PowerUp Challenge: Third Events Task

Crystal Bruce

Please answer questions 1 and 2 first, then this question last:

Receive at least one registration submission through the Raiser's Edge NXT online registration form that you created in web view. Please share any challenges or successes throughout this process.

Braden Morrill

@Crystal Bruce
The form linking directly to the registration and allocating payments to specific categories is really helpful for streamlining reporting.

Daniel R. Snyder

@Crystal Bruce We are only using these forms for free events and overall, I have been very pleased with the matching results. Yes, there are those “new” constituents who are not new, but it is pretty easy for me to make the appropriate connections and keep from having tons of duplicates.

A couple notes here: First, we are pretty small so do not have a huge amount of registrants. Also, if I could suggest an idea it would be that once you move a “new” constituent registration to an existing constituent record, it would be great if they were no longer listed as new.

Dana Smith 4

@Crystal Bruce It would be great if Test registrations did not get included in the Form Registrant total number. Love the attending/not attending lists

Dariel Dixon 2

@Dan Snyder This is so important! Making sure constituent matching is up to par. We have so many individuals who might sign up using an email address that we don't have. I'm also curious how event registration forms work if the non-constituent spouse signs up for an event. Can you easily move the registration over to the constituent's record? We don't use the registration forms but I'm curious how they work now.

Mercedes McCayRead

@Crystal Bruce so my biggest challenge with this last time was that I had imported the list of invited participants, but many would call in instead of using the RSVP feature through the online form leaving other people in my department to register for them, using their email addresses (so not the constituent email addresses) and even though it matched them to the constituent it would either overwrite the email addresses already in RE or create a new participant. So I had to tell my colleagues to not RSVP through the form but just let me know who RSVP'd (or not) so I could do it on the backend.

Jessica White 3

@Crystal Bruce
Similar to what Mercedes said, we often have fundraisers manually collect RSVPs rather than directing participants to the registration form themselves. The fundraiser will list their own email which causes a lot of clean up on the backend. Success - the ease in which we are able to see up to date progress on registration and prepare in advance for interactions at the event.

Brianna Thompson

@Crystal Bruce Our biggest dilemma is constituent matching. Every typo or second address leads to duplicates, which is so much work on the back end.

Laura Holland

@Crystal Bruce It can be challenging after an event to match up the ‘blank’ registrants from a sponsorship payment with those who actually attended thanks to that sponsor. Also, I don't know what to do with the blank registrants when not enough people attended to match records.

Kelly CampionSocol 2

@Crystal Bruce I wish the registration page had the ability to add a photo or something more than just text (or an emoji) to make it more visually appealing.

Also, with our first registration page we forgot to add in a registrant who paid by check. There was only one person who paid in this manner, and we forgot to link the payment to the event. This was embarrassing at event check-in when they were not on the list.

Daniel R. Snyder

@Dariel Dixon Excellent question and the answer is yes, you can. It is not quite as straight forward as moving a gift for example, but if you go to their registration and click on the ellipsis next to their name and select edit, you can search for a new name from within your db and move the registration to that record. You would then need to delete the non-constituent spouse record if you do not want them to have a full record, but seems a bit easier than with OLX forms.

Alex Wong

@Crystal Bruce
Without the ability to specify CFAP (campaign fund appeal package) PER fee level, we have no way to know (from gift side) what was “purchased”.

Lena Fedosova 3

@Crystal Bruce, the constant duplication of records is always a challenge, despite of settings. It would be great to know NXT algorithms - there are often dupe/s created even when the email is identical. Also, it would be good to have an opportunity to assign a separate Solicit code for people registered via forms. The last bug that we've got a registration with blank fields - I didn't know this is possible! (I used the transaction ID to define the constituent).

Aldera Chisholm 2

@Crystal Bruce Duplication is absolutely my challenge. I want to be able to upload all the invitees, and then have registrations not create dupes, but also, just in general if we were able to review them, like we can with donation forms, that would be helpful.

