Distinguishing additional donations from registration fees

Daniel Noga 2

Hi everyone,


This may seem like a silly question, but I've actually asked Support already and am waiting for a response as they look into this. In the meantime, I am wondering if anyone else has experienced this.


We have a registration form set up for a 5k race, and we've included the field to allow people to make additional donations. This is my first experience utilizing this field.


We had a transaction come through that was a higher amount than any of the available registration fees, and have confirmed with the registrant that the difference was intended as a donation. However, the transaction came across in Batch as a single lump-sum gift. We keep our event revenue and general donations in different buckets, so we need to have this in RE: as two separate gifts. There was/is no clear indicator either in OLX or in the RE: batch that the additional amount was intended as a donation, so our data entry staff quite understandably processed it all as a single gift.


Aside from looking at the transaction amount and attempting to deduce the registrant's intentions (a bit scary in my opinion), how can we look at a transaction and tell what amount to allocate as a donation?

Gina Smith 2

This is an interesting question  - we are processing our first event registration/donations and have discussed the same issue.  \\


My situation may be oranges vs apples to yours since we use BBNC Spark  - but your question peaks my interest for sure.  

Our event registration forms are processed thru NC Plug-in on the RE side using the Event Module  The prices are set - so the donor can't designate how much they want to commit torward the "ticket sales."  They can only indicate a quantity of registratoins/tickets.  Any donation would have to be indacted by the donor in the separate "make an additional donation" field and our form is set up to push that to a different "bucket" (fund). 


Of course - I haven't had one come thru yet with a ticket purchase AND donation - so I am curious how that will process thorugh the plug-in. 


This may be totally different in OLX - but similar in processing nature maybe.  Thanks for posting the question - i'll be sure to follow and curious to see your answer from support and the community.

Daniel Noga 2

Gina Smith:

  Any donation would have to be indacted by the donor in the separate "make an additional donation" field and our form is set up to push that to a different "bucket" (fund). 


 

You'e the best, Gina! Your comment above prompted me to check how our form is set up, and it had been set up to deposit the extra donation into the same fund as the ticket revenue, something I had overlooked when investigating. I think since both Funds were the same, the gift was lumped together. I'm going to change the fund and test this.

Daniel Noga 2

I did not get a chance to test this out in OLX.


When I went to ask for the credit card to do a test run, I was told that this was a known issue from the beginning, and that adjusting the Fund distribution in the form would not prevent the registration fee and the extra donation from being lumped together. The only known solution at this point is for data entry staff to be vigilant, pay attention to the transaction amounts, and take a closer look when we get gifts in amounts that don't match one of the registration fees. We will then presumably need to manually edit the combined gift in Batch, changing the amount and manually adding a separate gift comprised of the Donation amount.

Christina Swiszcz

I also have BB NetCommunity, not OLX, but can comment on the BBNC side of it. The only way I can tell if there is an additional donation is when first opening the Event Registrations in RE, the first screen that shows up is a list of the transactions. It says there under each name "has made an additional donation", and you can click on that transaction and open the details to see how much it was. After opening the transactions in batch, it is lumped into one gift. So if you don't catch that on the first screen, it is hard to tell once in batch. 

In batch, I would add a line and split that gift into 2 seperate gifts, which means that I would add that same constituent manually on a second line.

I hope this helps.

Gina Smith 2

Daniel Noga:

 

Gina Smith:

  Any donation would have to be indacted by the donor in the separate "make an additional donation" field and our form is set up to push that to a different "bucket" (fund). 


 

You'e the best, Gina! Your comment above prompted me to check how our form is set up, and it had been set up to deposit the extra donation into the same fund as the ticket revenue, something I had overlooked when investigating. I think since both Funds were the same, the gift was lumped together. I'm going to change the fund and test this.

 

Daniel - glad you found that - but apparently by your next post it didn't work for you.  Boo.  I have since had a transaction come thru our plug-in with a donation and a registration fee.  It worked.  The gift was split when i pulled it into an RE batch.  Interesting.