Transcript: StratusLIVE: CRM Options for Enterprise Nonprofits

On September 26, Heller presented the sixth installment of our CRM Options for Enterprise Nonprofits webinar series designed to help organizations learn more about today’s CRM solution marketplace. We also hope to help organizations understand and overcome common obstacles preventing them from adopting new technology.Below is the transcript of this installment focused on StratusLIVE, a CRM built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform.

To get the full context and view the demo of StratusLIVE, please view the recording here:

View the webinar

Anna Matthias: Good morning everyone, I think that we are ready to start the webinar or good afternoon if you are calling in from the East Coast like I am. Welcome to our sixth session of our seven part series on CRM Options for Enterprise Nonprofits. Today’s session will be focused on StratusLIVE built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Platform. We are joined today by Jim Funari, Co-founder and CEO of StratusLIVE and Brett Meyer, the Director of Product Management and Services. And I am Anna Matthias, Director of Professional Services at Heller Consulting and I’ll be your moderator for today.

About the Series

We started this series in May with an overview of tips and tricks on software selection. We invite you to take a look at that webinar and all of the other webinars, they are uploaded on our website. Since that first webinar, we’ve covered a variety of the most popular CRM solutions for enterprise nonprofits that we have listed here on our slide. We started with the Nonprofit Success Pack, we talked about Blackbaud BBCRM, NGO Connect, ClearView CRM. Today we will be talking about StratusLIVE and coming later in November we’ll be talking about ROI Solutions.

Our goal for all of these webinars is to provide a well-rounded view of the options out there for enterprise nonprofits. All of the webinars are recorded and the slides are available and transcripts are up on our website. After this webinar, we’ll be sending out the recording as well in a day or so.

About Heller

If this is your first time listening in and you’re just getting to know Heller, Heller’s co-expertise is working within the nonprofits sector. We’ve been working in this space for over 20 years. We typically start out most of our projects and our engagements with our clients talking about strategy and design, doing a lot of vision planning, road mapping, optimizing systems and planning a solid solutions for our future. We also do CRM implementation so, the more technical side of standing up your CRM system and all of our implementations include change management, training, configuration and building out of the systems. Lastly, we also work with organizations after you’ve implemented your systems so you’ve worked on your strategy, you’ve executed your tool and now you are learning how to use the tool effectively to optimize for your fundraising engagement and user adoption goals.

CRM Planning – Change Management

I’m just going to go through a few of our high-level suggestions as you are working on planning your CRM initiative and if you’d like more details than what you are going to hear here and just these few high-level sessions, Keith Heller goes into all the specifics in our first webinar series that you can find on our website.

So, the first element of the CRM initiative that often times doesn’t get the attention that it needs is change management. Often times everyone is really focused on the technology and the ‘how’s it going to happen’ part of these implementations and our clients forget to really focus on the human side of the change. Everyone reacts to change differently, some with excitement, some with fear and putting a plan in place to prepare for and address the change from the start of a project all the way through the launch of your project can really change your success rate. Some studies say up to 70% of project failures come from… are caused by the human, the people side of the change rather than the technical sophistication part of the project works. Heller has several resources on change management available on our website so if you are interested in learning more about this please take advantage of those.

Then this next slide, this talks about really taking the term change management which can be a very high level term and a feel good line item when you see it in a project and it helps you understand a little bit more of what you might get from a service like this and a change management assessment in plan, this is where we really can go in and study the users and the stakeholders and see where the organization is on the readiness scale and from there we make a plan on how we will move the people involved in the project and the organization through the different steps of accepting the change. We do user and stakeholder analysis, so this is more looking at the individual people to make sure that the stakeholder… so the people that have signed off on this project and the people that will be using this system. We start to study and look and see where they are and their readiness and awareness scales.

ADKAR is a specific type of model for change management. It stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Re-enforcement and those are the steps in change management. ADKAR analysis survey is your users to see where they are in this model and what steps they might need to take to be more ready for this adoption of your CRMs. This goes through a few more but really in change management services there’s a whole breadth of different types of deliverables and plans that can help your users be better trained, have stronger ability and re-enforce adoption strategies.

Working with Vendors

In addition to change management, another part of a CRM project is, you’ll be talking with a lot of vendors and whether it’s a consulting partner or the vendor of the CRM and some tips and tricks to navigate that is to really get to know your vendors, they know their products and they will be able to tell you their best features, they know what they are designed to do and what they might not do as well. So, really trust what your vendors are saying but also verify through references whether it’s talking to other organizations that are already on that particular CRM or possibly just colleagues in the space that may be navigating the same type of project that you are. Also you can… there’s a lot of user communities out there and demos that you can see as you are starting to make this decision.

Be sure to really invest time into talking to your vendors about your strategy so that they can really understand your organization and start to see where it matches up with the product to see if the product can help you achieve your missions. There will be a lot of back and forth discussion between you and your vendor as you form this partnership. Your vendor is a partner in this journey and make sure that as you are working together that you are aware of the sales cycle and quotas and timing and ensure that you are representing for yourself and forming that strong partnership that you will be able to work well together as you move through the life cycle of your CRM project.

Working with Consultants

Another piece that’s… this is coming from a consultant and a consulting company this may sound a little self-serving but it’s very helpful to consider hiring a consultant partner and there is proven reasons to this. I mean we go through… Consulting companies go through this all the time, we have a knowledge of  process and vendors and pure organizations, we can also help with resourcing on your end so possibly your team can stay focused on internal projects and in fundraising efforts and mission based work so that you have people dedicated specifically to your project. It also can be a buffer between you and the product vendors coming from consultants that work on these types of projects all the time. Then there’s just a… in addition to the value that you are consulting can provide couple other things that consultant companies don’t really do is, we don’t suggest the vendor for you. I mean 90% of your peers out there have picked from these six vendors that we’ve been talking about in this series.

Then this spreadsheet here that we are mentioning with thousands of features and check boxes is just a way that you can speak to strategically what you need rather than looking at your requirements on a huge scale. Then if you are interested in more information about CRM projects and developing a CRM vision there’s some resources listed here. You can also find all of these in addition to more of our CRM papers on our website. Please consider downloading these resources and having your team review them.

I think that we are ready to get started with the StratusLIVE team.

All right let’s hand it over to StratusLIVE.

About StratusLIVE

Jim Funari: Well, thanks Anna. This is Jim Funari, one of the Founders at StratusLIVE and I’m joined today by Brett Meyer, he is the Director of Product Management and Services and Brett is going to be conducting today product tour a bit later in the webinar. But it’s great to be with you and this installment in the series on Enterprise CRM options. A special shout out, thanks to Heller Consulting for organizing and promoting the series for the nonprofit community. I think it’s very helpful. Today’s agenda if you see here is going to include just a brief introduction to StratusLIVE and we are going to look pretty carefully at the Microsoft commercial platform on which we’ve developed our integrated suite for enterprise nonprofit. Brief review of the major function or component or modules, if you will, and the suite and then the product tour includes the combinations of live demonstration that we conduct as well as a couple of recorded videos of several modules that might give you a better flavor for some of the breadth of the product. Then we are going to wrap up with a Q&A session.

We are based in Virginia and have been in the business of serving nonprofits exclusively for about seven, going on eight years. When talking about the company, we are most excited to talk obviously about our clients and we are privileged to serve some really outstanding clients in the nonprofit community with our Enterprise CRMs Suite including organizations like the National Wildlife Federation in the DC area, The Epilepsy Foundation and Concur Cancer Foundation, Community Help Charities and the Disease and Disorder, market segments as well as many United Ways, we have some of the largest United Ways in the country using the platform. We also have an online work place giving product or as it’s come to be known these days as Corporate Social Responsibility and that’s used by a number of Fortune 1000 organizations such as Eli Lilly, GE, City Financial, Procter and Gamble and many others now approaching about a million employees on the CSR platform.

StratusLIVE Clients & Partners

This is the place that we get to toot our own horn just a bit if you’ll allow us. We’ve enjoyed some recognition and awards over the last few years, a couple include one from CIO Review Magazine, as the top or recognized as the top Microsoft partner offering products and services to nonprofits and we were the only one in that group and we do regularly get calls from Microsoft and are called upon by Microsoft to work with their mid enterprise nonprofit customers. Then in April of this year, Catalyst Investors out of New York recognized us as one of the leading CRM Software Solution for enterprise scale nonprofits and we were included there as you can see on the Dynamics platform along with Salesforce and Blackbaud. So, really pleased about that.

I want to get into now just some introduction of the Microsoft Foundation and how we’ve leveraged that foundation. First, so we just hosted in the worldwide as your cloud or we have optional hybrid cloud approaches if you so desire. Office 365 for daily productivity applications is next in the stats and many of you I’m sure already run on Office 365. Today, we leverage that throughout the product and nice native integration from CRM. Now, much of our functionality for engagement, advancement, fundraising and marketing is built on the Dynamics CRM 365 solution. Then we call that Stratus 365. If you are interested in cloud based financials or ERP solution for Microsoft as well, the Dynamics 365 for financials has native integration and leverage as the same common user interface.

We then use Power BI and we’ll see that today a bit later, we use Power BI as the analytics in reporting solution for discovery for mining and reporting on information and then finally although CRM itself has extensive customization capabilities and we leverage those extensively, an entire cross application development environment is available for Microsoft in the cloud using power apps, Microsoft Flow, which is a workflow and integration engine and similar tools, many tools from Microsoft for developers. I really want to focus over the next few slides and what we see is some of the advantages and the benefits of Microsoft Commercial platform. In Keith Heller’s opening webinar in this series, he identified the major trends that are now driving change and alternatives in the market place. One of the most significant trends is the rise of commercial platforms, developed and funded by large public software companies with rich CRM and analytics capabilities and those commercial platforms such as Microsoft platform that we are looking at today, Salesforce, Oracle and others.

These platforms were originally developed with… or to target a wide variety of for profit industries, retail, financial services, help care, professional services and many others and yet the fundamental requirement for customer engagement across those industries are really the same or very similar to the fundamental for a nonprofit customers as we like to say constituent engagement. With these very large investments in their platforms, these commercial vendors offer what we think is a real attractive alternative to the proprietary products in the nonprofit market that we traditionally used over the last 15 to 20 years. We’ve started StratusLIVE with that very vision and belief. We obviously chose the Microsoft Commercial platform and we’ve seen and experienced first-hand the power and the value available in nonprofits especially when compared with some of the other proprietary legacy solutions and we think this commercial platform represents a real low risk but high innovation future for nonprofits.

We just want to talk briefly about some of the advantages that you can experience on the commercial platform. Well, first of all, it’s important to emphasize that more nonprofits run Microsoft software applications in the Cloud than any other vendor or provider. Over 70,000 organizations now run mission critical applications from Microsoft, supported by the Microsoft Cloud, next the Microsoft CRM and analytical products continue to win awards and lead the industry and independent ratings. In fact, just recently you’ll see a few of the icons up there for some of these various research organizations that force research actually picked Microsoft CRM as the market leader in the strength of current offering and they won additional awards of CRM product of the year but really coming on strong in the last several years of the leader in the industry so, we think that’s pretty significant for you.

About Microsoft Philanthropies

Here is the one that you might not be aware of but, just recently Microsoft is organized to do a new division called Microsoft Philanthropies and this division’s mission is to empower nonprofits with technology and services and that initiative includes donating a billion dollars in software and services to nonprofits and so we think that creates some great opportunities for cost reductions and savings as you look at your enterprise implementation. For those of you that have international operations, you will be pleased to see the wide support in the Cloud for the platform on which we are built on Dynamics 365, Office 365 and the analytical product so all major currency supported 45 languages across 139 countries and now up to 34 data centers online throughout the world and more coming each year.

While our suite of products and services provide a large part of our clients solutions set. Most of our clients run with our suite and don’t need too many additional product, you do have access to products and services available from the eco-system and it’s a very large ecosystem. If we don’t have the specific application or module or functionality that you are seeking, you’ll likely founded on App Source which is the online store, there you go from Microsoft, from which you can download many applications, maybe you want a PLS application for merchandise sales that… an advance and we don’t have that, you can go to the store, click on the application, download it, it will load into your CRM environment. You can do that, the test or a development environment, test it out if you like it, purchase it, and run it in your production instance.

Then finally, and this is where I want to revisit the original key case that Keith made in the first segment in the series. You’ve got to have the benefit of what is the largest R&D investment in the industry and I think if you feel like or if you have to sense that your legacy product and vendor hasn’t really kept pace with the capabilities you need to carry out your mission and engage with your constituents and raise fund with a real modern set of technology, then you need to ask why. Our opinion is simply that the commercial platforms are setting the pace and proprietary options can’t keep up anymore. We think that’s really a significant driver to the change in the market.

StratusLIVE Capabilities

Now, transitioning just a bit to our products suite, we just want to go over the enterprise functionality in the suite. The core of the suite is the CRM relationship management where we maintain the 360-degree view of the constituent profiles, their relationship, their interaction, their activity and their transactions.

Beyond the core module social engagement allows you to manage and monitor your presence across social networks and then to capture specific posts from constituents, from influencers and even from critics in CRM. We are going to look at this, the social engagement module in just a bit. Then we have a rich set of online engagement options for giving pages, for landing pages, surveys, work place campaigns and peer to peer fundraising in the online suite. Then both the digital campaigns and the more traditional direct mail campaigns use our predictive analytics engine to help you determine what the optimum segmentation is and personalization strategy for your audience. This is something that we’ve been working on for several years with some of our larger customers, particularly those with fairly intensive and highly segmented direct response campaigns.

Our financial processing module operates as the true sub-ledger and is agnostic with respect to your general ledger systems. We can integrate with any number of financial systems. You manage your programs and mission initiative with project based tools for staff and volunteers, advance and supporting resources in the program management. The course, you are going to see our business intelligence tool running on Power BI demonstrated for analytics, data mining and information management. Obviously, enterprise integration is a big problem in most large nonprofits in the enterprise setting and this is the tool that we’ve developed to help you integrate the spirit third party data sources and imports and many of those integration tasks that we all face in the enterprise setting.

A couple of things as we get in to the product tour sort of just tee it up. You know it is all about making your day more productive with these tools and certainly mobility is the big idea here or if you want to work on any modern device of your choice from anywhere. If you don’t have an internet connection there’s native capability in the platform that allow you to work offline and then save with CRM, when the connection is available but sometime our users still work in over more familiar environments like Outlook on their desktop or laptop so in addition to this modern devices and browsers, Stratus 365 exposes all of its CRM information in the Outlook interface also.

Then with respect to guided processes, the option of automating repetitive processes and tasks, you can make use of our guided process capability which lead users through the necessary steps and activities and a given process might be a major gift cultivation as we are seeing on the screen and Brett will visit that a bit more in the tour. And of course, finally but frankly most important is, exposing this embedded analytics and charts and KPI and contextual dash boards so as to improve your decision making along the way. Again if I’m managing a major gift and an organization, I want to have clear visibility at all times into the opportunity for various stages of cultivation and the moods management process. That’s just a bit to tee up the product tour and we are going to turn it over to Brett Meyer, our Director of Product Management and Services. So Brett take the way.

StratusLIVE Product Demo

Brett Meyer: Thanks Jim and we are going to start today where everybody starts their day and that’s in Office so whether I’m using Office 365 or I’m in my Outlook Client, I can get to our CRM systems from those areas. Jim just showed you some screenshots coming at it from regular Outlook, I’m in the online version of it. If I want to jump in to my CRM system, the StratusLIVE 365 all I have to do is collect our… click one of familiar interface up here. I have all the usual mail and calendar and everything but I also have our StratusLIVE 365 and right beside there is the analytical marketing tool, we’ll touch on that a little bit late in our segmentation tool.

Let’s jump in to Stratus 365, this will automatically launch into Stratus 365 and into the dash board that I have set as my Homepage. Now, I play the role of a development officer in our development systems so my homepage is designed for that person. This Homepage in this dashboards have contextual analytics that are based on what I want to see for my data. We can build out different dash boards, Jim showed a brief line on major gift management, mine is just development officer. So, mine is showing me things like pay as due activities and activities that are due this week. I can see my opportunities, by sale stage so I’m looking at just a view of information and I also want to point out this little area called ‘What’s New’. This is an area that allows me to see almost like a Facebook-ish feed of data that’s been generated from the system that’s showing me different things, how things are moving through. It can show me when a major donor actually gives to us, we can put these rules in place that will display data out to me.

I can have other information, I have some plan giving opportunity and I have some major gift opportunities within the application. Now all of the system revolves around constituents so I want to jump in through one of our constituents in the system and I have one here called Brian Billingham. He is a contact that we have in the system, he has various different aspects about him so I can see a lot of just general information, his address information, some of the information around just how to contact him, do those types of things. One thing I want to point out about how to contact him, if you’ll notice these are all blue and underlined. That means that they are hyper lens, what that means is, I can launch emails, I can launch phone calls right from within our CRM or our StratusLIVE system for our constituents. We can see all of the activity feeds or post for this donor.

So, I’m seeing a lot of information just about Brian I can see gift information, I can also see all of the activities that we’ve done with Brian recently within the system. So, I ‘m looking at… we did an ask there for him, we completed some research, I had a phone call with Michael who is his son. I’ll talk a little bit about that, how I know that in a second but those are some of the pieces of information I can see. I can also get into financial summary information or analytical information about the donor. These are what we call roll up fields, so this is taking data and that’s rolling it up from various different areas. Now I’ve left one where I haven’t quite rolled it up yet because I wanted to demonstrate how the system just run these calculations. So if I click this little refresh button it automatically goes and runs that calculation for me and gives me the latest and greatest detail about Brian from those pieces of information. Now, I mentioned Michael and he’s mentioned here in this activities area just to talk a second about the visualizations, the hierarchy within our system of house-holding.

We believe in using and creating constituent records for those that are within the household. We make one person the primary. I don’t care if that’s the husband, the wife, it doesn’t really matter. One person in the household is the primary member of that. Brian happens to be the head of our household. I have a little icon up here. This is called our hierarchical visualization. When I click on that, this is going to take me over to a grid that’s going to show me the hierarchy within Brian’s household. This will show me Agnes, which is Brian’s parent, Karen, his spouse, Michael, his son. We’ve also included in them lifetime value giving within this card. These cards are completely configurable, customizable to what you want to see when you’re looking at this hierarchal visualization around the donor.

Some of the other things that we have when we’re looking at donor records that we are interested in getting into and everything is some of the surrounding address information. We have a direct link to Bing maps and I can get to Bing maps from here, in fact if I scroll down a little bit more, you’ll see the Bing maps is embedded right within here. But let’s say you wanted to make visit at the Brian’s, we want to find donors that live around Brian’s house. We actually have a tie to an organization, third party tool. We have a product called Maplytics. What the Maplytics product allows me to do, is it gives me the ability to plot records so I’ve already plotted Brian’s house here. Then what I did is I ran a proximity search 25 miles within Brian’s house and what I searched on is all contacts with a PDD score of three or higher.

We actually have an integration to WealthEngine.com. We brought that data back. I’m looking at those, I found three donors. One here, one here, one here. Let’s say I’m ready to do a route visit or a visit with them. I’m going to see Brian, I might as well go to see the other three. We can actually put together direction right from here, so I’ve already plotted these out. It gave me the directions. I can even email those directions over to myself. We have a whole capability around doing GL analytics. This is great for major gift officers. It’s also great for events. Think about putting in a plot for where you’re going to hold your event. Search for all your donors that are within 100 miles of that event. We can use the mappings tool right for those capabilities.

Let’s go back to Brian’s record for a little bit here. Jim had mentioned and we had talked a little bit about just analytic given around donors and additional things that we can look at or should be able to look at when we’re looking at the donor. One of the areas that I had is this area called Contact Analytics. This is a visual display form. You could take this out to the donor with you, you could display it on your tablet, on your mobile phone, wherever you want to show it as. This is going to give me some summary data just about Brian. I can have his given summary information, his last transactional, his hided information, what his giving status is with us. I can see graphs and charts around how he gives to us from a cumulative perspective, I can even look at the highest transaction is if I wanted to. I can get to details about the donor. These are the last 20 transactions that we’re gotten in from Brain.

I can even see interest summary information. This is an engine that we’ve designed in the system. We have the ability to relate cause concepts to things like advance and volunteerism, to giving to funds. When somebody gives to those or attends an event or volunteers for those, we can mark their record. I see one here for Brian. We have animals. If I scroll down, I can see that Brian has responded to two campaigns. He’s given 10 gifts into funds about animals, zero events and two volunteer activities. I can do the same thing for troubled teens, counselling for trouble teens. In this one I see that he has a pretty high interest in it, but something that popped out to me is that he’s never a gift to a fund about counselling for troubled teens. That might be a hook that I can use to do major gift management, those kinds of things. Some other analysis that we can do, I showed you the hierarchical visualization for house holding. But we also have what we call connections in the system.

Connections allows us to interrelate things between accounts, people, opportunities that we’re working on, anything along those lines. To stratify this created report that we call our financial report on here. What I’m looking at is connection role of endower, owner and solicitor. These are roles that Brian does with us. He’s endower to a foundation, he owns a business and he solicits other donors for us. I just scrolled to the bottom, because is the real meat of it. Brain actually has at total influence of over $3,000,000 to our organization. If I want to see how that breaks down, I can go to the next pages and this is Brian’s giving. I can see within his house hold, what that giving looks like. Then I get into, here’s is his foundation, he’s the endower of that foundation of over a million dollars. He is the solicitor for it. He solicits Brett Meyer for 1.3, Jeffery Labortories is 1500, so on and so forth. Not only can I get that top level, what is the influence within our system, I can see the details of how we influence the application.

Back on Brian’s record, we want to talk a little bit about the guided process as Jim mentioned. The first one that we looked at was this major gift opportunity that we have for Brain. I’m going to bounce into there for a second. These guided processes, are completely configurable to what you want to do as part of your process. We certainly deliver a moves management process and this is the one that we deliver with the application. It has the standard research cultivate then S, follow us the S in stewardship. Using this in conjunction with the work low capabilities could also allow us to publish activities that need to be done during each of these stages. You’ll see some within here. These are the posts for them. But I also have the activities. You can see I’m getting ready to move into the S portion of it. I’m getting ready to do this task but I’ve already completed the research for it. That was out there and I started to cultivate them. This is also the area where I would put those cultivation activities.

I’m inviting him to an event or I’m going out to do a site visit. I can create my activities right from here. These will go right over to my Outlook and go right over to my mobile device. If I’m doing a call report, I can have that coming in right from our CRM system, so I can see all that information. On Brian’s record, we also saw that he had a plan giving opportunity, so I’m just going to back up in the system, I’m going to scroll down and I’m going to go to this plan giving trust. The reason I want to show this is to show that we can have different data processes. This is the one that’s specific for the opportunity type of plan gift. We now cultivate the donor relationship, we proposed the plan giving plan and then we create the plan gifts and instruments. This is a totally different process. You can a build out whatever processes you bet you want, so if you’re a grant process, a plan giving process, if you have opportunity where you working with companies in workplace giving, you can put these processes right into the application.

We track a lot of data around the donor. I showed you just a minimum of what we can track around the donor. There’s a lot more information that we can get to, from recognitions to affinity groups, to wealth management, all of those kinds of things. Also in the application, when I hit this little drop down up here, this is what we call our work areas. We’ve broken out the system for nonprofits, this looks like a nonprofit system. We’ve designed this data, if I wanted to look at the finance area, I click the finance drop down and I get capabilities that are related to what finance would need to do their job. I certainly have my transactional capabilities, we can create our batch controls, be able to batch up pledges and gifts coming into the system. I can keep track of all of my payments and pledges. Payments are gifts in our application also, but we also take payments against pledges.

We also track credit, non-cash gifts, all kinds of recognition capabilities, recurrent plans where they’re giving their monthly giving and everything. We have all kinds of allocation capabilities and distribution capabilities. To an extent we spend some time with our United Way clients. They do payouts within the system. We can also, if I scroll a little further, we can do deposit management and we certainly have our capabilities around general ledger configurations so the ability to extract the data out in summary, take it over to our general ledger.  I skipped one area and that’s the imports. We’ve designed a couple of different import tools, some of them are based off of pre-defined templates of information. But what we find is a lot of clients need the more open abilities to do integration within the system.

They may need additional capabilities like constituent matching and things like that. For that we have a tool that we call Enterprise Integration. This is the tool, we can launch it right from within the StratusLIVE system. I just haven’t had it open. This allows me to import files from here. We have constituent matching algorithms that we can match our donors on and we can actually build into another tool if we have people kind of sit in the middle or we have more than one match. We can find them. We can set up additional data sources so if you do have pre-defined integrations that are out there and ties that you want to do, we can handle that. We can do process templates, which is basically just templatize as an important tool. I’m going to bring in accounts, contacts, pledges, and payments all within the same file. One of the areas that I mentioned here is the data sources.

I’m going to move into our next area, which is our online engagement. The reason I’m going to mention data sources here is one of the online engagements we have is our peer-to-peer capabilities. We partner with an organization called Dental Drive for our peer-to-peer capabilities. We already have a pre-build data source, where Dental Drive allows us to bring it right in through this tool. Our other areas that we do for our online fund raising is we do have what we call our Give Now pages. This is a live client site, this is The Epilepsy Foundation site. This is their page, these pages are completely configurable. If you can have different layouts, different backgrounds, those types of things on there. These are set up, we can do as recurring on here, we can do gift options, which would be dedicating this or in honour of having memorial or tribute to somebody. We take all of the donor information, the payment information. This is a credit card site, have all of that information out there.

We process the credit card through, we transmit that over to our other site. This is a single page giving page. We also have created what we call a Workplace Giving platform for corporates, employee giving that we have out there. If I go to here, this is the donor experience. I’m already I’m impersonating one of the donors in the system. We get the ability to renew a gift so I can select last year’s gift. I gave $250. It’s been suggested through the back end that this donor increase by 100%. We’ll take it up to $500. They can choose to move forward with this by submitting it and make those changes or they could start all over, do a new gift, designate it to whatever funds, programs, projects they want to right through the application. Then it will take them through the whole giving process. Infinity groups, sign up if you wanted to. It will confirm the gift for them and it will automatically transmit the data out to that. Then finally we’re also working through our constituent self-service.

This gives us the ability that the donors can log in and see if their information within a portal. This is Brian again from this perspective. He can go and manipulate data or allowing him to change. We can limit what he can do within here. He can also see different things like his communication preferences. If you want to turn things on and off for that, his pledge, his gift, his interest, how he designates his money. We can do events capabilities in here, including event registration, and also volunteer tracking. This one was designed as being able to track my hours within my online portal. We have a lot of portal capabilities, a lot of partnerships that we have designed out there for those pieces. For our next areas, I’m going to jump back into our PowerPoint.

I’m going to go into the first one, which will be for our direct marketing, or segmentation. We called it Analytical Marketing. As we’re playing through the video here you’re going to hear some analytical marketing references to that. This tool is designed for complex segmentation of high volume direct response marketing. It has real time modelling with predictive analytics, machine learning, segmentation overlays, things like the end target analytics or geo-clustering capabilities. Then we can execute the whole thing. I’m going to play this video, we’ll go through this and then we’ll top into our next area, so go through this, and we’ll jump into our next area.

Recorded: With the stratified analytic marketing, you can execute a multiple campaign at the same time within a batch. Here’s where we create and forward rules for your business project for use and create lenses in order to build to your segmentation and prediction matrix. You can also manage ask strings and product offers in app. Ask strings can be dynamic or static. Simply click the preview window in order to ensure the algorithm is performing correctly. Universes start with the dashboard showing progress towards your targets in this effort. You can configure multiple campaign activities or channels, and each activity can have one or more campaign activity groups. A campaign activity group has a source code, an ask string, treatment of package, and a product offer group associated with it.

Audience selection is simple. Simply pick from a list of saved drills in order to apply them to the universe. You can exclude in the same way after constituents are brought into the universe. You can tag them using labels. These labels are then applied dynamically during segmentation. We automatically segment using your labels, Recently, Frequency, Monetary, and Life Cycle Statuses in order to produce segments. You can build a segment using any column, just like in Excel. Segments show how the volume of constituents and interactions are based on a lens that is in play performed. We set a number of responses, the response rate, average gift and other cost based matrix such as ROI. You can change the lens at any time. Just go to the matrix to a more relevant set. You can paste it on columns in order to see the aggregated matrix. You can also hide and re-arrange columns as needed.

Select the top of the tree to get all of the constituents within the segment and then click the green button to assign them to the campaign activity groups. If you select more than one campaign activity group, you can use the distribution algorithm. We have Weighted, Even, and Sequential options. You can also apply a split to control the exact number of people who will be distributed. Once you’ve made assignments, you can review you projections on the Assignments tabs. You can drill down to the campaign activity group level and perform What If analysis. If you feel like you need to make some corrections, simply draw in, select the segments you would like to un-apply then remove them. You can review your execution at any time. If you feel like you want to make a correction at this point, just click on that thing you would like to change. If everything looks good, finalize your universe. You are then able to download your file immediately.

Jim Funari: Brett, this capability is again designed for organizations that are doing typically high volumes and also want to be able to model their segmentations strategy and real time. It’s using our analytics engine and that kind of a big data analytics to get it really large data sets in sub-seconds response.

Brett Meyer: That’s correct. It actually leads us into our next area that we want to talk about and that’s Power VI capabilities because we’re basing our direct marketing and segmentation or one of that, where we’re looking at pre-defined analytics that we have KPI, measures that we already done. Some of them preparations for that, some just for the general management and everything. We can use this tool also for Adhoc mime. Looking at those KPI’s and measures looking through that and then being able to publish it and share that out with colleagues. We’re going to have a video presentation from Mark. He’ll take you through what we have for the BI capabilities within here. Let me get my cursor back.

Recorded: StratusLIVE’s Business Intelligence solution utilizes Microsoft BI service alongside the StratusLIVE’s distant technology data cubes to create powerful, interactive and visually appealing views at a critical business data from your organization. The power BI service is cloud-based and [0:49:38 inaudible] to get started with it. The interface is in two, and each of the units is mostly used to [0:49:43 inaudible] the [0:49:43 inaudible]. Users can create batch reports from the report available to them and even mark the most important charts for PPI. It saves it so that the access to them is very quick. Stratified business intelligent solutions comes with a number of pre-defined report, PPIs and dashboards.

These analytics cover tip fundraising areas such as campaign performance, opportunity tracking, constituent segmentation, and designation reporting. All of these are created on the data that is extracted, transformed and built into a custom data source called [0:50:14 inaudible]. The advantage of basing report and KPIs on a [0:50:19 BI tube] is that the PPLs are pre-calculated into fields called ledgers. The data is fed into off screen very quickly. This report to dashboards are [0:50:29 inaudible]. We can work with you to update or customize this pre-defined analytics so that they represent the crucial information you want to make available to others in your organization.

We can also work with you to add any custom fields you may have added so that reports can be created using data generated within your organization. Of course you can also create your own analytics. With the Power VI service there are a number of charts types called visualization available for use to insert your data. After being provided access to the data source, creating a new report with KPI is as  simple matter of selecting the data into the [0:51:03 inaudible] you would like to report on and add to visualization that would best present into the information you would like to show. From there you can tell the representation if you represent your data in the most appropriate way. With a bit of training you can begin doing your own data mining and recovery resulting in greater insight into your organization.

Once you have a report showing the information you want, you add that to a work station where others in your organization can view them. Each visual auto-report can be added to a dashboard or you can add the entire report to a dashboard. You can also share dashboards with others in your organization using the tools within the Power VI service. Also available is the ability to subscribe to a report and have it delivered to your email inbox at regular intervals.

Brett Meyer: The final area that we wanted to show through a presentation is an area that we call Social Engagement, Microsoft Social Engagement. This is available with Office 365. It is designed as a listening, analyzing tool. You can interact with it, you can see posts and do things like that, but more powerfully, you can integrate it with the CRM or StratusLIVE 365 system. We’re going to take you through a brief video, just to show you some of the capabilities that we have with the Social Engagement tool set.

Recorded: The Social Engagement Solutions puts cutting edge tools in the hands of your development and marketing teams. Helping them to gain insight into how people feel about your organization and mission into practically connect on social media with donors, fans and critics alike. With social listening, you can set up search roles on specific key words, Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, and more. To find the languages and sources you want to search, you can listen everywhere. Take you social pulse and identify your key influences. It’s easy to navigate to the details about the topics you’re monitoring.

You can quickly access your data with these analytics dashboards. The overview dashboard provides a quick summary. See the volume of posts for the week and actual volume overtime. Know your influencers and see which authors are key because they are most involve in conversations about your brand and search topic. The Sentiment dashboard shows how people are feeling about your brand, mission or even your partners and competitors. The conversations, location and sources dashboards provides further rich analytics and ways to interact with your constituents.

You can always see the posts that were used to create the analytics, by expanding the vertical post playing on any dashboard. We stratify for fund raisers, you can bring your social data into CRM. Enriching the data analytics and profiling capabilities. As far as allowing you to create new CRM records from post bound in social engagement. Within CRM, you can see the posts your constituents made on their contact records, and keep track of their links, social profiles and influence scores.

Questions & Answers

Brett Meyer: We realize we’re running just a little bit short on some of our timing and everything. We want to make sure that we do give time for the Q&A. I’m going to skip a couple of the slides out here. These will certainly be in the slide deck and available with that. But we want to get over and be able to answer some of the questions that you have asked during the presentation. Do we have some of those available to us Ann?

Ann Matthias: It looks like one of the questions that we have here is, pardon me. How is StratusLIVE different from just using and adapting the native CRM software within the Microsoft Dynamics 365?

Brett Meyer: We use Dynamic 365 as the base and then the core but we’ve extended that with probably well over 100 or 120 entities or tables that are unique to nonprofits. Really customizing it for the nonprofit vertical. For example, native CRM really has no understanding of a pledge or a gift or anything that would be similar to that. There’s a whole host of entities that we’ve added interest based entities, things around connections and profiles that are pretty unique. Tracking educational history, tracking many many other points of data that you would expect to see in a mature nonprofit vertical solution.

Ann Matthias: Great, okay. There’s another question that says, what is pricing and how does it compare to a platform like sales force in nonprofit success pack?

Jim Funari: Very similar. We have a bundled pricing model that on a per seat basis can get you up and going with the included Microsoft software, all of Microsoft CRM and so forth. Anywhere from $150 per seat depending on what modules are in and up. There are other entry points depending on what you want in the mix, probably best to contact us and let us give you some customized pricing.

Ann Matthias: Great. Does the Outlook integration work with Outlook desktop applications or only Outlook 365 online?

Brett Meyer: It does work with both Outlook 365 online and your desktop version of it. Experience is basically the same between the two of those capabilities.

Ann Matthias: Great. Can we easily customize the donor record to add new fields for specific data we want to capture on a donor?

Jim Funari:  Yes. The customization capabilities are very robust and we have hoped to have some time to demonstrate customization today, there’s just not enough in an hour. If you contact us, we’d be happy to show you a quick demo.

Ann Matthias:  Okay, and the last question is, does StratusLIVE sync with MailChimp for email campaigns?

Brett Meyer: It can sync with MailChimp. That’s actually one of those, it does have an adaptor that’s available for it. We also have some other partners that we work with on digital marketing capabilities that go beyond MailChimp. That can do survey and forms that completely embedded within the same experience as StratusLIVE is. We find some clients will move outside of the MailChimp arena and move over to digital marketing tool set.

Ann Matthias: Okay. Actually there’s more questions, that was not the last question, sorry. How does it handle recurring gifts, donation in recurring gifts? What payment processor does it work with?

Jim Funari: Sure, we do have a recurring gift entity. That is a high-level entity that store the recurring gift. We then process payments against that or on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis, whatever the donor has selected. Our processors that we work with right now are authorized.net and PayPal. We have several others on the launch pad and the road map for payment integration.

Ann Matthias: Okay. Is the constituent portal ADA compliant? Does it work with JAWS or Windows ICE?

Brett Meyer: To be perfectly honest, we haven’t tested it fully for the ADA compliance, but we are working again with a partner on that tool set. I know they are working on their side of the tool set for the ADA compliance. I think I have to send you an update as well again, if you’ll just contact Elisa, we’ll happily get you a firm answer or an update on that.

Ann Matthias: Great. That is all the questions and all or our time.

Brett Meyer: Thanks everybody for your time today.

Ann Matthias: Thanks everyone for attending.

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