amongst yerselves….

Campaign Costs

The Revolution Online database allows you to keep track of your campaign costs. (And by the way, this isn’t a new feature…in fact it’s been a part of the ROI systems since 1999). And many of the ROI Reports display costs as a way to help you keep track of your campaign profitability. Now I know, sometimes when you submit your mail plans and costs are uploaded you might not fully know what the final costs of a campaign may be. That’s why we give you this nifty little ditty: we call it “Campaign Costs” (clever, huh?).

Located in the Tools Menu, this function allows you to allocate the costs of a campaign among the individual source codes within the campaign.

  1. Select a campaign from one of the pulldowns.
  2. Enter the total cost.
  3. Click “split costs” to review the impact of that cost on all of the source codes in the campaign.
  4. Once you are satisfied with the results, click “save costs” to save the cost information.

Keeping Your Drop Counts in Check

Located in the Tools Tab/Promotion Edit Screens, this function allows you to review and adjust the drop counts of all source codes within a given campaign to match the counts of actual contact records in donor contact history.

  1. Select a campaign from one of the pulldowns.
  2. The list will be refreshed with the current count from the source code table and the contact history table — the difference between
    these numbers will be highlighted in the “DIFFERENCE” column.
  3. Click “correct drop counts” to update the source code table with the actual contact values from the donor contact history.
  4. Note that unit costs and total costs for any affected source codes will be automatically adjusted to reflect these new counts.

Did You Know? – [NCOALink]

ROI Solutions now provides NCOALink® services to its clients directly – offering a lower cost alternative to the other vendors. Using the same packages other vendors use (NCOALink®) provided by the United States Postal Service and through our service level provider AccuZIP, ROI Solutions can now process NCOA and CASS certification for our clients at a discounted rate. By bringing this software and service “in-house” we are able to provide a more streamlined and faster NCOA process and help decrease costs for our clients.