Things To Consider When Holding A Large Event/Donation Drive 2266

Things To Consider When Holding A Large Event/Donation Drive

Published

Are you getting ready to have a donation drive, where large amounts of constituents will be calling in to donate?  Does your organization have large scale events that rely on your staff entering in donations to the NetCommunity site manually?  There are several things to consider when your origination is preparing for large functions such as these.  

Many factors can influence the functionality of your website, and it is important to properly plan out the implementation of these events to avoid complications. 
 
1. If you are holding a large phone-a-thon or donation event, and are using Blackbaud Netcommunity for donation data entry, you will need to consider several things to ensure the donation drive is successful. 
 
Blackbaud reviews the transactions that are submitted through Blackbaud Netcommunity and notes when someone is submitting incorrect credit card information.  If several attempts are made in quick succession to process an invalid credit card, Blackbaud will block the donor’s IP address.  This is in place to detect potential fraud, and to prevent someone from testing various combinations of credit card numbers.

During a donation drive where you are entering large numbers of transactions on your site from the same computer, it is possible that you will have multiple incorrect cards.  To avoid your computers IP addresses from being blocked after multiple invalid transactions, I would suggest you can proactively reaching out to Blackbaud Netcommunity Support  before the event begins. 

If you can provide Support with a with a list of your computers’ IP addresses,  we can add these addresses to a white list in order to prevent the these IP addresses from being blocked.

 
2. If you use Blackbaud Netcommunity email notifications for Donation Forms or Event Forms, there are a few steps you may want to take ahead of time in order to avoid causing mail deliverability issues.
 
If you have your Donation or Event Forms set up to send a staff notification when a new donation or registration comes in, it is likely that during a donation drive, you could see large amounts of emails hitting your inbox. 

Each of these emails will be from the same sender.  Most email servers analyze the traffic coming in to determine if it should be marked as SPAM. 

Your mail server may start to consider these notification emails as spam due to the frequency they are received by the mail server.  Just like with the IP addresses, you can proactively make some changes to avoid email from your organization being marked as SPAM. 

Before your event you can whitelist the IP addresses that Blackbaud Netcommunity uses to send email out. 

The below knowledge base article discusses the IP ranges that Blackbaud Netcommunity emails are sent from.  Instructing your IT staff to whitelist these IP's on your mail server will reduce the risk of your notifications being marked as SPAM. 

 
http://bbmarketplace.force.com/bbknowledge/articles/article/41347
 
Now that your workstations are ready for donation data entry, and your email server is prepared to receive a large amount of emails from your organization, you can focus more on the campaign, and less on NetCommunity!
 
News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud NetCommunity™ Blog 04/26/2016 4:34pm EDT

Leave a Comment

Check back soon!

Share: