September 16, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

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.

It’s been busy @ the “ROI Labs”

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:

The ROI Revolution Online FlexList feature is an exciting new addition to our database product that lets you take control of your constituent lists in a way you never could before. You can create these lists from a number of places throughout the application.

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.