Online Express Membership Forms - Capturing Referrals

Kevin Hardy

Hi -

We have this idea to send out an e-mail to our members that will instruct them to “forward this email to your friends, and when they sign up for a membership using this link you'll be credited with a referral” (not the real language but you get the idea)

The link will lead to an online express membership form where the “friend” can sign up, but I'm trying to find the best way to capture the referrer/current member who forwarded the email upon the OLX form submission. (hoping this will somehow end up on the new member record in RE)

Does anyone have any experience with this or has done something similar?

Austen Brown

Hi Kevin - There used to be a feature within OLX called “Givealanche", not sure if it is still available. It does exactly what you are looking for – as it recognizes if a second transaction was made because the first transaction was shared; recorded through parent/child attribute codes on gift records. I would recommend you look into this as an option to consider.

Also, I want to make sure you are aware that if the recipient of the forwarded message ‘unsubscribes’ from the email, the original recipient will be unsubscribed in the system. You may want to think through what measures to put in place to prevent this - at a previous org we included a line of text at the very bottom of the email warning constituents about this.

Kevin Hardy

Hey there Austen -

I was just poking around in the OLX Donation Forms and Membership Forms but couldn't seem to find Givalanche in order to try it out. It did sound like this is something that we're trying to do.

I did find some documentation for it (just in case anyone has better luck than me)

Great point about the unsubscribe link though.

Edit: It looks like Givalanche is no longer supported.

Austen Brown

That's a bummer! Not sure how else to track this, but if I think of something in the next few days I'll post another comment.