NXT Gift Batch does NOT give full referring URL info!?!

Andrew Scott · October 9

Has anyone noticed this?

We cannot see what emails are referring gifts to our organization!

This is a terrible setback for our marketing data.

Faith Murray · October 9

There is an Idea for this here. It is marked as "shipped" because, per the BB comment:

"We've pulled this work into our Q4 plan - we'll be releasing an addition to donation forms where it will automatically write Donation Form Name, Donation Form Referrer (URL) and BBPSTransactionID to custom fields."

Karen Diener · October 10

It sounds like you are hoping to see the email reference on the gift? I don't believe this was ever in place.

If you used the email marketing tool in webview, you should be able to see the number of transactions that resulted from it:

It will not add anything to the gift record though. I don't recall what information appears if there are transactions and if that is a list that can be exported. You would have to go through some hoops to export the list, make sure it is saved as a query, and then globally add information to the gifts to reflect their source.

I assume your previous email tool or a previous system allowed this?

Andrew Scott · October 10

Yes, OLX gave a full URL reference after any/all online gifts, which was tremendously helpful for our marketing data.

Thank you both for your responses!

Faith Murray · October 10

@Karen Diener it is useful to be able to see the gift totals on a donation form summary, but I don't think that's what she was asking for. In OLX, the form name loads as a gift attribute on the gift record. This is much more useful information, because not only can you see how much money a form has pulled in, but you can also see specifically who gave to it, which allows you to report on donor segments, profile donor response from different audiences, and drill down more deeply into upgrades, average vs median gift sizes, and other response metrics.

JoAnn Strommen · October 10

Same with NetCommunity. Yes, helpful to see what form used - how donor connected.

Samantha McGuin · October 16

@Andrew Scott and commenters - thank you for this thread! This is actually a bug. Referral urls display on both a donation form's performance summary, and since last December they are written into a gift custom field/attribute just like OLX and BBNC do. I did some investigation with my dev team, and we found that url parameters in the referral url, including the eml parameter from NXT email, are included on HOSTED forms but not forms where you have the form embedded in your websites due to some technical complexities in how these forms load from the scripts. This was not intended.

I've created a bug for our next sprint and we will fix this in the next two weeks. Coming from a marketing background myself, I completely understand the importance of having this data available.

Regards,
Samantha McGuin
Sr. Principal Product Manager, Online Giving
Blackbaud

Andrew Peterson · October 17

Adding myself to the list of folks who would really love to see this in NXT Donation Forms. For years we've used UTM codes in our urls and that information from the OLX form to measure the success of different email campaigns. I was very disappointed this morning to not see any of that url information in our gifts that came in from our first NXT form campaign.

Is there a timeline for this @Samantha McGuin? I may switch back to OLX forms until this is working in NXT.

NXT Gift Batch does NOT give full referring URL info!?!

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