Online Data Review for Event Registrations in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®

Tanya Fitzgerald

Event registrations are now part of Online data review, giving you more control over how participant information is added to your database. This will help you keep your records cleaner and more accurate as your events grow. We’ll roll this capability out in waves and all customers will have this functionality by May 5, 2026.

This change may impact current workflows if you use Event registration forms. Please review the information below for details.

What’s changing?

Now you can review event registrations in Online data review, just like you already do with donation forms. This update helps you ensure registrants are matched correctly to existing records.

Event registrations that get queued for review—according to your existing Online data review settings—will not appear as participants in your Work with participants area until they’re reviewed.

• If you already use Online data review for donations, you’ll start seeing event registrations, both free and paid, in your queue for review as soon as we activate the option to manage registrations through Online data review in your account. Review or adjust your settings from Gifts, Overview, Settings, Online data review.
• If you do not use Online data review, you will need to activate this feature to approve constituent matches for new registrations before they’re added to your event Participant work area. See below for instructions.

How can Online data review help clean my data?

Event registrations can create duplicate records if details like names or email addresses don’t match perfectly. We’ve heard your feedback through the Raiser’s Edge NXT Community and Idea Bank about the challenges this causes.

By using Online data review for event registrations, you can:

• Reduce duplicate records
• Save time and effort
• Ensure participant information is accurate from the start
• Help teams handle large volumes of registrations more efficiently

If you have been hesitant to use Event registration in Raiser’s Edge NXT web view due to concerns about duplicate records, it may be time to revisit switching from Blackbaud NetCommunity and Blackbaud Online Express.

What if Online data review is already enabled?

Event registrations will respect your current Online data review settings. If your system is set to Review unmatched constituents or Review all constituents, you will see event registrations in Online data review.

Event registrations that get queued for review will not appear as participants in your events until they’re reviewed. To prevent delays, encourage your team to stay on top of reviewing registrations as they come in.

Note: If you have Online data review set to Use automatic constituent matching, Event registrations will flow straight through to the event. The system links the event participant to a new or existing constituent (or non-constituent for guests) and the registration shows up in the event right away. 

How will event registrations work in Online data review?

When an event registration moves into Online data review, you’ll see event-specific details in the flyout to help you confirm matches quickly and accurately. Matching, searching, and linking records work just like they do for donation forms, and your existing role permissions stay the same.

Event registrations follow the same host and guest rules you’re already familiar with for events:

• Hosts are the main participants who register for the event and may bring guests. Hosts must always be connected to a constituent record and will go through Online data review if review settings apply.
• Guests without a name are saved as unknown guests (labeled as Guest of + Host/participants name) and do not go through Online data review.
• Named guests with only a name are saved as named guests and skip Online data review.

Guests with additional contact details, like an address, phone number, or email, will go through Online data review. These guests can then be linked to either a constituent or a non-constituent record.

How to set up, review, or update your Online data review settings.

Setting up Online data review is easy: Go to Gifts, Overview, Settings, Online data review. From there, choose the option that works best for your organization. You can also review your settings here. For more details on the options, review the Help files. Save the settings to enable Online data review.

This update simplifies how you create constituent data from donations and event registrations. It keeps the process familiar while making it easier for your team to handle new registrations and stay organized with confidence and consistency. You’ll be able to work with more forms using the Online data review, including constituent and membership forms. This enhancement helps you start with dependable data, so you can move forward with confidence from the very beginning.

Heather Reid

We have Online data review enabled and set to 'Review transactions with unmatched constituents', so our financial staff can review donations made by unmatched constituents. With this change, all event registrations who are unmatched will now come to this area first. Is there anything on the Event page that indicates there are one or more registrations waiting in the Needs Attention section of the Gift Management page? Also, how should we be configuring our Security settings, as I am assuming we will need to grant some sort of Gift Management access to the staff handling Events? We have separate staff who handle Gifts (ie online donations) vs Events (almost all of our events are $0 registrations), so I am concerned that they will now both need to work with the same Needs Attention section of Gift Management.

Lee Grisham

Please consider changing this to optional as it will help us keep cleaner records of Relationships. We have plenty of spouses that don't have emails/phones attached to them, but we do mark them as attendees for events.

• Named guests with only a name are saved as named guests and skip Online data review.

Daisy Alarcon

Hi @Heather Reid, great questions!

Good news on visibility: notifications will show up in several places beyond just Gift Management. You'll see an indicator on the Events overview page, on the specific Event page, and in the Participant Work Center, so your events staff won't need to go hunting in Gift Management to know something's waiting on them.

On security, no new permissions are being introduced. Online data review for event registrations uses the same existing settings as today, so your events staff will just need to be granted access to Online data review in order to review and match their registrations to constituents. You can find all the details on Online data review security in the help file.

And for the shared queue concern, staff will be able to filter the Online data review queue by source at the top, so they can view just event registrations, just donation forms, or all together. That should make it easy for your gifts and events teams to each focus on what's theirs without any overlap confusion.

Hope that helps!

Karen Diener

Is this generally available now, or still being released in waves?

