Events - and discount codes

Hey Jeff 🖐  Great question. The answer is yes, if you want to have varying price levels that shouldn’t be available to anyone and everyone who accesses your form, such as reduced prices that a discount code would provide, then you’ll need to make multiple versions of the form. I know that’s not ideal, but it should be pretty easy, since you can copy an existing form and then make the few tweaks to pricing that you need to make.

That said, I’ll also pass this along as product feedback to the team. And if you want to get in touch with your Account Executive, they could tell you more about DonorDrive, which now integrates with EveryAction, and provides expanded event functionality, such as the ability to offer discount codes (and event participant limits too).

Thanks Alexander, 

Yes it was one of a very short list of features we “lost” migrating from Salsa to EveryAction. It’s something our program team regularly reminds me that is lacking - and one I/they’ve passed along as product feedback. 

Curious how users have handled this?

We’ve gone the multiple form route, and depending on the event end up with way too many forms.

We’ve also made the mistake of just listing the discounted options on the primary registration form with various notes about who should use which … that backfired and we had to track alot of people down for additional payments. 

Most recently we handled comped tickets for volunteers and speakers through a third-party which our program team loved since it solved their issues, but made things more complicated on the backend for my team - and for providing up-to-date attendee lists. 

What work arounds have others been trying?

Unfortunately there isn’t another workaround outside of the multiple forms route. I mentioned DonorDrive because it’s part of the Bonterra family, and I think it would also solve the front end issues your team is experiencing. And then it should also handle the back end issue too, as the integration between DonorDrive and EveryAction would sync over any new contacts, contributions, and events created in DonorDrive into EveryAction (this sync runs once per hour), so no need for a manual process of moving that data from a third party system into EA.

I’m not 100% sure what the pricing is for DonorDrive, and I understand not everyone is in a position to purchase a new product, but if you’re curious I think it’s worth looking into.

Chiming in to say many of the nonprofits we work with who use Events would LOVE a discount code feature. Their solution to date has been multiple forms which has created a lot of overhead. It’s great that DonorDrive has that feature already, but adding a separate product with a separate login and added expense is probably too much for them. If there’s a place to keep track of nonprofit upvotes for Feature Requests, let me know!

I’ve provided this feedback to our product team directly! 

​@Megan Dodds having a place to vote on feature requests to help prioritize that queue would be a great community feature here. 

​@jeff you’re reading our minds! We hope to launch Product Updates in Bonterra Central as a space to do just this! We will continue to keep you posted on timeline. 

After migrating from Salsa, we are missing discount codes for our event sponsors and volunteers. It just feels like we shouldn’t need to purchase another product for such a minor issue. 

Is there a way to register our sponsors and volunteers on the back-end for an event without paying the event ticket price? 

​@Fatima can provide more information about how we handle this. it gets messy. 

We’ve definitely had situations where we’ve missed printing out nametags for sponsors at big fundraising events because of this lack. 

Hi all,

As Jeff mentioned, we run a variety of events with different ticket types, and the way we’ve been managing this has become pretty cumbersome. In some cases, we’ve had to create up to eight separate forms for a single event. This means I’m often running multiple reports for each form every day so staff can stay up to date on registrations.

We previously tried using a separate platform for scholarships, but that added another form to monitor. After the event, I also had to bulk upload scholarship recipients into EA, which created additional work.

For some events, we include both a regular ticket and a “Staff Use Only” ticket that essentially functions as the scholarship option. However, this has caused confusion—some participants select that option when they shouldn’t, leading to awkward follow-up conversations asking them to switch and pay the full price.

Overall, managing all of this takes a significant amount of time away from my other responsibilities. I would really appreciate having a single, integrated form to streamline the process.

Our organization migrated to EveryAction from Salsa over a year ago—even the when we asked about coupon codes then, the migration manager said “our team hears that a lot.” Every support person I talk to who will listen I also mention coupon codes and they say “we hear that a lot.” Every time I think of it, I submit a product feedback about coupon codes and tell my team to. The lack of a simple feature standard on possibly every other online form host in existence sucks up a massive amount of my organizations’ time designing custom solutions. (And build a larger donor base buff EA’s bottom line.)

Never heard a thing about it, never seen a product roadmap, never heard anything except “we’ll pass this on to our product team.” I’m getting impatient. Can you tell? I often wonder whether Bonterra has a product team or just an merger/acquisition team.

​@Megan Dodds you’re great, genuinely. I appreciate the webinars and education you put together. But I hope the irony of promising to update us when there’s a timeline on developing a timeline so we can know when to expect the feature we’re actually asking for isn’t lost on you, your team or your supervisors.

​@dkuhns Thanks for your candor, and I completely understand the frustration here. I've shared your message directly with the EveryAction product managers and they'll be reviewing this thread and sharing insights soon. The feedback y'all share is valuable so please continue to surface it and know we will ensure these messages are in front of the right folks internally!

Echoing DKuhns here - ​@Megan Dodds the main question I get asked from our staff is when we can expect comp codes / discount codes with everyaction. As Fatima mentioned, we have workarounds, but they are messy and cumbersome and make reporting much trickier. 

As our lead fundraiser, I’m fine putting in the extra time to keeping track of complimentary tickets for our big fundraising events, but it’s a waste of my time and my team’s time helping program staff keep track of all the different discounted tickets for paid-for trainings. 

A janky workaround I used but didn’t love

We essentially used marketsource as a stand in for a promo code and provided comped individuals with what we told them was a unique link.  It was a link to the same comped registration form but what we unique was the query string parameter with the market source and having each marketsource be unique and tracked by us in a spreadsheet

So for example:

[link to the everyaction form with the comped or discounted rates]?ms=XYZFoundation3galatickets04012024

We created a shared googlesheet tracking spreadsheet something like this

marketsource Code  | Who we gave the code to  |  The unique link we gave them  |  Notes   

Then we could use EA reporting for form submissions (adding the marketsource column) to see who that code was used by to audit for abuse.  if we gave a code out to someone and they shared it with others, then we could rescind their registration and the other freeloaders (this didn't happen by the way).

It was NOT ideal but was the best we could figure out.