Online Express Users

Lauren Fardella · May 2015

Hi, this topic area is sort of dead and I am thinking because there are not a lof users out there. If ANYONE is using Online Express, please let us know how you like or do not like it and can you share your online giving page so we can see some examples?

Thank you!

Jana Gay 2 · May 2015

Hi Lauren,

We are planning on changing from NetCommunity to Online Express in the next few months so I will be sure to let you know how it goes! I' m also interested in pointers anyone else who has undergone this process might have.

Thanks!

Jana

Shannon Slater · May 2015

I find Online Express the perfect solution for the giving pages that the organization that I'm serving needs. The Net Community giving pages are laborious to set up and since our tech team manages images and content on the website, all I have to do as the RE Administrator, is to build the various campaign giving pages through online express, copy the java script and send it to tech to post. Each page took about 5 minutes to build. Any time I make a change to the pages already mapped to the website, since it's linked, I don't have to send an update to tech. I would advise against using the "save as" function in it's current form as it quite frankly doesn't work how I understand "save as" to function, it was a mess and I will be following up with my rep to find out if a fix is in the works. Otherwise, it's a wonderful tool. When a donation is received online, it populates the Online Express Transaction box and the process is very quick to review and accept donor data, then populates a batch to deposit and enters everything into RE for new or existing donors. It also shows an overall form performance grid with page views, transactions, average donation and conversion rate. It's very cool! I love it. Our forms are live at https://www.foothillfamily.org/Donate/Donate.php.

Kellie DeMers · May 2015

We got On-Line Express this year and love it. It is intuitive and easy to use. My annual fund and alumni directors can do their own pushpages with very little assistance from me. You can upload images, change pages on the fly and use queries to target specific groups for emails. I asked the AF director to take off the 'bill me later' option since it was so close to end of year and it was edited and changed on the website immediately. The gift download area takes about a 10th of the time it did using our old credit card processor and the notification area has unlimited notifications so all of my solicitors are now notified when a gift comes in on-line. I can also now find e-mail bouncebacks quickly using the unusable email mechanism. You can check out our website donation page at https://berwickacademy.myschoolapp.com/Page/Support-Berwick/Online-Giving?siteId=646&ssl=1

Paul Morriss · May 2015

I'm a big fan of Online Express after having used NetCommunity for a number of years. I'm impressed by the rapid introduction of new features. We went live in September last year and some things were missing, like scheduled deliveries for email, but almost all those features are in there now.

We have a number of donation pages, but our main one is

https://wycliffe.org.uk/give/donation.html

Mary Fu · May 2015

We just started using OLX and we are very happy. After years of using NetCommunity, I am so impressed with OLX's capability.

John Zajc · October 2015

Sorry I did not see this thread earlier when it was probably more useful for you to hear.

The Cleveland Institute of Music has been usin Online Express since sometime in March 2015. I love being able to have custom online donation forms and the ability to update some things pretty immediately.

I have not used the email marketing feature yet, but so far am disappointed with it. I'm shocked by how few fields I can merge into my email (and some fields that can be merged feel pretty silly to me in an email, like a physical address). i am working on an email now to start making the case for Online Express repalcing Constant Contact and discovered that adding a jpg of a signature is not as simple as I would expect because you can't add it (as far as I can tell) in between two lines of text. So basiclly, so far I am surprised by its limitations.

John Zajc

Michele Stender · October 2015

Hey John! Thanks for posting. We do have a webinar around the Email Marketing piece in OLX that you might be interested in. We present it almost on a weekly basis so you might find some other tips and tricks and you can ask quesitons you might have live. I think I can help with the inserting the signature piece so let me know if you attend and I can show it live. I update this link on a weekly basis and ALSO you can find the webinar listed under the events tab in the OLX community.

Webinar Schedule

John Zajc · December 2015

Michele,

I went on vacation right around the time you posted this reply and haven't checked in for a while. I just signed up for the Email Marketing 101 webinar on 12/9.

John

Michele Stender:

Hey John! Thanks for posting. We do have a webinar around the Email Marketing piece in OLX that you might be interested in. We present it almost on a weekly basis so you might find some other tips and tricks and you can ask quesitons you might have live. I think I can help with the inserting the signature piece so let me know if you attend and I can show it live. I update this link on a weekly basis and ALSO you can find the webinar listed under the events tab in the OLX community.

Webinar Schedule

Danielle Allen 2 · December 2015

Michele Stender:

Hey John! Thanks for posting. We do have a webinar around the Email Marketing piece in OLX that you might be interested in. We present it almost on a weekly basis so you might find some other tips and tricks and you can ask quesitons you might have live. I think I can help with the inserting the signature piece so let me know if you attend and I can show it live. I update this link on a weekly basis and ALSO you can find the webinar listed under the events tab in the OLX community.

Webinar Schedule

I would also like to know how to insert the signature. So far we've had to tell our Comms team it isn't possible. Can we please have instructions that are not part of a Webinar?

Candy Reichert · December 2015

We are using NetCommunity and OLX. I find that there are times when OLX donor pages are helpful and the set up is very easy (drag & drop). I have tried setting up an email blast in OLX, and though it also is very user friendly, I find that options for field inclusion from an RE List exports and Queries is very limited. We need to be able to include personal information in our email blasts and OLX has very limited fields available. We find that for generic emails OLX will work. However, for more complicated emails that require inserting merge fields into the narative, NetCommunity is a better fit. OLX is an updated more modern interface. It will be nice when we can use merge fields from queries.

