ROI Solutions: Data Geek Speak

Feature Updates – April 2009

Published by admin on Apr 23rd, 2009 in feature updates with No Comments

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:

Features Update – June 2008

Published by admin on Jun 1st, 2008 in feature updates with No Comments

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.

Select a campaign from one of the pulldowns.
Enter the total cost.
Click “split costs” to review the impact of that cost on all of the source codes in the campaign.
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.

Select a campaign from one of the pulldowns.
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.
Click “correct drop counts” to update the source code table with the actual contact values from the donor contact history.
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.