EveryAction Discussion

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!

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 predic

Thanks to everyone who joined today’s coaching session, Modern Thank-You Strategies that Inspire Donors. Liz Albert reviewed best practices for thanking your donors. In our EA-specific breakout room, I went over how to use workflow automations to thank your offline donors.I’d love to hear other ideas from you! What automations do you use to thank donors? Do you leverage EA’s workflow automation templates such as birthday or first gift anniversary to reach out to your donors on a more personal level? Anything else that Liz went over that resonated with you?Drop your questions, ideas, or examples below. This community is a great space to learn from each other!

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-

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 “m

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

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:  

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 recor

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 folk

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?

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

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?

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,