Hyphenated names in Online Express Donation Forms

Em Siemonek

Kia ora team,

We recently had a donor try to enter a hyphenated last name (e.g Smith-Jones) into our Online Express donation form and they were met with an error:

We've run into a slight problem. Correct the following to continue.

Please enter a valid value for field: Last name.

We contacted Blackbaud support and they couldn't give us a lot of help and advised it had something to do with Online Express coding and suggested moving to using Blackbaud NXT forms instead. Which is fine, but we aren't quite ready for that yet. I'm almost certain we have had hyphenated surnames through our OE form before, so this error is a bit weird for me.

Does anyone know how to get around this or how to enable Online Express forms to accept Hyphenated names?

Thanks so much as always.

Alex Wong

@Em Siemonek
I just tried it on our OLX event registration form and did not have this problem, but when trying on Donation form, it has the problem you mentioned.

I think you should esculate the ticket as unacceptable bug that needs to be fixed.

Miki Martin

@Em Siemonek as @Alex Wong stated you should escalate this. Having worked at an all girls high school we saw our fair share of hyphenated names and initially were using OE when I started there. Perhaps it is something from a recent upgrade that has changed but there is no good explanation for a donor not being able to enter a hyphenated name. They're just too common.

For what it's worth, I did end up switching all of our donation and event forms from OE to NXT while I was there and we were very pleased with it all. I found the set up easier and with them updating the way names are matched we had a lot less duplicates by the end of my time there than when we first started using the NXT forms. Just something to keep in the back of your mind. Good luck!

Austen Brown

@Em Siemonek - As others have mentioned, start a case with support. Make sure to include your CSM and Account Rep in the conversation - your CSM can help advocate for your org, and move the process forward.