RELO + Calendar Events = Catastrophe

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Brian Solem
Brian Solem ✭
Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions
Hi RELO community: for one year now, we have struggled with a clash between the RELO Connector and Calendar Events. According to Blackbaud, the RELO Connector has a bug that dramatically increases the load time for pages in the LO Event app. Our end-of-year event in 2018 suffered as a result; we received many calls from frustrated would-be patrons, and we saw ticket sales decline by $15K and can only attribute that decline to patrons' inability to purchase tickets through the LO Event page.


Is anyone else experiencing this issue of long load times in LO Event pages? If so, how have you overcome it to ensure your event attendees have a seamless user experience?
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  • Julie Hiland
    Julie Hiland ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
    We dealt with this very issue during our very busy Spring event season earlier this year (January-May). This was the Support issue:


    "...which we have open regarding your calendar event loading slowly. This is a known issue our internal teams are currently working to resolve. In the past your organization has opted to temporarily disable real-time integration. With real-time integration disabled, data will still flow between LO and RE. The only parts this will impact is setting up new cross references, mirroring events and mapping offline segments. You won't be able to set up new cross references or mirror new events. Groups in Luminate that are mapped to an offline segment (RE Query) cannot be rebuilt. This change would be ideal if you need to prioritize events for a certain period of time and are able to halt the use of those other functionalities."


    So basically, for that very long length of time, we had to work with "disabled real-time integration" in order for our event pages to load properly. That meant that any time we needed to mirror a new event or make changes to any of the cross-referencing, we had to contact Blackbaud and have them re-enable the integration. Then, after we had finished making our changes, we'd have to contact Blackbaud to have them disable the real-time integration again. (During the day or two that it took for Blackbaud to enable the integration, us to make changes, and Blackbaud to disable the integration again, the pages wouldn't load properly.)


    It was a VERY frustrating Spring season for us, because of this issue. We are a large healthcare system and have lots of events, many happening concurrently, and many as you can imagine in the Spring season. It did eventually get corrected. But I'm sure we lost many registrations because of it. I'm not clear how it was corrected. It's not presently an issue for us, but the Support Case is still open so... ??
  • Kim Ethridge 2
    Kim Ethridge 2 ✭
    Sixth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    We are dealing with the same problem with LO and LCRM. I've had to put the following on all our event registrations:
    If you have difficulty with this registration form, please send your name, address, phone, names of any guests, and panel question if you have one, to kethridge@cbf.org.


    We've been told the issue is the same, and there's no way we are going to disable real-time integration or we'll end up with over-booked events. Luckily most of our events are still turning over high response rates, though we've had a few--especially before I added the above--where we believe we lost registrants because of it. I'm dealing with frustrated site users and very irritated staff event managers.

  • Brian Solem
    Brian Solem ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
    Hello! We received an update from Blackbaud specialist Khai Ma, who was working on this issue for us. TL;DR : the problem has been solved.

    ...[W]ith the recent improvements from the 19.5 release:


    Before it would take 10-60+ seconds, a significant amount of the time, to load calendar event pages for our clients. I have confirmed that most of the calendar page loads were around a second with only a couple that were between 3-5 seconds. A callout is still made to RE, but all the traffic is being passed through a separate connection instead of it using the same connection for all of the other RE connections. Going back to June, your organization had some pages take 50secs to load and that is not happening anymore for you (at least over the days I checked and matches with engineering/ops considering it resolved/improved).


    You should be able to proceed with creating your events and the events should be loading as normally, as intended. Please let me know if you have any questions.

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