Web Forms with International Addresses

J Kiku Langford McDonald

Hi all,


With our recent shift to virtual programming, we've noticed many more people submitting web forms from abroad than we have in the past. However, last week we found out via social media that people from some countries were receiving errors when trying to submit pre-registered program web forms. I mentioned this to a couple colleagues at other museums that use Altru and their web forms had similar problems.


I found out via chat support that we have to go into each country under Administration>Countries and States and either change/refresh the Address format OR click on the country's name and add states/provinces to the code table for each country.


I mostly want to bring this issue to everyone's attention so you all can check your own web forms and see if yours also need attention. If the thought of having to manually populate every country's state/province code table seems impossible to you, please also vote for this idea on the ideas board to ask Blackbaud to populate that information for all of us.


So far, changing and refreshing the Address Format for every country that's having problems is working for me, but I still have to go through and test each and every one and then wait several minutes for each one to refresh.


Good luck and let us know if you come up with another solution!

Kiku

Regina Holten

I voted!

Olivia Harding

I voted as well! We've been having issues with international folks trying to register for our virtual programs. Unfortunately, sometimes there is a language barrier so it's been even more difficult to understand what specific address formatting issues our users are experiencing. I will need to research the mailing formats of each of these countries when we add them in, as well as add the provinces/states. For example, I just completed Venezuela which has 23 states and it took me a good chunk of time. Just a heads up for anyone else completing this, if you give states/provinces an abbreviation, that abbreviation will be your only option in the drop down menu when adding the address to a constituent record. So, Venezuela labels their states with letters like A B C D and so on...so after I added all the state's names, when I went to edit the constituent record I only had a long list of letters to choose from, not the state's names. All of that just to say be careful if you use the abbreviations because it may make it more difficult to get the correct address for your constituents.


However, the abbreviations are NOT listed on the webforms, only the state names. Why Altru uses the abbreviation sometimes and the whole state name other times, I have no clue. Good luck everyone!