EveryAction Community

We have a donor who donates substantially through a variety of methods. Sometimes that’s their donor advised fund (sometimes multiple, unique funds), their family foundation, personally (via their credit card), and other ways. I believe it is best practice to create records for each entity (ABC Foundation, DEF Family Fund, Spouse A, Spouse B) and soft credit to the donor as an individual. This is also something EveryAction suggested during Ask the Experts. Something that’s unclear to me is whether I should connect all these entities in their financial household, any advice? If I move forward with adding in their financial household would I stop soft crediting to their individual contact record? Thanks in advance! 

i need a list that gives me Household Cumulative Giving for this Fiscal Year with Cumulative Giving amounts and spouse names

Hey all!  What are your thoughts on donor surveys? I myself have never received one from organizations I donate to, but I would love to get inside the mind of our org’s donors to learn more about how they ended up donating to use and what we can do to get more people like them to find out about organization.  Someone suggested adding a survey as part of the “Thank you” email we send out. Has anyone done this before? Has it helped you to gain new donors/retain current donors?  Does EA have tools that can help with this? 

Is there a way to conditionally set an Activist Code from an Online Action form?  We’d like to set one only if the donor opts in for the Email Signup. 

What is the best approach to pull a LYBUNT Report in EveryAction? Gave Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year Contribution Report. Is there a template already created? 

We just pulled a list of folks who only have one email that is marked as not subscribed but are still receiving emails. There’s a lot! Could someone explain why that is happening? 

Hi everyone! As some of you may know, I lead our amazing team of Advanced Support Consultants here at Bonterra for our Fundraising and Engagement tools. This month we introduced an “ASC Spotlight” section into our monthly newsletter. Each month we’ll be sharing topics/tips and also highlighting work that we have done with our clients. So, onto the show…In my experience with clients (over eighteen years' worth!), I've found that simple plans you can stick to will always beat complicated checklists in terms of both productivity and overall return. I've come up with a few examples of plans I'd recommend putting into place that tie in directly to some specific EveryAction features; these ideas will help keep you on track during one of the busiest and most important times of the year.Plans to have in place: A plan to convert one-time Giving Tuesday donors to sustainers. In EveryAction, you can turn on the Recurring Upsell option on your year-

Hi! Is anyone using the new Optimized Contribution Forms and accepting Venmo as one of the payment methods? I’d love to know and see an example of your form, if so. Thanks!

Hello! I have created a ticketed event, but there are going to be a few folks we'd like to invite that will not be required to pay. I cannot find a place in the event to create a discount code for these folks. I asked the AI bot and it said we may not have that setting enabled. I’m open to other work arounds I just really need to be able to give folks a free ticket! Can someone help me set this up?  

Hi EA folks! I’m looking to keep our number of contacts below the paid-for threshold. What’s the best way to do this? Find old contacts with no donation history and no longer subscribed to emails, and bulk-delete them? Has anyone gone through this process?

This is a two part question that stems from government comment periods not providing email addresses to deliver comments, and what appears to be EA’s inability to deliver comments to government portals any longer. First, can someone confirm that EA cannot deliver to governement comment periods on the government website?Second, if that is true, I would still like to allow users to customize suggested copy the way they do with an advoacy form. If we could download all the comments and deliver them to a target, using an advocacy action would be fine. But it seems as though you cannot collect advocacy form comments and then deliver them separately - they need to go to a target. And even if I made a fake target, there’s no way to download them? But petitions do not allow for customization of comments. So people can only insert a comment as a custom field, producing some strange comments when you then deliver your signatures. How are groups handling this? An

What is best practice for handling anonymous bequests and planned giving in EveryAction? These are planned gifts that we want to make sure are tracked for analytics and reporting but don’t strictly have a VanID that we can apply them to. Is it possible to apply bequests on a single or several “Anonymous” VanIDs as a stand-in? Or is there a better approach?

Hello!We are interested in using the e-card option on our main donation form through the holidays, but are the e-card #s trackable? I’m just trying to see if we need to make a separate online action form in order to track cards, or if we can simply add e-cards to our existing form. 

