Kevin Maloney, Chief of Research and Development, recently sat down with Robert Lambert to share why he is so passionate about our constantly evolving solutions.
For the last 15 years, I have focused my energies on the research and development of Revolution CRM. I want to share some of the things I’ve been working on over that period, starting with the evolution of the application itself.
The big thing about Revolution CRM is that when we first started building it, we took the time to create a robust infrastructure – from the application server components to the database to the back-end business rules processing – such that it was much more flexible and scalable than it probably needed to be at the time. Over the years, that flexibility and scalability meant we didn’t have the episodes of periodic upheaval that you often see in other tech companies. You probably know the kind of thing I’m talking about, where they scrapped everything every few years and started over from scratch with a version 2, version 3, new programming languages, new database vendors, and on and on.
At ROI Solutions, we don’t have versions – the closest thing we have to a version number is today’s date. Instead, we have a constantly evolving platform that can be extended in whatever new ways our clients need. While the user interface is dramatically different from what we started with, the system’s backbone is similar to what it was 12 years ago and is still very strong.
Behind the scenes in the lab, we monitor many statistics about Revolution CRM and its use by our clients: what parts of the application are getting the most action, what reports are being scheduled, processing times for uploads, client log-ins, and credit card processing by card type. It’s fascinating to witness and continue to learn from all these stats. I’ve been looking at the kinds of things that our power users are doing – the people who author their scripts and execute their SQL queries. Revolution CRM users run over 4,000 custom SQL queries in any given week.
There are a few other developments that have me pretty excited lately. First, we’ve teamed up with a world-class Data Science company to explore ways to use advanced analytics and machine learning to improve our clients’ marketing effectiveness.
We also recently launched our Constituent Care functional area. In this project, we worked with the same design team that collaborated on High Touch Prospect Management and an incredible client advisory group to streamline the workflow of users who deal with donors on the front lines, whether telephone service or email engagement. It’s now in active use by many clients.
People sometimes ask me what the future holds in nonprofit data management. While I don’t have a crystal ball, and it’s hard to predict what the subsequent technological advances will mean for our clients, I promise we will be ready.