It’s time to start thinking about OrangeCon2012!

This year we thought we would get our clients involved in the structuring of the conference. The conference will be held over two days, one day for MPX and one day for Orange Leap On Demand. We are weighing the options of the seminar based conference structure from previous years, and modeling OrangeCon2012 after the new trend of un-conferences.

What is an un-conference?
An un-conference can be described as an open forum atmosphere where clients have direct interaction with not only our developers, but each other concerning best techniques and strategies for using Orange Leap to grow their non-profit. This is not to say that we would be stepping away from the administration of the conference, but moderating and guiding the discussion topics you choose.

Get involved!
We encourage you, the client, to participate in this decision because you can benefit most from the outcome. Take a look at videos from our previous conferences, and research other un-conferences. Simply click to vote on our group, or join the conversation and Tweet your ideas and responses under #OrangeCon2012. For more information visit our conference page.

The Third Quarter Release of MPX is Available for Your Production Environment!

Version 10.2.4288 is the official PCI Compliance release. All credit card numbers are now tokenized and are no longer stored in the database. Now when a credit card is entered into MPX, that number is sent to the payment processor for storage.

There were also over 60 enhancements made in this MPX release including the ability for the MPX user login process to use integrated Windows security. To enable this you need to set the following config setting both in the client and the server. Other highlights include distribution list updates, forms for postal code validations and exceptions, report enhancements, as well as a variety of donor and transaction screen updates that improve efficiency.

There is a change to downloading the MPX Release Version 10.2.4288 and it’s release notes. These can now be downloaded from Confluence, which requires a login. If you do not have a login, you can self-register. After you register, please email support@orangeleap.com and let them know your credentials so you can have the access to the MPX folders. Once you’ve signed up, you can access Confluence anytime or for a complete list of all changes and enhancements go directly to the MPX 10.2.4288 release files.

Orange Leap On Demand v14 is Here! What’s New?

We have made several improvements and incorporated new features throughout the product.  The following list highlights some of the major features and enhancements included in this release:

Redesigned user-interface 

A major improvement with Orange Leap On Demand has been the user interface.  All of the functionality is still available, however, how you access the information is redesigned to be easier and more user friendly.

Search Functionality

The search functionality is located in the same place — on the top right in the title bar area.  However, there are a couple of key improvements:

1. Search Auto-complete — As before, the default search is a fuzzy text search, however, as you type results will start to display records that match what you are inputting.
2. If the record you are looking for appears in the list, you can click on it to navigate directly to it.  If an exact match is not found, the constituent search results will display.

Import Functionality

The import functionality provides an auto-cleanse option to automatically cleanse the data and to resolve common formatting issues, such as dates and check box values, with imports. The check box associated with this feature is checked, by default. If you do not want to use the auto-cleanse feature and allow the import to work similar to how it was previously, you will need to uncheck the associated check box.

Events Module

Sections called Event Goals and Event Details have been added.  There are Event Goal Category and Event Attributes associated picklists for you to input the types of goals you might have for the event; there are also Event Goal Category Items and Event Attribute Details that have values dependent upon the Event Goal Category or Event Attribute Details that you selected. 

Sponsorship Module

Additional attribute grids are available on the sponsorable record, program, and home screens.  Their setup is similar to the additional constituent attributes.  There are picklists associated with each attribute list and attribute details can be added based on the selected attribute.

NEW Modules!

• Prospect Research: We have a new module, Prospect Research, the purpose of which is to give you tools to help you understand your donors and potential major donors and their ability and probability to give.  This module will often be used in conjunction with complementary products such as Wealth Engine or Donor Tools.  If the module is enabled, it renders as an item under the Constituent’ Profile menu.

The Guru

• Enhanced Charting: For all charts, you can now add a Title, Subtitle, an X-Axis Label, a Y-Axis Label, There are several new chart types supported, including 3D charts.
• Enhanced Postal Radius Criteria: The Postal Radius custom filter criteria is now available on the Constituent & Primary Contact data source.

For a more in-depth review of all the product and feature enhancements log on to confluence and view our Orange Leap On Demand and Guru Feature Release pages.

Orange Leap Announces Email Integration With 2Dialog

We are pleased to let you know about the release of 2Dialog’s integration with Orange Leap’s MPX and Orange Leap On Demand.

2Dialog offers a suite of online fundraising and e-Communication tools. One of2Dialog’s online communication tools, called Billboard, embraces all aspects of direct response marketing strategies. It enables organizations to easily create and execute effective email campaigns through the use of microsites and landing pages in order to maximize donations. 2Dialog has a lot of functionality in one stand-alone tool which now seamlessly integrates with both MPX and Orange Leap On Demand.

