EveryAction Discussion

Hi all. We’re setting up welcome series automations (and automations in general) in EveryAction for the first time, and every time I think I have the right search criteria and activist code naming conventions figured out, I realize a hang-up that could screw things up. The whole automation process has been stressing me out. So, what do your evergreen saved searches look like for your first time donor welcome series? What criteria are you using to ensure they’re not being targeted more than once, and to avoid hiccups in general? How are you handling removing activist codes that get auto-assigned, and what activist code naming conventions are you using? I’m basically at step 1 still.Thank you!

Hello, workflow automation users! As our organization expands our number of automations, we’re finding that there’s a sticky point with automated contacts (i.e. emails) not being recorded on the contact record. While we can pull a report to see who got those emails, it’s not the same as actually seeing “Contacted via email on XX/XX” within the individual’s record. Unfortunately, that’s starting to mess up our sense of contact timing.Are there any good workarounds people have found for that? I’m putting a pinned note at the top of their profile, as well as using an activist code, but there’s still limitations in reporting and CAL since automated emails don’t look like personal contacts. Curious to see if others are bulk uploading once a month, adding additional flags, or have found some setting in automations themselves that I’ve somehow missed!

My organization has about a dozen events each spring and fall that are the same format but have different dates, times, and locations. People sign up through ticketed event forms. We want to send email reminders to registrants prior to the event (preferably 10 days out and 2 days out) and are trying to figure out the most straightforward way to do this. I’ve found two routes that each have their own challenges:Creating a workflow automation that uses a saved search with event (narrowed to the parameters so we’re not getting other event registrants in this flow) start date 10 days out, which will trigger sending an email. We love the set-it-and-monitor-it format of this, but the (major) drawback is that it sends a generic email. In some cases, people are registering almost 2 months in advance, so having them dig back in their emails for event details is a big ask. We can create targeted emails with a template to keep most of the content the same and update the date/time/location specifi

 Email remains one of the most powerful tools in a nonprofit's communications arsenal—and for good reason. Nearly half of donors cite email as their preferred method of hearing updates and appeals from the organizations they support. That's not changing anytime soon. But the environment email operates in is getting harder to navigate, and organizations that rely on it exclusively are starting to feel it.Over 16% of nonprofit emails either go to spam or never get delivered at all. Inbox providers like Gmail and Microsoft are paying closer attention to whether people open and click—if you're sending to your full list every time, you're training the algorithms to treat you as noise. That means even well-crafted emails from well-intentioned organizations are increasingly fighting just to reach the inbox.The answer isn't to abandon email; it's to stop asking email to do everything.Text messaging is the most direct complement to email outreach available today—and the numbers reflect why. Ope

Would it be possible to have access to a link to the virtual product conference that was a couple of weeks ago? 

Hey everyone, I’m looking for ways to streamline or automate certain processes at my org including gift entry. Are there any integrations automations you’ve discovered that have made your work faster?Currently exploring the possibility of automatically adding contributions with an API key for some of our 3rd party disbursement sites (like our workplace giving). I’m also wondering if there’s a way to connect our process for scanning checks to automatically upload to our bank and to the CRM.

In reconciliation, we have found a couple PayPal transactions on the PayPal activity report (that were not declined or refunded) that did not import into EveryAction with the other transactions in the PayPal batch. There is no obvious reason that these would not have imported with the other transactions, except they are the only transactions without an Invoice Number. In general, the invoice number points to the OA form ID.PayPal could not help me identify the source of this problem or how to correct it. Has anyone else ran into this?

