Gifts are getting linked to the wrong LO records, resulting on transactions history Inaccuracy and tax receipts issued incorrectly

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Kabiria Espinosa
Kabiria Espinosa ✭
Sixth Anniversary First Reply
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions
Hi, our organization is new to Team Raisres / Luminate Online and we've been noticing the error in the subject.


Seems LO feature of using email address as a unique identifier is causing some trouble in our database.


Most common errors that we are seeing is when people make donations on behalf of organizations, using their own email.


Or


Individuals making donations on behalf of other individuals (their mom, their husband, etc.)



Has anyone out there found a way to solve this problem or reduce the occurrences?


Just as an extra note: Our organization set up is Team Raisers / Luminate Online linked through an API into Raiser's Edge.


Thanks so much in advance for your support, our API has been shut down for now until we figure out this piece, as we are very concern with the integrity of our CRM.


-K.


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Comments

  • Heather MacKenzie
    Heather MacKenzie ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Following. Hope you get some resolution!
  • Kabiria Espinosa
    Kabiria Espinosa ✭
    Sixth Anniversary First Reply
    Thanks Heather! Have you heard of this issue before? Wondering if this is everyone's headache or just ours.

  • robert badley
    robert badley ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    Kabiria, this is a known issue and there are a few possible solutions but none are perfect. See past discussion on this (https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/1/38709).


    Robert
  • Brian Mucha
    Brian Mucha ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I bet this has to do with the Remember Me cookie and shared devices.


    If you log into LO, you may get a cookie that stores your login. That way the site knows who you are when you return, even if you don't log in. (Some things still require log-in of course. This is really intended to allow you to personalize your site with S-Tags and Web Interests for their subsequent visits.)


    But if you have that cookie and later go to a donation form, that donation will be connected to your record and the info you enter there will update your record, even if you intended to donate as someone else and entered completely different data.


    I added a little block to the top of our donation forms that alerts the visitor if they are logged in when donating.






    My forms are all API forms, but you can also do this with S-Tags in a caption field on your form builder form.


    I think that would look roughly like:


    [[? **::*[[S1:cons_id]]*:: "Have an Account?"::"Is this you?"]]


    BPM
  • Brian Mucha
    Brian Mucha ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Another possibility is that they are simply using an email address already in use by an existing account. When donating, LO accepts just about anything without 'existing account' complaints. Then it uses the same algorithm as duplicate identification to try to put the gift on the right account, and leaves everything else that is less certain to manual duplicate management later to correct. You may need to adjust your duplicate recognition settings to be more discerning so LO doesn't see different donors as the same just because of a common email address and zip code.
  • Brian Mucha
    Brian Mucha ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    > email address as a unique identifier.


    By the way it doesn't actually use the email address as a unique identifier. The cons_id has been the unique identifier since before BB bought Convio.


    But there is a system that you can use to enforce unique email addresses in your file, and if that is set to super stringent then it is functionally the same thing. However you can adjust that, or even turn it off and permit duplicate email anywhere. (We have it set to permit duplicate email only when registering for Teamraiser to facilitate family registrations.)


    A problem with that is that there is no system in LO email to prevent sending the same message to multiple cons that share the same email. So a family sharing an email address gets 5 copies of the same email - each personalized differently but sent to the same address.

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