Candy

Jennifer Chase · December 2015

We switched from BBNC (Spark) to OLX in summer 2015, and I love it.

You can find our donation forms here: https://www.effecthope.org/donate. If you pm me your email address, I can send you some of our emails too.

We have noticed a positive trend in conversions and open rates since the switch.

Suzanne Murray 2 · January 2016

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for sharing the link to your forms! I like the functionality and it does look better than ours which is in BBNC Spark (support.twoten.org).

We are not very satisfied with Spark so I am curious to learn more about your experience with switching - was it fairly painless?

I have seen from browsing the forums here that OLX does seem to have similar limitations regarding unsubscribes and bounces as Spark does, for one. But perhaps it solves other issues? We are already using BBMS and we also rely on event registration via Spark right now so I want to keep those functions available, whether or not it's through the same back end process.

Thank you! And if email is better I'm happy to reach out that way!

Suzanne

Rob Kudyba · February 2016

Our org is so disappointed in the limited functionality and extremely limited flexibility, WRT to the email portion. No flexibility. No customizing. No way to control your brand. No HTML editing. Can't event update the footer. Templates look dated and very limited. Complete bust. #EPICFAIL

Carrie Sauer · February 2016

Pros: Easy to use, integrates with other Blackbaud products, secure, cheap

Cons: EXTREMELY limited in ability to customize forms, email confirmations, and receipts

Rob Kudyba · February 2016

Carrie Sauer:

Pros: Easy to use, integrates with other Blackbaud products, secure, cheap

Cons: EXTREMELY limited in ability to customize forms

Cheap? Maybe the OLX stand alone but NXT? Cheap?

Carrie Sauer · February 2016

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Carrie Sauer · February 2016

Rob Kudyba:

Carrie Sauer:

Pros: Easy to use, integrates with other Blackbaud products, secure, cheap

Cons: EXTREMELY limited in ability to customize forms

Cheap? Maybe the OLX stand alone but NXT? Cheap?

We already had The Raiser's Edge, so compared with using a different online giving system, yes. The fees through Blackbaud Merchant Services are low, and OLX is $2,400 per year for unlimited online donation forms and up to 90,000 emails sent per year (+$240 per year to add event registration).

It doesn't seem like such a good deal now that we know how limited we are in customizing those forms and emails.

Merllene Bendixen · August 2016

Lauren Fardella:

Hi, this topic area is sort of dead and I am thinking because there are not a lof users out there. If ANYONE is using Online Express, please let us know how you like or do not like it and can you share your online giving page so we can see some examples?

Thank you!

Not sure if this is the right forum - but I will give it a shot. We have just migrated to NXT, which includes Online Express. We previously used NetCommunity, primarily for our online donation pages. While we love the ease with which the donation forms can be generated and revised on Online Express, we have run into what appears to be a HUGE issue. While the Online Express form is PCI compliant and secure, the webpage on which the form is hosted may or may not be PCI compliant. Our IT person thought they would just move us to the HTTPS site, but our auditor waved a big red flag, based on the following: The form elements on this page may be created by HTML loaded from the merchant's website or by JavaScript loaded by the consumer’s browser from a third party. From the merchant's perspective this is an attractive solution as it gives the merchant greater control over the look-and-feel of the payment page and the payment flow than what is provided in a redirect or iFrame method. The common criminal attack against this scenario is to compromise the payment page by including criminal-provided JavaScript that simply takes a copy of the cardholder data as it is being entered and sends it to a criminal's server. The actual payment flow is not affected, and therefore this attack is very hard to detect and will often provide an ongoing supply of cardholder data to the criminal. It is primarily for these types of environments that the Council developed SAQ A-EP to provide a level of assurance that the merchant's website was appropriately protected.

Our IT guys had a discussion with BB support, who totally misunderstood the question. We were not questioning the PCI compliance of the Online Express form, but asking if we could get a link instead that could be safely included on our webpage, or if there was another option that could be used. I would be interested in knowing if this situation has come up with other clients and how the issue was resolved. If these forms can only be placed securely on PCI compliant pages, it would be helpful to know that in the beginning, as that would definatly have a bearing on whether or not Online Express can be successfully deployed.

William Henderson · August 2016

The only part I am not really liking about Online Express is that when a donor sets up a recurring gifts they are given lest options of what day they want their gift to go through unlike NetCommunity.

Lauren Fardella:

Hi, this topic area is sort of dead and I am thinking because there are not a lof users out there. If ANYONE is using Online Express, please let us know how you like or do not like it and can you share your online giving page so we can see some examples?

Thank you!

Candy Reichert · August 2016

William Henderson:

The only part I am not really liking about Online Express is that when a donor sets up a recurring gifts they are given lest options of what day they want their gift to go through unlike NetCommunity.

Lauren Fardella:

Hi, this topic area is sort of dead and I am thinking because there are not a lof users out there. If ANYONE is using Online Express, please let us know how you like or do not like it and can you share your online giving page so we can see some examples?

Thank you!

Below is a link to one of our giving pages. You will be able to see how I handled the any day of the month issue for the Recurring Gift frequency. When you have one set up as default it is easy to copy to create a new donor part.

We also attempted to put the OLX forms on our pages that are outside of BBNC and found that they were not secure. Therefore, we have placed them back onto our secure BBNC pages.

https://community.e.southern.edu/pages/give-now-to-southern-adventist-university-student-missions

Online Express Users

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