PowerUp Challenge: Third Events Task

Shirley Fuligni · March 20

@Crystal Bruce
I do have challenges with receiving registrants in webview as the system is adding a duplicate most of the time which I then have to go and edit the batch for payment as well as then go and edit the registrant for the event. I would prefer to have it like our donation forms where I can “approve” the transaction prior to bringing the money into the system which allows me to double check duplicate entries.

Kylee Hamilton · March 21

@Crystal Bruce

One struggle with the application form is its ability to recognize constituents or past event attendees who were not in our system as constituents. This can create challenges in accurately tracking and linking participants, sometimes requiring extra manual effort to ensure our records are complete and up to date. Improving this functionality would help streamline the process and reduce the risk of duplicate or missing data.

Sara Niemiec · March 21

@Crystal Bruce, duplicate record creation is a big one. For my organization, we use an email type called Email SIS (which refers to our student information system) as primary rather than just Email, so most of our records don't have a regular Email populated.

Lisa Lang · March 21

@Crystal Bruce
Duplicate records are still time consuming to verify and delete the record if needed. Our org has also relied on the Name Tag function. We use a special add/sal formula for this. Is this going to be added to Events in NXT?

John Whitmer · March 21

@Crystal Bruce

Though I don't work in accounting, I know they've had issues with fee batches being cut off at seemingly-arbitrary times. We also really could use the Nametag capability in database view for registrants. It would be nice to offer them a formatting option for how they want their nametags to look.

Karen Zygmunt 2 · March 21

@Crystal Bruce, This was every easy to do and very excited to use this process for event registration moving forward.

Tara Walsh · March 21

@Crystal Bruce I agree with many others regarding matching existing constituents being a challenge.

Kelly Sylvia · March 21

@Crystal Bruce hoping duplicates are caught more often prior to registrations.

Elizabeth Johnson · March 22

@Crystal Bruce

Successes:

As mentioned in the first event task - I love how easy it is to teach our frontline people how to use. They manage the RSVPs, add guests, and now create events! This is a huge win - while I thought it was easy in OLX the visual aspect makes a difference.
I love moving away from spreadsheets. That said our event planner is downloading lists from events to work with in Excel/Google Sheets right before the event. I like how all the participant options can be included in the columns. Last I checked if you changed the order it wasn't sticky.

Challenges:

Duplicate records
Our biggest event is a multiple-day event - there is room for improvement for these types of events and fee structures (we are working on simplifying that on our end) We use a lot of workarounds. This wasn't easy in OLX either. I found one item to vote on for this.
We don't want to have event fees on the gift records. With OLX this was very easy to deal with. I just stuck them all in one batch and once the reconciling was completed I would delete the batch. Last year (Our multi-day event is our only paid event) I brought everything in and then globally deleted it. It was more of a hassle and I'd love to know as we move to the TWS that we will have some workaround.

@Dan Snyder Seconded and voted!

@Alex Wong I need a new option for the “like area” for mind blown!

@Lisa Lang @John Whitmer If you create an idea I'll vote for it!

Laura Vaughan 3 · March 23

@Crystal Bruce
Obviously, duplicate records remains the biggest challenge. For internal staff signing up, we set their organization email as type “Business email.” It appears the duplicate check is on the main "Email" field. If the individual is new, this adds some additional data cleanup so we need to work this into our procedures.

Carol Ewart · March 24

@Crystal Bruce As I noted before, we don't use forms builder. I have a lovely little portal which I can log into and see my profile and my giving. But there's noting about registering for any events so I guess I missed something along the way. It seems really easy though. (In my defense I have nothing to do with setting up events, lol)

roger berg · March 24

@Crystal Bruce
Like many others have mentioned - duplicate management might be an issue. From years of using OLX registration forms, it still amazes me the number of typos registrants enter - even mis-typing their name! More often it's an issue of the address - entering their work rather than home address, or the credit card is registered to a business but they're paying for an individual ticket so the address doesn't match.

