Membership forms - using attributes

Andy Petrus · March 2016

We are in the process of moving from Raiser's Edge and Net Community to NXT and Online Express. We tried to create a new membership form and found that we are limited to which fields we can add to the form. Our membership form would need to include items that would come from the attributes tab in the membership, but we are limited to selecting things like name, address, phone number and so on when in the Extras part of the form builder. For example we have an attribute labeled Program Type and we are asking our members to select what applies. We have similar services including wanting four additional contacts for name and email address. The form creator doesn't allow us to select from the attributes.

The Donation form allows for this but is limited to not having checkboxes and radio buttons. It has to be free text. And we want it to be a membership form, not a donation form.

We would like to have the membership form allow us to select from the attributes and to be more flexible so that we can gather information that we would like to house.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Greg Swyden 2 · March 2016

Hey Andy,

We just lost our online portal with BB called NetSolutions so had to make a change. We signed up for Altru but had to shut the process down since there were similar issues you are describing and we needed more flexibility so for now, staying with RE and added Online Express. We had to have something online until they can customize Altru.

When we set up OLX, we found the same issue as you in the Membership forms. We needed to have/create attribute options to customize the membership form but this is not currently an option so we set up memberships "donation forms" to make this work. The ability to customize the Gift Attributes gave us enough to make it a work around. There are still issues such as in gift giving and collecting the recipients name, address etc. we had to create a tab "Is this a Gift" then use the comment section for them to fill in the info. Not the greatest and takes away our comment section but...

Not sure this helps but to let you know we worked with the OLX team and they said this is one of those updates/upgrades they will put in the pipeline and hopefully have down he road. Not familiar with NXT.

Darragh Nolan · January 2018

Greg Swyden:

Hey Andy,

We just lost our online portal with BB called NetSolutions so had to make a change. We signed up for Altru but had to shut the process down since there were similar issues you are describing and we needed more flexibility so for now, staying with RE and added Online Express. We had to have something online until they can customize Altru.

When we set up OLX, we found the same issue as you in the Membership forms. We needed to have/create attribute options to customize the membership form but this is not currently an option so we set up memberships "donation forms" to make this work. The ability to customize the Gift Attributes gave us enough to make it a work around. There are still issues such as in gift giving and collecting the recipients name, address etc. we had to create a tab "Is this a Gift" then use the comment section for them to fill in the info. Not the greatest and takes away our comment section but...

Not sure this helps but to let you know we worked with the OLX team and they said this is one of those updates/upgrades they will put in the pipeline and hopefully have down he road. Not familiar with NXT.

Hi Greg

We are seeking a similar solution for our membership forms to collect direct mail response codes. Nothing yet, but if anyone else has come up with a solution, we are all ears. Still brainstorming on our end and will let you know if we find anything related in Blackbaud community.

Good luck!

Ron Horick 2 · April 2020

It would be very helpful if membership forms had the attribute functionality of the donation forms. We have this need at our organization as well.

A solution would be helpful.

Greg Swyden 2 · April 2020

As you can see it's been 4 years since my previous post. I was told at one point that attributes were being considered as an update to OLX but has never happened. We still have our membership pages set up in the donation tab because you have attributes there. You can look at our webpage at www.biopparksocity.org/membership to see how this looks. We had to set up an attribute for gift giving since donations doesn't have this option. The membership page does, thus a negative for using donations but it's better since we can collect promo codes this way. Let's keep bugging them, maybe some day. I wish they read this posts...

Chris Martin · April 2020

Thanks Ron Horick‍ and Greg Swyden‍ for your recent posts in this thread asking for OLX membership attribute functionality. While this isn't currently planned work, I did want to just acknowledge Greg's concern that maybe requests like these fall on deaf ears. I can assure you we're listening...not only to the good dialog shared on these forums but also in the ideas portals themselves (here's a link to the idea that's been submitted requesting that we add attributes to OLX membership forms: https://onlineexpress.ideas.aha.io/ideas/BBOX-I-320).

I'm sure it's no surprise that like any other company, we have to make difficult choices about which good ideas to pursue. We don't always get it perfect, but I can tell you that our product teams work incredibly hard to try and deliver the most value to the most customers as consistently as possible. It doesn't mean that suggested ideas that we aren't working on are less valid or relevant. It's just that at the moment, we've made the tough call to focus on other items that we believe could have a greater impact.

But yes, PLEASE keep bugging us!!! Despite the feature request in this particular thread not having been implemented yet, there are loads of others that have. So please keep the good ideas coming and sharing the context of why and how a particular feature would improve your use of our solutions. It's very much appreciated.

Thanks guys.

Chris Martin

Blackbaud Product Management

Ron Horick 2 · April 2020

Thanks for your response, Chris. I certainly understand that your team has to prioritize the ideas that should be pursued.

From a user perspective, this seems rather simple to implement since the addition of attributes are already available

on donation forms so the coding could be copied over to membership forms. But I am a fundraiser and not a coder.

Appreciate the time to explore this and other potential solutions that help fundraisers like us be more effective

in our work.

Ron

Greg Swyden 2 · April 2020

Thanks Chris! I have posted a number of times and never rec'd a response from a BB associate so just assumed you guys didn't view these posts. Didn't mean to sound snarky but it can be very frustrating trying to find answers, solutions or help other than from the community. Plus I have been bugging everyone, my rep, etc since we were moved into NXT/OLX to make this happen. Luckily the Donations tab helped but we lose the "gift giver" tracking that you get in "Membership". Hope this happens some day.

Membership forms - using attributes

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