Austen Brown

@Crystal Bruce - It would be great if registrant info could be routed through the Online Data Review tool, like Online Giving forms. That way an org can choose if they want to fully utilize the automatic constituent matching tool (current process), utilize it partially to match new constituents themselves or review all incoming data themselves. Creating this option would increase buy-in in this area.

Melanie Sullivan

@Crystal Bruce
Have had many registrations by now. Main problem is duplication of constituents and some difficulties with automatic matching of registrants with invitees if they have been uploaded.

Cindy Lee 2

@Crystal Bruce Constituent matching for those not on the current invitee list could be improved. It would be nice if there were a feature similar to the gift matching that would allow you to match those that did not auto-match and choose to mark them as a constituent or as just a participant (this is helpful if they are only attending the event and do not appear to be prospects at that time)

Patti Hommes

@Crystal Bruce my biggest challenge is, as others have said, constituent matching. The person paying the registration fee can easily be matched, but the guests in the event record are not matched, which creates extra work for us.

Krissy Dunn

@Crystal Bruce Registrants are reflected in the auto-populated number of people attending and you can easily review the list of everyone who bought tickets by clicking on the number. It's very convenient to get a quick snapshot of ticket sales and a quick peek into who is planning to attend.

Danielle Repic 3

@Crystal Bruce I like the functionality, but the gift processor wasn't able to produce the reports that she needed with the necessary fields. So, I was forced to go back to database events.

Miki Martin

@Crystal Bruce my test was pretty simple and worked well. I am still waiting on the confirmation email in my work Inbox to tell me someone registered so that takes some time. I will echo what others have said about constituent matching and registering non-constituents. I had a workaround at my old org to register non-constituents instead of making them a full constituent. Having the list preloaded to note who was invited is great for tracking until those constituents start RSVPing and instead of updating their registration from invited to attending it creates a new line. Things have definitely improved over the last five years so I am excited to see the improvements in the next year.

Tracey Thompson

@Crystal Bruce When I used events the first time for a golf tournament, the form required all contact information to be registered for each foursome….definitely user error which I learned from, but it caused a bit of angst in people who just wanted to put in a team captain and go play golf!

Pamela Bird

@Crystal Bruce unfortunately, matching of registrants didn't work well. Rather frustrating.

Mary Beth Wells 2

@Crystal Bruce My biggest challenge, like others have mentioned, is constituent matching. While it's straightforward to match the person paying the registration fee, the guests listed in the event record are not automatically matched, adding extra work for our team - and that is not our goal. This CRM should save time allow for us to be more efficient and effective.

Amanda King 2

@Crystal Bruce

After some testing it loks like constituent matching is still a challenge, after an event combing through the duplicates created is always on the to-do list.

Irene Hui

@Crystal Bruce We are still using OLX, but I was able to test out a form - really like being able to use the URL copy feature to test out the form. Nice that it lists matched duplicates on the event page. It didn't give me a change to approve the constituent match for the comp entry.

Anuradha Parihar

@Crystal Bruce
I also agree with others on the challenges of constituent matching and registering non-constituents.

Keith Wilson 2

@Crystal Bruce
Had several team members do a test registration. One of our team members was required to enter an address even though address was optional, however, others did not have this issue. I did have to make adjustments to the Fee Options because if you set a number greater than 1, and then select 2+ on the form, it doubles the number of people you need to register. I also wasn't sure at first how to process a registration that was submitted but eventually figured that out! I am looking forward to using Events for more donor engagements in the future.

Barbara Pottorff

@Crystal Bruce
We have 2 current online event registrations going right now but they're both in DBV. I was able to do a test registration in WV though and it seemed to go ok. The only slight issue I had was the duplicate search could be a little better.

Jordyn Kieft

@Crystal Bruce We have used web view for our registration process for years and I love it. I love how easy it is for people to register and it already pre-populates all of the information needed for a batch. In terms of issues, I wish that RE was a little bit better at recognizing constituents that already exist. We have a lot of old constituents that register as new ones because RE is unable to recognize them already in our database.

Briget McAninch

@Crystal Bruce I enjoy the convenience of how the registration automatically creates a constituent file. It's much better than having to post them from Online Express.