How are people entering offline gifts after converting to Donations2?

As of the next product release - Convio 5.3.60 - Donations2 will allow clients to enter offline transactions for Donations2 campaigns/forms. These offline transactions could be check/cash or credit card. You should check with your Account Manager to see exactly when your site will be upgraded. It's probably only a few weeks away.

Tell me about it!

Convio is the most frusrating Software!

We are having MAJOR problems syncing our offline database and Convio Const. 360.

One record in Pledgemaker (our offline database) containing gift information with two e-mail addresses can only be translated into one Const. 360 record.

That means that if Mr. and Mrs. John and Alice Smith make a donation and both log-in to our site with their separate e-mail addresses, one will have to be deleted once we do the data sync monthly.

Any one else expereincing this extreme frustration with Convio???

Convio does have a secondary email field on the constituent record. It is typically used when an individual wants to receive email at 2 email addresses, for example, a home email and work email. You can CC the secondary email when sending to the primary email, but you cannot send only to the secondary email.

The secondary email field, however, is not a workaround for the householding issue. As you know, Convio does not have a household record type; Convio is designed on the premise that each individual has his or her own email address. Here, Michael's post above is right on target. For Convio, even in the case of a John and Alice Smith sharing a household, the expectation is that both John and Alice would each have an individual email address and could be distinguished uniquely in Convio and in the offline database. Target Team Approach, for instance, is a database where the all the individuals under a household account have their own name id within that account, and the combination of account id and name id can thus uniquely identify these individuals. This allows all the individuals in a household to have their own Convio records. Another option is for the offline database to hold the Convio cons id in an alternate id field. There will always be accurate 1-to-1 record matching between the two systems if the Convio cons id is used to do the matching. However, this would still only help with the householding issue if each individual in the offline household could be differentiated and have its own unique Convio cons id.

So if the household is the most granular level at which the offline record can be uniquely identified, then a single Convio record per offline household record is the best option. In cases like this, John Smith might be the name on the Convio record while Alice Smith might show up in the spouse information on his record, or vice-versa. A salutation of "Dear John and Alice" or "Dear Smith Family" is also a way to address a household even if the Convio record just belongs to just John. If Alice came online and created her own separate Convio record with her own email address but you did not want to create a unique record for her in Pledgemaker, then indeed you would need to merge the John and Alice records together in Convio to maintain a 1-to-1 online to offline record relationship.