EveryAction Discussion

I am trying to automate membership assignment using saved searches because membership function does not account for cumulative one-time donations reaching a designated threshold (threshold $500, I gave $300 in January and $200 in April - as of April donation I’m a member).  I’m using Activist codes at moment because Membership looks very complicated to get right.I can add a “membership” activist code - beautifully with a “membership’ saved search as input to a bulk apply.  Now I want to remove the activist code for someone who no longer fits the criteria in my “membership” saved search.  In my mind, the easiest way is to create a new search step 1 everyone with the “membership activist code”, step 2 remove people who who are in “membership saved search”.  I see I can use a Saved List as criteria but not a search.  I’d prefer not to have to recreate the “membership search” in the “remove membership saved search”.Any ideas?  If Membership function is not as scary as I think, any advice?

The Support Tickets link in the top navigation bar of Bonterra Central has been updated!Clicking it now takes you directly to your support ticketing system, where you can log in and manage your cases — saving you time and keeping everything right where you need it. This is part of our ongoing work to make Bonterra Central your one-stop shop for all things Bonterra.More updates are on the way, and we want to hear from you as we build. What would make Bonterra Central even more useful for your team? Drop it in the comments below! 👇

In the last several months, I’ve received numerous messages from individuals who have always received my organization’s emails saying that they’ve suddenly stopped receiving them (including BOTH of our Executive Directors!!). I can’t figure out why contacts are being unsubscribed without any action on their part and how I can add them back to receiving emails. Any suggestions on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated!

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?

Currently a user can be assigned only one user profile. This forces adding another user profile each time a different combination of access rights is needed for a different organizational role. This is very important when volunteers fill many roles that will shift in responsibilities over time.The ability to assign multiple user profiles would make it possible to define a limited number of sets of rights that can be layered to assemble a wide range of combination of access rights needed to address a range of organizational roles.Without this, each time a user needs access to a different part of EA than others who have similar but not identical responsibilities requires creating a new profile that’s close to the same access as an existing profile but with one or two additional items checked or removed for that one person. Over time, this gets uglier and uglier and creates undue risk that a user will be granted rights they shouldn’t have in order to grant rights they need.

My question is somewhat related to this discussion post about how the system treats records with duplicate emails.We sent a Targeted Email to our full list yesterday, excluding our manual Suppression list. I now want to send that same Targeted Email, only to those emails that didn’t receive the first one.I’m trying to figure out how to accurately pull a list that won’t send folks duplicate emails.For records A and B with the same email address x@gmail, record B was in our Suppression list. Record A, however, still received the email. My initial strategy is to Create a List and remove any records that received yesterday’s email. When I Create a List and remove any contacts that received yesterday’s email, record B is included in that List. So I assume using this list would mean x@gmail gets the email again, since my search relied on whether a record received an email, not whether an email address received an email. Are there any ways that I can re-send this email to our Suppression list

When prepping for a donor meeting I would like to review all the previous donor meeting notes but they are often buried in with all the other tasks, emails, and other various notes. I have labeled them as Donor Meetings in the note category but the search apparently doesn’t work for the note category. Is there a setting that I can change to make this function and more useful?

Hi! This is an idea for Workflow Automations: adding the ability to A/B test the initial group of people who enter a Workflow Automation. (Not necessarily a Targeted Email A/B test, but analogous.)Example: every day a few people trickle in to a workflow automation via a Saved Search. The first Action/Decision for the automation is to split the people into two equal groups and send them down different branches. Then during each branch, people receive one or more emails, and they either click/donate or they don’t. This would essentially allow someone to test two versions of a welcome series against each other in real time. Wouldn’t that be cool? 

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.

Is anyone using a heatmapping software that works well with EveryAction forms? Our English-language advocacy forms perform well, but our Spanish-language advocacy forms have abysmal conversion rates, so I want to investigate what is happening in the user journey there. My organization used HotJar for our website in the past, but it sounds like it wouldn’t connect to our EveryAction forms.Would love to hear if anyone has recommendations!

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!

We are in the middle of moving from NXT to EveryAction and though we were informed the event area was not robust we are having a hard time figuring out a solution to retain important details of previous event participant.  For example we have more than 10 years of galas that we want to keep track of what table a participant sat at for a specific event.  Likewise for previous peer to peer events we want to have information on how much a participant raised for each specific event.  Anyone who moved over from NXT and had a lot of participant attributes - what did you do with this data?

Recurring donors are the most valuable segment in most nonprofit databases and, paradoxically, the most neglected once they're acquired. The effort that goes into converting a one-time donor to monthly giving often isn't matched by the infrastructure built to keep them giving. When a sustainer cancels or lapses, it rarely happens because they stop caring about the mission; it usually happens because a card expired and nobody caught it in time.The good news is that most of the tools you need to run a proactive sustainer retention program are already in EveryAction but they need to be configured and connected.Failed payment recovery is where retention programs live or die. When a recurring gift fails, you have a short window to recover it before the donor disengages entirely. A well-structured failed payment sequence — an email the day of the failure, a text follow-up two or three days later, a final email before you suspend the gift — dramatically increases recovery rates compared to a

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. :) 

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