Sara Niemiec

This is great news! My team is just starting to use event registrations in RE NXT. I can't wait to see it in action!

Daisy Alarcon

Hi @Karen Diener , We’ll roll this capability out in waves.

Matthew Duprey

Hello. Is it possible to have different settings for online donation form matching vs event participant matching? For example, we would want to review every single online donation that comes in but only want to review event participant records when they do not auto-match.

Ursula Stacks

If I am understanding this correctly, those in Event management will now need access to Gift Management to review participants? We don't want to give access to gift management to those that work on Events. It's a different group of people so there should be different security to review only event participants versus having access to events and gift management.

Lee Grisham

@Ursula Stacks there is just a setting at the bottom of Gift Management that needs to be checked that doesn't allow a user to do anything else but the review. As capabilities in NXT are expanded, it may be best to put that in a different bucket moving forward, @Daisy Alarcon.

Jenn Watson

Thank you for this update. I spend either the end of my day or the beginning of my day merging records created from event registrations. I have a PA flow that sends me an email with the "potential" duplicates.
I am matching at least 90% of the records based on email alone. Sometimes the names are spelled slightly different.
One question, though….. Are all the settings the same as with the Online Data Review for Gift Processing? I do not use that myself, but if we need it slightly different for event registrations and I go change the settings, then will it mess up/not work the same for my gift processing team when they do it for gifts.
There are some places where we do not have enough granular control over what we see in the data and just thinking that this could possibly be one of those areas.

Anne Dicker

Please de-link donation matching from event matching settings. We need to enable automatic matching for last minute registrations to our 300+ events - many of which are free events. However, we need a finer review for our actual donation transactions.

Sarah Stracener

I got an e-mail saying this was now an option available for my organization but it's still not allowing us to match all registrants. We've got all of the settings correctly applied; how will I know it's actually functioning properly without having people register?

Melissa Rabinow

Many of our events are free - will the matching still apply and be visable only through Gift Management?

Heather Reid

How do we know if this is available for us yet? We received an email a couple days ago indicating we can now manage event registrations in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT using Online data review. We have our Online Data Review settings as "Review transactions with unmatched constituents". I tested it today, with an Event Registration Form we created a few weeks ago, but it created a new constituent record instead of flagging it as 'Needs Attention'. This Event (like most of our Events) are free. I'm wondering why the settings didn't work correctly - is this not available for us yet, or does it matter when the Registration Form was initially created, or if there is no payment made?

Alex Lerman

"Guests with additional contact details, like an address, phone number, or email, will go through Online data review. These guests can then be linked to either a constituent or a non-constituent record."

It only seems to be giving me the option to link them to an existing record (the host), or to create a new constituent record. The option for a non-constituent record is not there as far as I can tell.

Update: It created non-constituent records when I selected the option to create new constituent records.

Alicia Cipriano

@Heather Reid

We are having the same issue. Last week I updated our settings to Review and match all transactions just so our team can get used to the process. Today we tried to process 20 event transactions and new records were created for people who are already in our system. We did not see a screen or anything that allowed the team to review transactions and match with existing records before approving gifts. If this is a glitch, Blackbaud should review this, or let people know this could be or still remains an issue.

It would be helpful if a video existed - perhaps it does and I just haven't yet found it - that provides a visual overview of the process, instead of just reviewing info sheets and blog posts.

Lee Grisham

@Alicia Cipriano Here's the video they posted recently on Learn: https://learn.blackbaud.com/share/asset/view/1190

Ursula Stacks

This is not helpful as the functionality stands today. There have to be more settings than just one button that effects gift AND all events. There have to be separate options so that people that want to do this for gifts but not events can have that option. Or vice versa.

There also has to be a way to select to not do this for $0 events. As others are stating we have free events and now I have 38 people I have to review and likely make into New constituents because the registrant added her name, email, address and only changed the name for all the people she is registering for a free event. So I have no way to know how to link these people even if they match a name in our database.

This is not going to help us at all. Those people need to be able to be added as Non-Constituent records.

This does not seem well thought out for the end users. There was so much more needed to be addressed before this just "turned on" as an option without giving the DBA's a choice.

Alison Weil

@Heather Reid and @Alicia Cipriano We're in the same boat too. I have four free events currently accepting registrations, have set my Online Data Review to 'Review and match all transactions' but we're still getting duplicates! Sure would be nice to know if this is working as intended or we just don't have the functionality yet.

Alicia Cipriano

@Lee Grisham Thank you for providing a link to the video. Although I have online data review set to "review and match all constituents" I am not seeing any of the screens/functionality that is outlined in that video. So, I presume this has not been fully rolled out for our organization just yet. Appreciate your assistance.

Alicia Cipriano

@Alison Weil

Hi Alison - I am going to assume that the functionality has not been rolled out yet, which is frustrating. This duplicate issue is exactly why I have not implemented the NXT online donation form and am still using Online Express.

Tanya Fitzgerald

All Raiser's Edge NXT customers will have Online data review for even registrations by May 5, 2026.