The benefits of the integration include:

Donor Data Synchronization

• Data segmentations created in MPX and Orange Leap On Demand are available in Billboard for emailing campaigns.
• Donors in MPX and Orange Leap On Demand are synchronized within 2Dialog.
• Important campaign data captured in Billboard is automatically transferred back into MPX and Orange Leap On Demand.

Email Deliverability System

• Ability to send email fundraising and marketing campaigns to your constituents and donors.
• Campaign effectiveness and donor behavioral analysis can be done within2Dialog, MPX, or Orange Leap On Demand.

Microsites/Landing Pages

• Quick deployment of e-campaigns through the use of campaign specific microsites/landing pages and forms created within the Billboard tool.
• Transactions done in Billboard are instantly available to be viewed in MPX and Orange Leap On Demand.
• Data captured within these pages are automatically transferred back into2Dialog, MPX, and Orange Leap On Demand.

Common Vision

• Business and Product Development Goals and future direction are shared between both partners.
• Relationship established in 2009. Product integration began in 2010 and was demonstrated with MPX at OrangeCon in 2011.

For more information, please contact orangeleap@2dialog.com.

Orange Leap Introduces Orange Leap Donor Widgets and Launch of Beta Program

DALLAS, TEXAS (November 11, 2010) – Orange Leap announced today the successful demonstration of Orange Leap Donor Widgets to customers and partners last Thursday at OrangeCon, Orange Leap’s annual conference for users and developers.  As part of the demonstration, Orange Leap announced the formation of a Beta Test program that will run into early 2011.

Orange Leap provides a highly innovative and easy to use software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that strengthens relationships between an organization and its constituents and donors. Used by organizations around the world, Orange Leap On Demand is a powerful, full featured, constituent relationship management solution designed specifically for nonprofits.

Orange Leap Donor Widgets provide organizations with the ability to literally “cut-and-paste” snippets of code into their existing websites that extend the power of Orange Leap On Demand directly to donors and constituents.  Orange Leap Donor Widget capabilities initially include:

• Website Registration – the ability for a constituent to register to enter a private area of an organization’s website.
• Donate Now – the ability for a new or existing donor to make a one-time or recurring donation through a simple and secure form.
• Sponsorship – the ability for a new or existing constituent to enter into a sponsorship relationship.
• Donor Profile – the ability for an existing donor to look up their contact information and donation history and update their contact information.

Coming in the next release:

• Event Registration – the ability for a new or existing constituent to register to participate in an organization’s event.

“Organizations have been struggling with the flow of data between their offline database and their online database as long as the Internet has been around.” Said Randy McCabe, CEO of Orange Leap.  “Syncing and ETL (extract, transform, and load) processes work fine for some organizations.  But those usually operate one-way, they’re not real time, and there is a high probability for errors.”

He continued, “Extending the power of Orange Leap On Demand to the web, giving donors and constituents a direct connection to real data in real time, is the ultimate solution.  Orange Leap Donor Widgets not only complete the communications loop between an organization and its constituents, but also ensures appropriate treatment of all constituents through the consistent application of business rules regardless of how their data enters Orange Leap On Demand.”

About Orange Leap

Orange Leap energizes nonprofits, making it easier for them to achieve mission success. The Dallas-based company offers innovative yet simple to use software-based solutions that strengthen relationships with constituents and donors. Orange Leap’s ever-growing community collaborates on advanced technology and smarter practices. Nonprofits big and small, with a wide range of missions and constituencies, choose Orange Leap to move their organizations forward. For more information, please visit www.OrangeLeap.com.

Orange Leap — Simple

A simple explanation of how Orange Leap On-Demand software can help organize and manage constituent and donor relationships for non-profit fund raising organizations.

Tanzanian rats sniff out mines (and they use Orange Leap as their CRM solution!)

A project in Tanzania is teaching rats how to save human lives. Blessed with a keen sense of smell, they are being trained to detect land mines and have so far helped clear nearly two million squared… Find Out More

FocusDriven the Platform to Manage Communications, Marketing, and Fundraising

FocusDriven is a fast-growing advocacy group for victims of motor vehicle crashes that involve drivers using cell phones. The company recently selected Orange Leap (News – Alert) On-Demand as its platform for managing the growth of their constituent relationships, communications, and fundraising efforts. Read More

It’s all about reporting…

As CTO at Orange Leap I’m constantly reminded that CRM applications are only as useful as the reporting capabilities. It makes absolutely no sense to put data into any system unless you can get the data back out in the format the customer desires.

Over the years we have implemented a couple of different reporting solutions each with it’s own shortcomings and benefits. Below I will outline these implementations and the shortcomings and benefits of each solution. Additionally I will give you a glimpse into our new reporting implementation that hopefully will retain the benefits of it’s predecessors  while removing the shortcomings.

In the beginning there was Crystal Reports

Our window’s based on premise solution (MPX) used Crystal Reports as it’s reporting solution. By embedding Crystal Reports into our product we provided a complete reporting solution for MPX with very little engineering effort from Orange Leap. Additionally we shipped a slew of “canned” reports with MPX to allow our customers to extract data from our database without having to write reports them selves. By utilizing Crystal Reports our customers had the ability to write custom reports and use them through our application as well.

Benefits to using Crystal Reports

• Many developers know how to write Crystal Reports
• Crystal Reports is fast, stable and provides great output
• Most of our customers where able to answer their questions using the canned reports

Shortcomings of using Crystal Reports

• Expensive. The run time costs money and the design time costs even more
• Most of our customers did not have the capability to write a custom report
• Our services team inevitably had to write custom reports for our customers
• There is no testing framework to test these reports before deploying a new version. This leads to a time consuming and tedious manual testing process
• Reports often “looked” correct but presented “bad” data
• As new functionality is added to the application additional canned report’s needed to be developed
• Customers are forced to view their data the way we “think” they want to view it. Not necessarily the way they do.

Crystal Reports proved to be expensive, inflexible and manually intensive

Then Came The Guru

We decided to build a end user focused “Report Wizard” that allowed the end user to construct report’s on the fly. The Guru is built on a data dictionary that describes the underlying database, it’s content (fields) and it’s relationships (views). As I pointed out that the data dictionary points to “views” that describe the relationships between various entities within the system. The Guru was implemented on top of Jaspersoft’s jasper report’s server. Using Jaspersoft eliminated the upfront licensing costs for our customers and the tools can be had for free… We thought we had hit a panacea…

While this solution is more flexible and less expensive than Crystal Reports we did not provide many “canned” report’s thinking that customer’s would generate their own (and many of them have done so successfully). Some of our customers however have not made it up the learning curve to successfully utilize The Guru.

The underlying design to implement The Guru on “views” created a plethora of problems that have plagued it with problems. First and foremost is performance. On smaller databases The Guru performed just fine. But as the size of our customers databases grew The Guru started to show some cracks. Because our view’s used functions to define some of the columns associated with custom fields the database server was unable to optimize these queries and the result’s where very slow performance.

Additionally because we implemented the solution on “views” as new feature functionality was added to our application the “data dictionary” and “views” needed to be updated with each release. Frequently we would release new functionality and “forget” to update the view’s. This is a show stopper cause as I said “It’s all about reporting…” and customer’s now had data in our system that they could not report on.

Benefit’s of The Guru

• Inexpensive
• Flexible
• Generates accurate results
• Most of our customers are able to answer their questions with The Guru

Shortcomings of The Guru

• No canned reports left unsophisticated customers scratching their heads
• View’s quickly became out of date
• Lack of sub reports caused some limitations in reporting results
• There is no way to get to data that is not represented by the views
• View and data dictionary maintenance is manually intensive

The Guru proved to be cheap, flexible but manually intensive and slow!

So what’s the solution?

We have identified the underlying ‘views’ of The Guru implementation as the primary source of problems with this solution. As mentioned they create performance issues as well as maintenance problems for us and our customers. So the next generation of The Guru will have an administrative function that will allow the customer or our analysts to populate data sources with straight SQL rather than with views. Think of it as an advanced query builder that uses introspection to construct SQL based on the underlying data model.

I feel this will be the best of all worlds for us and our customers. First off it will facilitate the construction of data sources as new functionality is added to the product. Second it will allow the customer to have data sources that describe their data exactly the way they want to see it (not how we “think” they want to see it). It will also out perform our existing solution significantly.

Watch this blog for announcements on it’s availability shortly.

58 Open Source Replacements for Commercial Communications Apps (Orange Leap Listed)

Datamation has a list of Open Source replacements for widely used applications.

21) Orange Leap Replaces: Blackbaud, Convio Orange Leap offers a different type of CRM—”Constituent Relationship Management.” This app aims to help non-profits simplify their communications with donors and other stakeholders.

See article here 58 Open Source Replacements for Commercial Communications Apps