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 record - we swap that). Quarterly/Annually: Clean up saved lists and reports with staff, annu

I’ve seen another question on here about a post-donation survey, but we’re hoping to do a relatively in-depth survey of our members. We plan to link it in a giving form or email. Ideally, we will use EveryAction to ask a series of questions, either linking relevant information to a contact record or producing some easy-to-understand report of who the folks in our community are. I’ve spent quite a bit of time exploring EveryAction to see what might work. I created this draft survey that includes the breadth of some of the questions we’d like to ask. I see that radio buttons (the last question on the survey) can be mapped to survey questions that are created separately in EveryAction, and therefore show up on a contact record. Some things can also be mapped to activist codes, which could be useful. But when it comes to multiple-choice questions, responses are captured in a Google Sheet, like this, which is hard to interpret. Has anyone successfully used EveryAction to survey their commun

A lot of my recent work has focused on cleaning up old data and processes and creating new futureproofed ones. The best systems aren’t just effective today—they’re understandable and maintainable six months from now by new staff members.What this looks like in practice:Plain-language naming conventionsSaved searches and automations named for what they do, not how they were built, reduce confusion and onboarding time.Fewer workflows, clearer purposeConsolidating overlapping automations makes it easier to troubleshoot and adjust when priorities shift.Documented ‘why,’ not just ‘how’A short note explaining why a workflow exists helps future users decide whether to reuse, pause, or retire it.Standardized campaign checklists inside EveryActionRather than external docs, we embed consistency directly into configuration—forms, receipts, and follow-ups behave predictably every time.Any other ideas for helping teams design systems that work today—and still make sense tomorrow?

When I find out that one of our donors is deceased, I mark as deceased then manually check the boxes for “Do Not Email/Call/Mail.” I really appreciate that marking someone deceased triggers a pop-up asking me to update their FHH salutations. Is there a way to set up another trigger so that everyone marked deceased is automatically marked “Do Not [contact method]”? When pulling most reports, we’re filtering out people who are deceased anyway, but it’s a nice failsafe to have as backup. Not a major need, but it would be nice to have!P.S. If the answer is to create an automation… yeah, we’ve been thinking about it already. :) 

How do others work around the lack of option to offer discount codes in event registration?Do you just make a lot of different forms with different registration costs?

Question for non-Bonterra staff…. Has anyone had success resolving issues with accounting?Please respond with a direct message - I’d love to connect for advice. On a few occasions, we’ve had some major disconnect between our account manager (main advocate within Bonterra), and Bonterra’s accounting office. Seems to be a regular occurrence that we’re told things are resolved, and then need to be re-resolved. It’s been a major headache.If anyone has a success story - and some tips, I’m all ears. Again, please send me a direct message. No need to have this all on the open message thread. Thanks! 

We recently migrated to bonterra payments, it seems like the amount of time we spend reconciling EveryAction donations has doubled. The payment gateway we previously used charged one lump sum for processing fees monthly.  Bonterra payments charge fees on each individual donation. However, there is no single report that can pull donation data that includes: source code, financial batch, donation amount, settlement batch info and processing fees.  So far we’re having to:download a report filtered by payment gateway in EA reports that includes source code, general ledger code, donation amount, covered costs, financial batch, settlement date - sort by settlement date go to bonterra payment gateway download batch info one by one for each payout date that includes processing fees, net payout  (arduous due to inability to open batches in new browser tab, and filters reset each time you navigate away from filtered results) then match, copy, past processing fees, net payout to original donation

BonterraPay charges fees on a transaction-by-transaction basis, rather than at weekly/monthly schedule, which we are used to. Has anyone found a way to have the fee on a separate row from the donated amount in the transaction pro or a custom data file?

The promo for the EveryAction Virtual Conference has been great. My team and I are looking forward to it.Question - In the promo email and in-product popup I saw Tuesday, June 30 12pm - 3pm ET. When I registered it had 12pm-3 CT, and that’s what I’m seeing in the pre-populated calendar invite (1-4pm ET). What is the correct time?Also, who is the target audience? It’s during our typical weekly staff meeting so am wondering how much of our full staff this would be appropriate for? I’m assuming our main admins? For other users, how are you deciding which members of your team are joining? 

Anyone have experience collecting info from supporters through stories? I had a supporter submit information through an online form that was confidential and needs to be removed. I manually deleted the story from their contact record, but the full text of what they submitted is still visible in the online activity report staff is using to monitor what is received. any thoughts about how else to remove this info?