With Year End around the corner, we’re starting to look at posting new or updated contribution forms for our donate page (we have two landing pages - one-time and monthly, though both allow for recurring or one-time).A few questions related to best practices:How often do others switch up the language in your contribution forms and autoresponders?Do you just post the new form, or do you delete the other one in Online Actions too? If you don’t delete old ones, how do you keep things from getting too cluttered?If you delete the form, what happens to a monthly donation tied to that form (IE started online in March 2024 and has kept processing)?  On that last point, we use the autoresponder tied to the contribution form for our automated receipts. So when we update our monthly donor auto-thank you, we have to go through and find every contribution form that still has an active recurring commitment and update each one. Does anyone have a way to “m

Hi! I am interested in how other organizations manage volunteers and track volunteer activities in EveryAction. I am especially interested in organizations whose volunteers are mostly engagement (and not event shift) volunteers.  How do you track who is active, both your definition of active volunteer and actually how you track the status in EA? What kind of maintenance do you have around the volunteer statuses?  We currently track the volunteer status with a custom field, which updates from our volunteer sign up form to new sign up. Then we have to manually update to active, retired, inactive, etc. Does anyone use the volunteer section of contact records to track volunteers in a non-event shift capacity? We haven't found this section flexible enough for tracking our volunteers outside of events, which is why we created the custom field. I am interested to hear if anyone else uses this field for non-event tracking and how

Our organization has a strong program team that’s distinct from our development team in a lot of day-to-day operations. The dev. team uses Every Action to track contacts with our donors, which helps guide our stewardship and solicitation. We’ve struggled to ingrain Every Action use within our program team’s day-to-day operations, but we don’t want to miss important notes, especially when they’re having external conversations with members (at a community event, for example). What are some best practices for making Every Action feel accessible and convenient for those who don’t use it as a development tool? How do you make it feel like “not a lot of work” to record conversations with members?Maybe a Google form that we could upload to notes? Thanks in advance!

Good morning all! As I plan out our Best Practice Coaching Events for 2026, I want to know what topics YOU would find most impactful. Please share in the thread topic areas you would like our fundraising coaches to dive into next year. Ideas: Capital Campaigns, Corporate Sponsorships, AI in Fundraising PS: if you haven’t attended one of our Coaching Events - check out our Events page here!

We have a fairly large number of donors that we don’t have a personal relationship with, especially those that are lapsed or one-off donors. Now that we’re soliciting that portfolio more (especially as we get to year-end), I’m looking for a way to quickly check for obits, especially with couples where only one of them may be deceased. I’d hate to send something to a couple, only to find out that one of them passed 3 years ago.How does your organization stay on top of obit-checking at a large scale? Is there an external tool you use, or database where you can upload names in bulk? Do you conduct a monthly rotating review, and how do you pull those lists?Right now, we’re individually Googling names and their city of residence, but that isn’t practical for months where we’re soliciting 500 lapsed donors. Thanks in advance!

Drew Glover led an incredible event today titled “Smart Stewardship After the Year-End Rush” in which he shared a really important takeaway:Shift your mindset: You’re not begging! You’re offering them an opportunity to live their values and to join you in making impact. I’ve attached his slides for you to review - what are you doing to ensure effective stewardship of your donors after the Giving Season?  Coach: Drew GloverEvent:  

What are the best ways to track which donations may have come specifically from Social Media posts? Is there a way to tag these donations on the system? Can it be done automatically?  What are your best practices for being able to report the source of each donation? 

When I send a bulk email through the EA platform, it consistently lands in spam folders. Any work-arounds to help improve delivery??

Hey y’all! Have you started using our new Optimized Contribution forms yet? 

Hi All! At my org we have a list of daily, weekly and monthly maintenances that we do in EA. I have shared this with a few other EA admins, and thought we could share together here! I would LOVE to hear what other kind of maintenance your org is doing (both one off and on a regular basis!) and see if I can pick up any other good habits 🙂  I’ll start with a list of some of ours: Daily: Duplicate managementWeekly: Review custom calculated fields (they break from time to time), Check for missing OSCs, Review Targeted email meta data for accuracy (campaign, naming convention, etc),  Check for paused automations. Monthly: Review and update expired/failed scheduled reports with staff, audit revenue streams on source codes for accuracy, check for newly released user permissions, email subscription change/preferred update (when an unsubbed email is marked preferred, but there is a subscribed email on recor