Best practice for processing donations from donors without an email address

Matthew Smith:

What's the current best practice recommendation for this? I see some conflicting recommendations about devnull+uniqueid@convio.com in past posts but I couldn't find any recent recommendation. @Noah Cooper

Hi Matthew!

This question you have posted here is a bit of a bugger. The best practice is really dictated by your organization's infrastructure and standard operating procedures. That being said, I can discuss some of the pitfalls I have seen clients fall into which may help in your consideration.

So, the kind of best in class scenario would be that your organization had Luminate Online integrated with another CRM like Raiser's Edge or Blackbaud CRM or any other CRM. Then, you could record your donations for offline donors without email addresses in that system and just not worry about them in LO.

If however LO is the ONLY system you have to process that gift, then these are some things to consider:

– Fake emails: Using a fake email, if your donor returns, and provides their REAL email, you now have a duplicate where one record has a fake email and one has a real email. This is a pain to clean up in automated merges and essentially records in this state can be a real problem.

– Previous clients have gotten their database into a terrible state by using one single fake email address for ALL offline gifts. This can result in multiple individuals transactions being attributed to one constituent record in LO which is a big mess to unravel if you should ever need to. If you do decide to use a fake email, definitely use a different unique fake email for every constituent.

Another alternative is TEMPORARILY allowing emails with null values to enter your system. This is not a great solution either, but LO can be configured to create records without email address:

So, you could possibly configure your system so that it would allow records into LO without emails, but that is a questionable idea as well because this would effect your entire system. Front end users could squeak by and create a record without email if you don't have all of your forms configured in a way so that the email address is required directly at the form level.

This all being said, you could potentially just enter the fake email addresses and deal with the repercussions. Many clients do decide to go that route and if there is no other option for entering your offline gifts for folks without emails,. If that is the case, then a fake email WILL work for getting the donation into the system, but it is just not optimal to knowingly enter bad data into your system if there is any possible way at all to avoid it.

Hopefully this helps! If you have any follow up questions I am happy to discuss it further! Just let me know here or send me a message!!

Thanks,

Kenneth

Hi Matthew,

For donors without email addresses, we add a fake email firstname.lastname@convio.net. This way each constituent has a unique email, but it has the same fake setup so we know it is not a real email. Then we have a query built to ensure that any constituent with "@convio" in their email is pulled into the query group and that is used on email sends to ensure they are always suppressed.

Cheers,

Meghan