EveryAction Discussion

 Thanks to everyone who joined today’s Ask the Experts  all about Workflow Automations. Peter and Rachel were our experts today and gave fantastic, real world examples for how to streamline your workflows using EA’s host of tools!In our session, we covered a lot of ground.We’d love to hear other ideas from you! Is your organization using a welcome series automation of some kind? What other automations are you using? Anything else that Torvic and Rachel went over that resonated with you?Drop your questions, ideas, or examples below. This community is a great space to learn from each other!

Lapsed donors are often treated as one large segment — but a donor who gave 11 months ago is very different from someone who hasn’t given in three years. The most successful reactivation work I’ve seen starts with clear segmentation and simple execution.Here are a few approaches that consistently perform well:Define your lapse tiers.Create saved searches based on last contribution date (e.g., 9–15 months, 16–36 months, 3+ years). Each group should receive different messaging and cadence.Prioritize by likelihood.Use DonorTrends or Bonterra Que to identify which previously engaged donors are most likely to return. Focus effort where probability is strongest.Check engagement before asking.Supporters who have opened or clicked recently—but haven’t given—often respond well to a short, direct reactivation message.Keep the ask simple.Reference their past support, include one clear call-to-action, and align suggested amounts with their previous gift. Enable recurring upsell to capture monthly

Hi EA community! I’m looking for a web designer conversant in the Online Actions pages as used by EveryAction, who could do a small project making our signup pages, petition pages, and donation forms look a bit nicer.Anyone have a connection or recommendation? Comment here ! Thank you!Jeff

Thanks to everyone who joined today’s coaching session all about Mass Communication Strategies. Kristi Rinck was our coaching expert today and gave fantastic, real world examples for how to improve your communication strategies!In our EA-specific breakout room, I went over how to start building a multi-channel campaign.I’d love to hear other ideas from you! Are you using source codes to report on how well each campaign effort did? Is your organization using a welcome series automation of some kind? What other automations are you using? Anything else that Kristi went over that resonated with you?Drop your questions, ideas, or examples below. This community is a great space to learn from each other!

Hello! We recently hosted an event that reached capacity, so we added a waitlist option by creating a $0.00 “Waitlist” ticket to manage additional interest. This event is one of our paid trainings with limited capacity.When someone is moved from the waitlist to the participant list, we ask them to submit their payment as a donation, since they already completed the full registration questions when joining the waitlist.​@jeff and I would be interested to hear how other organizations handle event waitlists and any tips or best practices you’re willing to share. Thanks in advance!

The ‘Contribution Summaries’ section within Create a List provide a way to filter for household contributions for Lifetime, HPC, MRC and First Contributions.  We often have a need to find household contributions within a time frame. There is a ‘Sum of Contributions’ for the ‘Contributions’ section, but this only looks at an individual.  For example, if one household member donated $100 and another member donated $400 last year and we wanted a list of households that donated at least $500 last year, a list of all that donated last year would be needed to feed into a Contribution Report and then  household totals created by manipulating an exported Excel file to get the answer.Not only is this extra work, but the process prevents us from using an Automation to assign Activist Codes as well as using the information for a Targeted Email.Has anyone run into this and found a simpler solution?

👋 Quick question for you!We’re hosting an Ask the Experts session next week all about contact management, and we’d love your input. What’s been tricky lately? What questions do you have? Anything you wish worked better or made more sense? Drop your thoughts (big or small!) in the comments 👇 We’ll use your questions to help shape the conversation.

Thanks to everyone who joined today’s coaching session, Year-End Reporting Made Easy. Janet Cobb reviewed best practices for the reporting insights you can pursue to support stronger decision-making this year. I’d love to hear from you now:What reporting strategies are helping your team the most? How are you using year-end insights to plan for 2026?Drop your questions, ideas, or examples below. This community is a great space to learn from each other and strengthen the way we use data to move our missions forward.

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? 

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! 

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. 

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-end form, and send a short follow-up message to a

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 “move” a recurring commitment to the most up-to

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 it works for them. How do you track volunteer activities

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:  

How are organizations creatively using automations? I’m talking beyond a welcome series or a re-engagement series, how are you using automations to really level up engagement, advocacy, and fundraising? I’m currently thinking about setting up an automation for our highly engaged online advocates to let them know they are among our top action takers and offering them extra, higher-bar opportunities to get involved with the organization. What are others doing or thinking about? 

The basic need is to use bulk upload to add dozens of attributions for one contribution. It seems like it’s probably possible but the article I found on attributions leaves quite a bit to speculation and I’m hoping to avoid a lengthy trial and error process and having someone manually enter 80+ attributions. If you’ve done this and have a sample spreadsheet or some guidance, I’d love to hear from you!Background: We’re a small organization in Alaska, with one really new development person and maximum of one year of experience in EA for the most senior of us. Alaska is notorious for its Permanent Fund Dividend — Alaska residents receive dividend checks every October from a fund seeded by oil money — and several years ago the Pick.Click.Give. program was created, allowing folks to pledge and donate money from their dividend to Alaska nonprofits. Organizations receive the donations as one single check, along with a spreadsheet of the individual donors. Thanks for sharing your wisdom!

Hey y’all! Have you been working with Que yet? We have a customer event today at 1:30pm CT where we will be demoing an exciting new skill - email creation - and answering your Que related questions!  We’d love to see you there - register now: Que & A  

Hi everyone! 👋Excited to introduce myself! I’m Kathleen Connelly, part of the marketing and customer advocacy team here at Bonterra, located in Washington, DC. I’ve had the honor of hearing many of your inspiring stories over the past 5 years, and one of the things I'm most passionate about is connecting with customers who are doing amazing work with our product.I wanted to let you know that I'll be keeping an eye out for community members who are actively engaged and making an impact with our solution in their organizations. If that sounds like you, you might be a great fit for some exciting opportunities we have coming up 😊 things like speaking engagements, customer spotlights, case studies, and other exclusive benefits through our customer advocacy initiative.Of course, don't wait for me to find you! If you're interested in sharing your story, being featured, or getting involved in our advocacy program, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to send me a message anytime at at kathle

Happy Monday y’all!Thanks to everyone who joined our recent Fundraising Coaching Event with Robin Cabral — or caught the replay! (If you missed it, you can watch the recording here: Fundraising Metrics that Matter for Sustainable Growth) Robin reminded us that even a 5% increase in your donor recapture rate can add thousands in revenue without finding a single new donor.So what’s one thing you’re trying (or planning to try) to re-engage lapsed donors before year-end?

It’s no secret that A/B testing is a valuable way to learn what captures your supporters attention. I’d love to know what selection criteria you use when selecting a winner for an A/B Test?