Offline donation processing

valerie

Our organization receives a lot of credit card donations by mail and phone. We process these offline credit card transactions through Convio. We're curious how other organizations handle their offline credit card transactions.

Vickie Johnson

We've just completed deployment, and for now we have both an offline and online (Constituent360) database, which we intend to integrate using datasync. But we haven't figured out what to do when an offline donor has no email. We process donations over the phone using the online donation form. If a donor has no email, we can enter their name and key in a fake email address, but we haven't figured out yet what effect that will have on the datasync process, or if we'll actually have more work identifying duplicate records.

Angel Galiazzi 2

I am trying to find that out as well - just posted and will let you know if i find anything out!

sstennis

Unless an organization has very specific reasons to add email-less folks to cons360 I suggest they be left in the offline database and not moved into Convio at all.

Here are some of the issues:

If you make up a fake email address for them and they eventually visit the website and try to create an account or log in they will create a duplicate since they will not have the fake email address to enter. If they are left in the offline DB and eventually visit the site there is a much higher chance the two records will be paired correctly during a sync.

If you set the email address field as not required, so as to avoid having to create a set of fake addresses, you will then get a ton of duplicates as people end up registering multiple time with the same email address.

The fake email address have to be 'maintained'. Since you can't reuse any of the fake addresses you will need to create a list and distribute and update it to everyone in your org that enters these offline constituents.

Why do you want them in Convio in the first place? Since you don't have a valid email address for them you can't send them any messages. You can't even send them their username and password, so they will not be able to log into the account. If they can't log into the account and you can't send them messages, what's the point?