In the wake of the recent news (Blackbaud buying Convio), I’ve been asked to re-post our mission statement – which was developed back in 1999 and rings true to this day.

ROI Solutions exists…

• To provide advanced, comprehensive, integrated, and sophisticated technologies to non-profit clients and socially responsible businesses.
• To foster an internal work environment where staff are interconnected to the advances in technology and their associated benefits insofar as they help to advance our clients’ organizational missions.
• To pursue technological advances that improve our clients’ effectiveness.

Management Guidelines

• We shall not pursue growth for growth’s sake or increased profitability. Instead, we will focus on essential and substantial work without compromise to our existing clients and staff.
• We shall not make unfair and unjust profit. Profit, while necessary, is nothing more than a measure of our success and serves to promote our values and objectives.
• We shall place high emphasis on ability, performance, personal honesty and integrity so that each individual can achieve the best in ability and skill.
• We will continually welcome technological challenges and advances and will focus on highly sophisticated solutions that will help our clientele.

Our Credo

• Our first responsibility is to our clients. We consider our clients partners in the struggle to make the world a better place. We are established as and will remain a client-driven company. Client service is our highest priority. We will take a proactive stance in providing the best services and most advanced and tested products to our clients at all times. Our products and services will be dynamic and of the highest quality. We must continually strive to be most efficient and most timely in fulfilling requests from our clients.
• Our second responsibility is to our staff — the backbone of our company. Salaries and compensation must be fair; management just; hours reasonable; and working conditions established to foster productivity and a healthy working atmosphere. Staff must be committed to our purpose for incorporation and dedicated to our clients. We will foster an atmosphere that values new and innovative ideas that we believe will ultimately benefit our clients. We will remain tolerant of honest mistakes. We will build a leadership team with a high degree of connection to, knowledge of, and commitment to the issues facing our clients.
• Our third responsibility is to the community in which we live. As a socially responsible business, we must adhere to business practices that benefit the community and, when possible, contribute to the well being of society.

Manage your Flags

Account flags are a great way to, well, flag your constituents for certain treatments. For example they may want to only receive mail and never a phone call, they may want to be contacted only two times per year, or they might only be interested in certain parts of your mission. In Revolution Online, an unlimited number of flags can be created and they can be assigned to any or all members of an account.

Perhaps you’ve embraced flagging and have categorized your constituents into 200 different categories. Flags are great, but you may now find yourself suffering from a condition known as Flagus Overloadus.

Symptoms include:

1. being unable to see a constituent’s name and address because there are so many flags displayed at the top of the account screen
2. having trouble figuring out which flags are the most important ones
3. fear of assigning a new flag to a constituent for fear of exacerbating symptoms one and two above

Well now there’s a cure! On the flag code edit screen, there is a new option to hide from the account screen.

If you choose Yes, the flag will not display at the top of the main account screen with the other flags but will still display on the flag screen.

Filter your Trees

The promotions tree has a lot of great features. You can organize the hierarchy however you want and you can view summaries or detailed transaction information at any level of the hierarchy. But what if you only ever need to see the Major Gifts promotions or you only work with Email campaigns? Well now you can not only organize the promotions tree how you like but you can also filter the top level to narrow your view.

To apply a filter to the top level of your tree view, just click on Display options at the bottom of the promotion tree, then select Yes next to Show top-level filter.

After you apply the changes you will see that the tree view now includes a drop-down filter for whatever you chose to be the top level of your tree. When you select one of the options, all other top level promotions, campaigns, source types, years or contact types are hidden and you can focus on what you are looking for.

Did You Know?

You can now add notes to transactions in correction batches. When you key in the corrected account, amount, or source code you will have the option to add a note clarifying the reason for the correction. Once the correction batch is locked, the transaction note will appear on the adjustment transaction.

As always, please contact your Technical Account Manager if you have any questions about any of these features.

Account Profile Report

How many of you have been in this position? You are on your way out the door to meet one of your mega super donors and you realize you need to know when they last gave, the last time someone in your organization had a phone call with them, the last event they attended and you also need to review their interests. Probably your first thought is to just bring your laptop over to their house and ask them if you can get on their wi-fi while you look them up right then and there (we kid, or course). Or perhaps more retro, you could lug your boxes of paper files to the car, parking secretly around the corner just before the meeting – just like Mama G used to do when she was a fundraiser.

Or you could go into Revolution Online and print up an account profile report.

Account profile reports are completely customizable by donor and you can create different reports for different types of constituents and save them for future use on any other constituent.

Here are some of the things you can capture in the report:

1. Flags
2. Board Activity
3. Comments (including filtering by type, subject and date)
4. Contact History
5. Donations
6. Event Attendance
7. Major Gifts project plans, assignment, research notes, etc.

To create a profile report, go to the profile report screen in any constituent’s record. On this screen you can choose which items to display, filter the display for certain items, and adjust the sort order so the items display in a meaningful way.

Once you’ve set up your custom profile report, you can save the parameters for use in any constituent account. Once you click the process button a report showing all of the requested data will display and you can print it in 8.5” X 11” format.

Flex Notes

Long time readers will remember this topic from back in the aughts. We thought it might be a good idea to remind everybody that this is still here and that you are free to use it. Anyway the topic at hand is Flex Notes and the idea is that you can add a sticky note that travels with the constituent’s ID number wherever it displays. Whether it is in search results, on the account record or in a list of possible duplicates, the notes are always there and you just need to mouse over the ID to display them.

To create a new flex note, click on the icon that looks like a sheet of paper that displays at the top of every constituent record.

A blank note will display allowing you to either create the note just for yourself or for anyone who accesses the account. Type your note in the box and click the save button to create the note.

For example in Search Results:

Did You Know?

You can format the text in your comments using BBcodes? BBCodes, or Bulletin Board Codes, allow you to do basic text formatting including bold, italic, underlined and strikethrough as well as inserting a link.

For example if you added a comment that read:

John was [u]kind[/u] enough to mention us on his [b]popular[/b] blog. Here’s a link: [url]http://www.datageekspeak.com[/url]

As always, please contact your Technical Account Manager if you have any questions about any of these features.