I started receiving this “Remove any <script> syntax from the 'HTML Message'” error a few months ago and can’t get any help to fix it.  I’ve tried everything -I DO NOT have any browser extensions, I’m not connecting via VPN, I have cleared cache and data numerous times and getting the same thing It happens whether I am creating a brand new email or using existing or a templateIt’s obvious this is an issue for more than one person so if there is a solution why not add it to the troubleshooting FAQ instead of giving a resolution privately.  This is very frustrating and needs to be fixed.

If you've seen "Que" pop up in EveryAction and wondered what it is or whether it's worth your time, this one's for you.Que is Bonterra's AI assistant built directly into EveryAction. It's not a separate tool you have to learn or a new platform to log into—it lives inside the workflows you're already using. The idea is simple: instead of navigating menus, building queries manually, or starting every email from a blank page, you tell Que what you need in plain language and it does the heavy lifting.For organizations that feel stretched thin—managing campaigns, stewarding donors, and keeping data clean with limited staff—that kind of efficiency isn't a nice-to-have; it's a real operational advantage.Here are a few places where Que is already making a difference for EveryAction users:Building donation forms is one of the newest entry points. If you're already heading to Online Actions to create a form, you'll now see a "Build with Que" option right there. Clicking it launches you directly

Summary: I think having a specific Quiz type of Online Actions form in EveryAction with some added quiz bells, whistles, and functionality could be a killer app!Why: Quizzes are a great way to engage users, keep email engagement high, for acquisition purposes, and a way to involve users even when a legislature is not in session. However, many organizations use a built-for-purpose quiz tool that comes with best practices for quizzes (answers, scores). This creates an extra manual task to import the engagement data back into EveryAction. As quizzes might be around for a long time, the risk of admins not importing this data is high. EveryAction’s Signup Forms can support quizzes, after a fashion. Here’s a recent quiz we built for EDF Action using a Signup Form: https://actnow.edfaction.org/a/farm-bill-quizFeatures that are good: the ability to drop in a merge field for “your answer” on the Thank You page, the ability to map answers and the form to Activist Codes and Source Codes, the answ

I had an embarrassing intro call with a consultant today when they pointed out we needed an actionable thing on our donate page...While screensharing he pointed out that there was no place to input donation info on our donate page of our website. Apparently when a user is viewing our pages with a VPN turned on, none of our embedded EA forms are visible.Is this an issue others have noticed or experienced? In this particular instance, web browser was Google Chrome and VPN was NordVPN. It seemed to be all embedded EA forms - so not just donate page, but our advocacy actions and event registrations too. Our staff is now taking some screenshots with different combos of browsers and VPNs that we have access to.Fortunately, I don't think it impacts our typical supporter - since we have an older donor demographic. Not ideal if any percentage of people going to our website cant even see a form for an advocacy action or donating. Yikes!

Is there an Idea Bank or a place to request functionality?For example, I would like to set-up Automatic Soft-Credits. For example, when a specific Donor Advised Fund makes a donation I want to automatically soft credit the advising donor. I have a large number of these types of arrangements. There is a lot of places to forget or miss adding the soft credit. It would be best to automatically set these arrangements up on the records themselves.

Does anyone have experience in requesting and receiving a file of your organization’s data from Bonterra without purchasing pipeline cloud?

The results of an Address Report on all contacts had many rows with a missing ‘Street Address’ value, but the city, state and zip are present.  The street address is populated when looking at the individual contact record.  The addresses I reviewed appear to be valid.

If you're still running older donation forms, it may be time to look at EveryAction's Optimized Contribution Form (OCF). OCFs are modern, mobile-first donation pages built with best practices already baked in with no coding required. Features like Recurring Upsell (which invites one-time donors to upgrade to monthly giving at checkout), Cart Abandonment nudges (which capture email addresses and remind donors to complete incomplete gifts), flexible payment options including Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal/Venmo, and a streamlined four-step setup make OCFs one of the fastest ways to meaningfully improve your donors' giving experience.The good news is that optimizing your donation form experience doesn't have to be a big lift. It usually requires a fresh look.For OCFs and Traditional Contribution Forms, Optimized Ask is one of the highest-value features to make sure you're taking advantage of. It uses predictive models to personalize suggested donation amounts for individual donors base