Appeal code issues with TeamRaiser + RELO

Brian Solem · September 2017

My colleague Fonstella has encountered a major roadblock in processing TeamRaiser gifts since we adopted the RELO Connector. When the gifts and registrations come through the RELO Connector, they come in as a registration appeal code. Two appeals codes were created, one for the event registration and one for the event donation, but only one comes over in the Online Connector, and that is the registration appeal code. While this can be changed through batching gifts, our major annual fundraising event receives hundreds of donations a day, meaning it's a very time-consuming process for her (and wasn't like this before RELO integration).

We have gone from what used to be a streamlined automatic process to a manual, tedious and time-consuming one. What have other RELO users done to work around this?

Christine Robertson · September 2017

Brian Solem:
My colleague Fonstella has encountered a major roadblock in processing TeamRaiser gifts since we adopted the RELO Connector. When the gifts and registrations come through the RELO Connector, they come in as a registration appeal code. Two appeals codes were created, one for the event registration and one for the event donation, but only one comes over in the Online Connector, and that is the registration appeal code. While this can be changed through batching gifts, our major annual fundraising event receives hundreds of donations a day, meaning it's a very time-consuming process for her (and wasn't like this before RELO integration).

We have gone from what used to be a streamlined automatic process to a manual, tedious and time-consuming one. What have other RELO users done to work around this?

I believe that when you set up the cross references on a TR form, the only field that you can set to change between a registration and a donation is the fund. I haven't found another way to differentiate at this time. So, the only thing that I know to recommend would be to make the fund default different on the donations (even if you make a "fake" fund as a placeholder) so that you can use Global change to correct the packages much more quickly than your currrent process.

robert badley · October 2017

Christine McMinn:

Brian Solem:
My colleague Fonstella has encountered a major roadblock in processing TeamRaiser gifts since we adopted the RELO Connector. When the gifts and registrations come through the RELO Connector, they come in as a registration appeal code. Two appeals codes were created, one for the event registration and one for the event donation, but only one comes over in the Online Connector, and that is the registration appeal code. While this can be changed through batching gifts, our major annual fundraising event receives hundreds of donations a day, meaning it's a very time-consuming process for her (and wasn't like this before RELO integration).

We have gone from what used to be a streamlined automatic process to a manual, tedious and time-consuming one. What have other RELO users done to work around this?

I believe that when you set up the cross references on a TR form, the only field that you can set to change between a registration and a donation is the fund. I haven't found another way to differentiate at this time. So, the only thing that I know to recommend would be to make the fund default different on the donations (even if you make a "fake" fund as a placeholder) so that you can use Global change to correct the packages much more quickly than your currrent process.

Brian and Christine, welcome to the pain that is dealing with RELO!! Christine's comment about using a seperate fund for the reg fee from the donation is correct. This will allow you to filter out your reg fees and globally change them as necessary. This is not a "good" solution by any means but it is better than trying to look at each transaction in a batch of potentially hundreds and trying to edit on the fly.

My experience in the past weeks as we have set up our major event team-raiser has been around tax receipts. We are charging a $5 reg fee which is not receiptable. As well, participants can make a donation at the time of registration which is receiptable. What we find is that LO handles the transaction correctly and generates an e-receipt for the donation portion only but RELO messes things up. When the transactions appear in the RE batch the reg fee, which comes first, appears with a receiptable amount of $0 (which is correct) but for some reason it attaches the receipt number and date from the receiptable gift to the reg fee and this is just wrong!! We are having to filter gifts in RELO to pick up reg fees and clean up the receipt info before commiting it in RE.

Another example of how RELO stinks and why we are moving to the Omatic LO Integration tool.

Robert

Appeal code issues with TeamRaiser + RELO

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