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:

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!).

Who are the people in the neighborhood?

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: