Online Express Pros and Cons

Monique Cunningham Sims

Greetings All,


We are in the process of evaluating Online Express and wanted to get an idea of current clients' experience with the software. What are the pros and cons that you have experienced with its' implementation and use?


Thank you in advance.


Monique Sims

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

Elizabeth Naughton 2

Monique Cunningham Sims:

Greetings All,


We are in the process of evaluating Online Express and wanted to get an idea of current clients' experience with the software. What are the pros and cons that you have experienced with its' implementation and use?


Thank you in advance.


Monique Sims

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

We just transitioned in December to Online Express from NetCommunity. I'll tell you that it's much much easier to use than NetCommunity. The emails also are mobile friendly, which is my favorite part. Still learning.

Merrianne McGill

There are many PROs about Online Express, but the CONs are as follows:

1. When the donor writes their name as Mike and we have their name as Michael, OLX will not allow us to ignore the update by unchecking the box, it will overwrite the our current data in RE with the new value, this applies to any update. We would like the check box to ignore the new udate.

.

2. The format and fields that load into RE make no sense. Is there a way we can change this information when the batch is created without manually changing everything ourselves?


3. OLX creates a blank name in the Tributes instead of picking up the tribute that exists in RE.


 

Jen Claudy

Merrianne, I don't have time to go into a lot of detail right now and I don't have access to OLX at the moment, but here is some information that you will hopefully find useful:


1.  RE will ignore OLX updates, however, there is a second step.  When you are finished reviewing the transactions and ready to push them over to RE, on the second tab there are options that will instruct RE to ignore updates that are marked as such on the records.  I know there are other Community posts about this, I believe including screenshots.

2.  You can set up a Batch in RE to use as a template, with all of the fields set just as you'd like them.  On the same window as mentioned above, you can select your template Batch and RE will use the fields and settings in the new OLX Batch (I think this is on the third tab, maybe?).

3.  I haven't linked tributes from OLX in a long while, but it's a separate link you need to create when reviewing the transactions.


Hopefully someone else can jump in with more detail and/or screenshots...or links to the other Posts I know are out here somewhere!


Not to say that there aren't a number of things in OLX that most users find clunky or frustrating...even these three items are clunky.  OLX has a number of Help videos, which are fine, except that it's difficult to find the part of the video you want, and sometimes they aren't updated as quickly as the software is.  If you come across something you think you should be able to do, or you would like to do, search the Community (and if you don't find your answer, Post it).  Also, check out the OLX Idea Bank and vote for or add new Ideas for future functionality in OLX.

Hayley Golding 3

Monique Cunningham Sims:

Greetings All,


We are in the process of evaluating Online Express and wanted to get an idea of current clients' experience with the software. What are the pros and cons that you have experienced with its' implementation and use?


Thank you in advance.


Monique Sims

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

Hi, We are very happy with Online Express since moving from NetCommunity. It's much easier to use and Fundraiser's need very little support to use it.

The Cons for us are;

1. The Image library is not sorted and cannot be organised in any way (that I know of!), so images are uploaded again and again.

2. We recently discovered a limit of 200 lists, and so we are now having to re-use previous ones and being more organised (not a bad thing, I suppose)

3. It doesn't show who (i.e which user) the email designs are created by - we have to guess by the topic of the email.

4. You can't upload your own template, so you have to use previously sent/designed emails instead.


Mostly good though, our rule of thumb is to keep the designs simple - they work better and display more reliably.

Good luck!

Hayley


 

Hannah Wiginton

It's basic which is super helpful if you want a 'done and go' approach. That being said, you cannot customize it as much as NC. 

Emily Chen

We love the convenience of OLX. A few things we continuoulsly see as problems include:

1. Charities donating through OLX automatically receive a tax receipt. We would love an option to just send an acknowledgement letter if the donor is a registered charity. We have to query for these and go back and void the receipt numbers for any charities. foundations, or churches donating online.


2. Tribute linking or organization names - a lot of the time people fill in these two fields with irrelevant information. There is no option to ignore it - we have to link to a tribute even if it says "Kermit the Frog" which we've seen before. We have to link it to a record in RE otherwise it will not push through. Same with irrelevant organization names - if people fill in their individual name again, we have to create an organization record named "Michael Smith" for example.


These are two recurring problems we see in OLX.

Sara Guando

Monique Cunningham Sims:

Greetings All,


We are in the process of evaluating Online Express and wanted to get an idea of current clients' experience with the software. What are the pros and cons that you have experienced with its' implementation and use?


Thank you in advance.


Monique Sims

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

OLX would be helpful for events and registrations that are super basic. Its a simple program and simple to use. However, for our purposes we have found that the lack of customization abilities has made it very difficult to translate our needs and keep it user friendly on the registrant side. Some of our issues include:

- Inability to limit only a certain kind of price type, rather than the entire event itself. We have some ticket types for events that are special and therefore limited but we don't have a way of limiting them.

- Sponsorships that include various participant types (i.e. a "platinum sponsor" for our golf outing includes 2 foursomes (which includes dinner for the golfers) and 8 additional dinner guests) - there is no way to make it clear which guests are for golf and which are for dinner. We had to really spell it out for people and the feedback was that that made it overwhelming and easier to just call in or fill out a paper form (which of course our goal is to get more people to use our online page) - splitting into two registrant types and adding attributes were the suggestions I received and really only made the process more confusing on the user side.


The agency has used OLX in the past with not a lot of success. This will personally be my 1st time using it and we haven't had the event yet to get to any issues translating into RE but these are just a few user issues and customization options that we really needif we were to continue OLX going forward.

 

Sarah Krenicki

Monique Cunningham Sims:

Greetings All,


We are in the process of evaluating Online Express and wanted to get an idea of current clients' experience with the software. What are the pros and cons that you have experienced with its' implementation and use?


Thank you in advance.


Monique Sims

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

We've found the lack of customization fairly limiting when it comes to events and making user-friendly donation forms. We wanted to make everything easy to see and click buttons, for example, but OLX would only let us use dropdown menus. ​We're actually moving away from using OLX for this reason- we want the forms to be as simple and uncomplicated as humanly possible. 


I liked the ability to put it through as a batch into RE, as out policy states that all gifts have to be entered through a batch, but it loves to update things that don't need to be updated - ofr example if someone uses all caps, it will update the constituent record feilds to all caps, and we don't want that! Sometimes it lets you ignore updates, but there are some feilds that it makes you put through- like if someone enteres their name as an org. 

 

Darcy Law 3

Jen Claudy:

Merrianne, I don't have time to go into a lot of detail right now and I don't have access to OLX at the moment, but here is some information that you will hopefully find useful:


1.  RE will ignore OLX updates, however, there is a second step.  When you are finished reviewing the transactions and ready to push them over to RE, on the second tab there are options that will instruct RE to ignore updates that are marked as such on the records.  I know there are other Community posts about this, I believe including screenshots.

2.  You can set up a Batch in RE to use as a template, with all of the fields set just as you'd like them.  On the same window as mentioned above, you can select your template Batch and RE will use the fields and settings in the new OLX Batch (I think this is on the third tab, maybe?).

3.  I haven't linked tributes from OLX in a long while, but it's a separate link you need to create when reviewing the transactions.


Hopefully someone else can jump in with more detail and/or screenshots...or links to the other Posts I know are out here somewhere!


Not to say that there aren't a number of things in OLX that most users find clunky or frustrating...even these three items are clunky.  OLX has a number of Help videos, which are fine, except that it's difficult to find the part of the video you want, and sometimes they aren't updated as quickly as the software is.  If you come across something you think you should be able to do, or you would like to do, search the Community (and if you don't find your answer, Post it).  Also, check out the OLX Idea Bank and vote for or add new Ideas for future functionality in OLX.

Hi - I don't have a clue when an individual who works at an organization puts their name as the donor - then it seems I HAVE to link the individual and then link the Organization but then the CC gift is under the Individual not the Org name where it should be - any thoughts as to how to process these?? Thanks, Darcy

Jen Claudy

Darcy,


I would consider having OLX create a new Individual Record for that donation, then once it's in RE, convert that Record to an Organization Record (and add a Relationship Record).  Or if the Organization is already in RE, merge the Records together.

Alison Smith

Hi all ,


Our foundation has just begun exploring the tool OE to send email marketing - we have been using other email platforms in the past but think there is a great potential to use the OE system to send out marketing and fundraising communications! 


That said, from our observations Online Express needs to be enhanced to improve design features, including:
- Images: possibility to crop pics and add filters. Also there needs to be a feature to buffer text around pictures - photos with text to the right or left appear squashed next to text. 

- Donate buttons: ability to customize size and change position
- Attachments: possibility to upload docs to be shared via the cloud (RE Database)
- Merge tags: ability to see a live merge tag before sending marketing emails (Mailchimp has this feature and it's great! The test version is unable to show how the tag will appear once sent). 

The list of merge tags is also limited and does not include alternative salutations (owner determined), can that be customized at this stage?


In relation to other cons, it would be great to look into these areas:

- Files: ability to save email with name and then archive files in folders (we have not discovered a way to do this yet, I'm thinking it's not a current feature, but please correct me if I am wrong  

- Customize types of email: The dropdown list shows half a dozen mailing option e.g. fundraising, event, etc - It would be useful if these could be customized and owner determined. 


Good luck and thanks for opening this discussion!


Alison 

 

Jenna Anderson 2

Monique Cunningham Sims:

Greetings All,


We are in the process of evaluating Online Express and wanted to get an idea of current clients' experience with the software. What are the pros and cons that you have experienced with its' implementation and use?


Thank you in advance.


Monique Sims

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan

I will second what everyone else has already stated, OX is very user-friendly which makes it easier for those without a background in HTML editing to create emails.


Cons: It is too simplistic. There is no ability, according to my colleague, to customize the HTML code in an email if you want to.

Another huge con is that you can't import lists into OX to email to. We have several large spreadsheets of emails for e-newsletters contacts that we manage on behalf of someone else. We do not want to add them all to our database, but since we can't email to imported lists in OX coupled with the lack of ability to customize that we rely on to create those e-newsletters, we are still relying on NetCommunity to serve a lot of our web and email functions at our organization. 

Another con, we are currently in two small capital campaigns, and are selling customizable tiles as a naming opportunity. The last time we had done this, we used NetCommunity to create a custom donation page that captures and shows all of the information we want, but OX is unable to do this, as well. 


For our organization, the transition from NetCommunity to OX was deflating, to say the least. We have set-up in OX all that we can, but still rely heavily on NetCommunity to meet all of our organization's needs.