Processing Offline Donations without an Email Address

Heather McDowell

What is the best method by which to process donations from an offline source when you don't have a corresponding email address?

david glass

In some cases this happens to us and we have to use a sequence of non-existing email addresses, such as noemail001@noemail.com, noemail002@noemail.com and then to keep things clean we put them into a group and suppress them from emails.

Noah Cooper

I'd say the best method is to make email address non-required for admins. This is something that can be changed in Database Configuration, available only to Convio admins or members of the Advanced Site Admins group.

Using dummy email addresses is not a good practice, for obvious reasons.

Heather McDowell

My concern in turning off the email address option for admins is causing duplications during the data sync process.

I asked this question of Technical Services and got the following response:

Having recording in Convio that do not have an email can be a significant problem especially when dealing with merging or DataSyncing with RE. For example, records without an email address will never sync any changes back from RE to Convio as RE only sends to Convio records that have email addresses.

We would reccommend that first and foremost, obviously, you attempt to acquire an email from the constituent in question whenever possible.

However, that is not always possible. If an email can not be obtained and a “dummy email” needs to be used it needs to be:

1. Unique

2. The record needs to be set to Accepts Email = False

3. The record should be set to Email Status = Hard Bounce.

As far as the naming convention –  Convio has an email address that is a bit of a “black hole” so that if somehow by accident an email is sent – it will not go anywhere or cause problems.

The email address in question is  devnull@convio.com. To make these unique, we recommend that you choose a unique identifier such as the Convio Cons_ID or the RE ID to add to the email - such as devnull+123456@convio.com. That is a valid email address, that the system will accept, will be unique, will allow the record to sync correctly, and is a black hole in case the record is accidently edited in the future and an email is sent to it.

h.

David Elliott

Heather McDowell:

My concern in turning off the email address option for admins is causing duplications during the data sync process.

I asked this question of Technical Services and got the following response:

Having recording in Convio that do not have an email can be a significant problem especially when dealing with merging or DataSyncing with RE. For example, records without an email address will never sync any changes back from RE to Convio as RE only sends to Convio records that have email addresses.

We would reccommend that first and foremost, obviously, you attempt to acquire an email from the constituent in question whenever possible.

However, that is not always possible. If an email can not be obtained and a “dummy email” needs to be used it needs to be:

1. Unique

2. The record needs to be set to Accepts Email = False

3. The record should be set to Email Status = Hard Bounce.

As far as the naming convention –  Convio has an email address that is a bit of a “black hole” so that if somehow by accident an email is sent – it will not go anywhere or cause problems.

The email address in question is  devnull@convio.com. To make these unique, we recommend that you choose a unique identifier such as the Convio Cons_ID or the RE ID to add to the email - such as devnull+123456@convio.com. That is a valid email address, that the system will accept, will be unique, will allow the record to sync correctly, and is a black hole in case the record is accidently edited in the future and an email is sent to it.

h.

This is an interesting question. If someone is entered into COM without an email address, will that record sync with Common Ground?