Aly Conrad · March 24

@Crystal Bruce
One challenge is the creation of profiles for guests or spouses that are actually duplicates. Then it makes it complicated to search for constituents outside of events because we have more people popping up that look like constituents but aren't.

Danielle Lifshitz 2 · March 24

@Crystal Bruce I don't manage or have access to our website and can't ask for someone to put it on the site just to do this test, but it seems very interesting. However I worry about duplicates. Also, would we be able to add people who did not pay to attend? How could that happen without a paying a fee?

Tammy Duncan · March 24

@Crystal Bruce It is user friendly and intuitive, however, like others, I do see having to pay close attention for duplicates.

Meghan Millar · March 24

@Crystal Bruce I found the registration to be a great process from the registrants point of view as well as from the back end. I did not have too much trouble and like how you can create constituent lists straight from the events page.

However, when I went back into the event and added a second fee option, my original form did not update. I had to create a new form, which then showed the updated ticket options. Is that by design?

Emily Bastow · March 24

@Crystal Bruce I love birdseye view of participants and fees. I wish there was a way our constituents could go in after the fact and assign names to their guests. People purchase tickets to our gala months in advance and don't know the names until closer to the event. Which means we have to manually reach out for names and then enter them individually.

Lisa Richardson 5 · March 25

@Crystal Bruce The online form is pretty easy to use from the donor prespective when registering

Cherie Menke · March 25

@Crystal Bruce For us the biggest challenge is duplication. Also, registrants not being able to enter guest names at a later date. It is rare that the host/sponsor knows the names of their guests when they register. We end up entering these names, but would be grateful if they could come back and enter the names.

Christie DAdamo · March 25

@Crystal Bruce
Wish that we could copy the form from another event.

Carolyn Russell · March 25

@Crystal Bruce since our records are not split, we run into a lot of difficulty with spouses registering and automatically becoming a new record. It would be great if we could have the option to match these records before a new record is auto created OR if the system could map to bio 2 emails, too. thanks!

Marci Belval · March 25

@Crystal Bruce We use registration submissions to make sure our records are up to date. From time to time the auto match doesn't work and I have to merge constituents. The less data we ask for when registering, the more duplicates we end up with.

Ashley Petty · March 25

@Crystal Bruce

The only issue I have encountered is the system will sometimes make a duplicate record for a constituent.

Rachel Graan · March 26

@Crystal Bruce Currently, we are not hosting any paid events. I created a test registration page, and it seems highly intuitive, but we are still working as an organization to determine best practices for event registrations. For now, this is managed outside of NXT as we do not use online donation forms. Tracking attendees is the only function we are using at this time within the event module.

Rachel Davey · March 26

@Crystal Bruce

I set up a test event and registration form and tested it myself. It all worked well and it did not create a duplicate but matched it to my record in the database. However I still prefer the ability in OLX to match the participant to a record rather than the matching being done automatically (or not) and I hope that functionality will come to events in the same way as it has done for donation forms.

Morgan Nikolov · March 27

@Crystal Bruce We recently received at least one duplicate record with an event registration form recently, and I had to manually merge the duplicate participant. As Rachel said below, it would be great if the event registration forms had an option to review unmatched constituents, as you can with online donation forms.

Stacy Cope 3 · March 27

@Crystal Bruce I LOVE how my free event participants were instantly matched correctly and added to records!

Brent Troth 2 · March 27

@Crystal Bruce So far we are definitely impressed. I'll just say Dupes since this has been most frequently mentioned. One issue for us relates to some of the reports that we frequently use for our larger events, many of our reports use the Response field from the participant record, but this field is not the same as the RSVP status. The Status field in DBView also does not seem to connect to WebView so this is a bit of an issue that we will have to figure out for our reporting.

Shaundra Mitchener · March 28

@Crystal Bruce The matching and ability to review. The automatic addition to records too.

Jessica Cellini · March 30

@Crystal Bruce While we don't utilize NXT Events (yet), importing via OmaticCloud has been a breeze! ?

PowerUp Challenge: Third Events Task

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