Adding offline sustainers into Convio?

david glass

Hi - Does anyone have any suggestions or best practice ideas for adding a group of offline sustainers into Convio?  For sure we'd have to create some kind of sequential email addresses -- but I'm more interested to see if anyone has figured out a way to do this other than manually adding one sustainer at a time.

Thanks!

David

Noah Cooper

David,

There really isn't a solution other than to enter the offline gifts manually, one at a time. Convio has no upload tool, as handling a file with credit card information would be a pretty big security issue.

Also note that it is possible to make it so that admins are not required to enter an email address when entering offline gifts (assuming they're doing so through the admin interface, not a constituent-facing donation form). If you decide to instead enter email addresses for these offline donors, you should do so following the convention devnull+<<firstname>><<lastname>>@convio.com (you could replace first name and last name with any unique identifier, like member_id for example), instead of making up email addresses at say "fake.com" or "test.com", which could in fact be real.

Brian Mucha

Noah Cooper:

David,

There really isn't a solution other than to enter the offline gifts manually, one at a time. Convio has no upload tool, as handling a file with credit card information would be a pretty big security issue.

Also note that it is possible to make it so that admins are not required to enter an email address when entering offline gifts (assuming they're doing so through the admin interface, not a constituent-facing donation form). If you decide to instead enter email addresses for these offline donors, you should do so following the convention devnull+<<firstname>><<lastname>>@convio.com (you could replace first name and last name with any unique identifier, like member_id for example), instead of making up email addresses at say "fake.com" or "test.com", which could in fact be real.

devnull+<<firstname>><<lastname>>@convio.com

Could you confirm what I'm guessing about this convention, Noah?

Does the +whatever part work like it does in gmail, where it is for tracking purposes and ignored by the email system (and the address is actually devnull@convio.com?)

I found in another post that there something special about devnull@convio.com. Its a blackhole address and won't ever deliver to some real person who happens to have 'nothing@noemail.com'.

Regards, Brian

Noah Cooper

Brian Mucha:

devnull+<<firstname>><<lastname>>@convio.com

Could you confirm what I'm guessing about this convention, Noah?

Does the +whatever part work like it does in gmail, where it is for tracking purposes and ignored by the email system (and the address is actually devnull@convio.com?)

I found in another post that there something special about devnull@convio.com. Its a blackhole address and won't ever deliver to some real person who happens to have 'nothing@noemail.com'.

Regards, Brian

That's right -- similarly to gmail, Convio's email server is set up to redirect incoming email with a plus sign in the address, for example, ncooper+test1@convio.com, ncooper+test2@convio.com,and ncooper+test3@convio.com all go to my inbox. And you're correct about the devnull email address.