Frustration with Online Express Event Forms

Hi RJ - Unfortunately there is not a simple way to view the information you are looking for - see KB Article #91876 for more info.  You can do this one of two ways: either put your BBMS account into test mode (see KB Article #54273 for more info) to run a test registration through the form or run a test registration through the form with a personal or organization credit card.  There are downsides to each option:

• When you set your BBMS account to test/demo mode, it turns off processing for all other live OLX forms and disables your ability to charge credit card's within RE. 
• If you charge a personal or organization credit card for a test registration on the form, that leaves you with a refund to process and test data to remove from RE in general (specially constituent records and the event module).

Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck!


 

I don't see this as an idea in the OLX Idea Bank, you should add it! Let me know when you have, and I'll go vote it. I agree, it's a feature that should already exist. 

Hi Ruth James‍. Thanks for your feedback! Would you mind clarifying whether I'm correctly understanding your questions/concerns:

1. Preview the thank you email

Is your main concern here how the individual merge fields will look to a registrant in the thank-you email they receive after they've registered successfully? When you design the thank-you email, there's of course no specific registrant context, so what (or whose) information would you ideally like to see populate those merge fields in a preview? Would you like to see a "dummy preview" with bogus recipient data provided by OLX just so that you could see an example of what it might look like? Or would you prefer to be able to search for a specific constituent and then preview the thank-you email as though that person had registered?


While we're probably not going to be solving for this in Online Express, our next gen event reg forms for RE NXT are in early adopter testing and we have TONS of exciting capabilities coming to those forms...and that's where we're going to be focusing our iteration and improvement for online reg forms.

2. More merge fields

Would you mind sharing what additional merge fields would be most helpful to you? As above, we're more likely to add additional flexibility in our next gen registration forms, but hearing your needs on which merge fields you'd most like to have is helpful in our prioritization.

3. Preview from every tab

I'm not quite sure I understand this one. Are you wanting to be able to summon a preview of how the registration form itself looks from every tab in the form editor? Or were you hoping to be able to preview the thank you email from every tab?


Last question: You mention having to use another solution for event registration. Are the above the only (or primary) thinks preventing Online Express' event reg capabilities from being a better fit? Anything else you'd care to share would be super helpful for our prioritization.


Thanks Ruth!

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management

Wow Ruth James‍ thank you so much for such a detailed reply! This is incredibly helpful to understand what would make using online event reg forms more flexible for you. Our team who is working our new RE NXT event reg forms watch this forum very closely (and we've chatted offline about your reply too), so thanks!!!


What I'd recommend in the interim with Online Express is to have a go at testing one sample registration and use the <registration details> merge field. We designed that merge field to be a sort of catch-all for much of what you want to confirm in your thank-you email. By the way, this is pretty much the same stuff we heard from most of the customers we did discovery with and it's why we chose the prescriptive route of a single merge field that automatically pulls all of that info (how much was paid, who is attending, under what ticket type, etc.) into the email instead of you having to deal with complex merge logic like "looping" over each registrant to show registrant-specific info.


Hopefully that help. Thanks Ruth!!!!

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management