OLX Event Registrations - many issues

Emma Wilkins · December 2022

I have been experiencing a number of issues with registering guests through online express. My organization households record, so typically the male spouse will be the primary constituent and the female spouse will be linked to this record, but not actually have any record of her own. It has made event sign ups confusing.

Our form is set up like this - you choose how many guests are attending from a drop down list then fill in the required contact information that pops up below under Guest #1, then Guest #2, and so on. One issue that arises is anyone who registers after Guest #1 on the same form, will be registered to the event as a “guest of” Guest #1. This prevents them from being linked to their own record if they are a constituent unless done manually by creating a duplicate participant record.

Another issue that has been coming up with this arises when the female or non-primary constituent in a household registers as Guest #1, which happens quite often. Let's say our record is for John and Sarah, with John being the primary record and Sarah's being linked as a spouse without her own record. If Sarah registers them for an event, she will register herself as Guest #1, then scroll down and register John as Guest #2. When downloading this transaction in OLX, we link it to John's record and reject the updates to his record that want to change his name to Sarah.

Then, in the event record, the registrations get messed up. Since we linked the record to John, and rejected the update to change his name to Sarah, the event participation lists John being registered twice. It is possible to fix all of this manually, but for a large event, that is not nearly efficient enough.

Another question related to this is the issue of non-primary constituents registering for events without their primary constituent counterpart. If only the spouse (Sarah) registers, then in order to link the records, we would have to change it say the primary constituent name (John) is registered. Then we have to manually enter in the spouse somehow, which again is inefficient. Is there a way to mark event participation for just a spouse when records are householded like this?

Carlene Johnson · December 2022

@Emma Wilkins
Lots of complicated stuff here! Has your organization considered breaking out the spouse into their own record? It certainly creates other challenges, but I've landed on the side of “everyone gets their own record” specifically because of events and email related things.

There are pros and cons to making that switch. I'd be interested in learning more about what type of organization you work for and any reasons you are hesitant to elevate spouses to their own record.

Emma Wilkins · December 2022

@Carlene Johnson
I am new to the organization and had a similar thought about splitting up records. I think the thought behind the database setup was having one main person in a family since we are an independent school? I would guess the reason for not splitting things up is the time constraint, but I'm not entirely sure.

I just wanted to float the question out there to see if anyone else has experienced this as connecting with the Blackbaud customer support has proved somewhat unhelpful.

Karen Diener 2 · December 2022

@Emma Wilkins It can be VERY frustrating! I read through your post and after pretty much every issue, nodded and said “yup” to myself. Unfortunately, that's just how things work. You're doing what you can, but it is definitely inefficient and frustrating.

As Carlene said, separating the spouses would resolve most (if not all) of these issues, though it could present others. I worked in a school for a few years as well, but they moved to separate records so that each parent would have separate logins in order to check their child's grades, attendance, sports team messages, etc. They were a full Blackbaud school. But once all parent records were separated and soft-credit policies were written and implemented, we did not have problems with reporting in any way.

Unfortunately, I think your options are to continue with the frustrations of OLX event registration, investigate webview event registration (though I think similar issues apply there) or separate spouse records.. Those are the most obvious choices at the moment, anyway.

Karen

Emma Wilkins · December 2022

@Karen Diener
Thanks for the insight! Although there does not seem to be an immediate solution for this, it is helpful to confirm what has worked in the past at other schools.

OLX Event Registrations - many issues

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