Events - and discount codes

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.

​@Megan Dodds - any updates here? We’ve been using Whova for our events but would love to have the registration form and payments within EA… the lack of a discount code is the main barrier.

Hey Everyone - Thank you for your patience. I wanted to reply here with a few updates on Events in EveryAction. 

Context

The most important thing to note is that we hear you. There have been gaps in the Events functionality in EA that we have known about (some of which are highlighted here in this thread!) that we wanted to solve for.

As part of that evaluation the most compelling future ended up being acquiring OneCause, which is the clear market leader for Event Fundraising. If you want to learn a bit more about the why, please read our press release here: https://www.bonterratech.com/news-press/bonterra-acquires-onecause. 

What Does This Mean?

Theres a few things to note as we integrate these two platforms and bring the OneCause capabilities to bear for EveryAction:

1. The data integration is live right now - if you have OneCause and want to integrate it or are interested in exploring it please reach out to your account rep, schedule a demo here, or send me a note directly at ryan.duffy@bonterratech.com.
2. We do not have plans to sunset the current events functionality in EveryAction. However, our innovation agenda and roadmap for Events will be focused on OneCause and enhancing the integration and cross-product experience with that best in class Events platform. 
3. OneCause will complement our F&E Pro and Enterprise bundles - alongside DonorDrive - giving Nonprofits an unparalleled set of world-class, integrated Fundraising tools in a single subscription.

How to Reach Me or My Team

For those who haven’t met me i’m the Director of Product for EveryAction! Ive been in this role for 6 months now but have been with Bonterra for more than 4 years. If you want to talk to me or my team about Events or anything else heres two easy ways to do so:

1. This link allows you to self-schedule time with the EveryAction product team: https://bonterratech.zoom.us/zbook/d/-l7afyc9/lets-talk-about-your-everyaction-experience
2. You can email me directly at ryan.duffy@bonterratech.com.

Came across this thread again while wondering about a similar case. Thanks, Ryan and Megan for taking this seriously! I’m not a coder by any means, so this may come off as a dull question, but our team keeps asking why those integrations can’t be added in directly, and I don’t know that answer. DonorDrive seems to fix most of the issues and already lives within the Bonterra family, so why is it separate? Is there a plan to eventually integrate those capabilities into EA? Or is it primarily a financial choice to keep it as an add-on only? Same goes for OneCause, I imagine. 

​@ryan duffy  what do you mean by “We do not have plans to sunset the current events functionality in EveryAction?” Is it just staying limited for the foreseeable future with a push towards purchasing add-ons? We’d like to understand whether we can expect improvements to the existing EA platform or whether Bonterra is encouraging the transition to other tools. Thanks!

Hey Lark - 

Id love to chat with you about both of these topics. Never a dull question! Can you find time with me over the next few weeks? You can book time here on my calendar! https://bonterratech.zoom.us/zbook/ryan-duffy/ryan-duffy-meeting-times. 

Looking forward to it. I noticed in your post history you have started a bunch of threads and have some great insight on other EA areas that I want to hear too. 

Ryan Duffy