Using Bloomerang and Zapier brings connectivity to all kinds of apps and your database. Learn how you can connect your Bloomerang database with Eventbrite through Zapier. Set up custom fields for the event, track event payments and participation from Eventbrite as donations and interactions, report on Eventbrite data in Bloomerang, and more.
Full transcript:
Diana: Good afternoon, again, and welcome to Bloomerang Academy. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Diana Otero, and I’m the Product Engagement Manager at Bloomerang. You might recognize me from attending Bloomerang Academy classes or listening to our release and help videos. Today we’re talking about “Bloomerang + Zapier: Managing Events with Eventbrite.”
I’d like to introduce our presenter today, Jessie Gilchrist. Jessie is a Zapier certified expert and Bloomerang integrations consultant at Sidekick Solutions. Sidekick Solutions is a Bloomerang partner specializing in system automations for Bloomerang. Sidekick Solutions has been a Bloomerang users since 2013, and most recently was part of the Bloomerang team that launched the Bloomerang Zapier app, which is a key component of today’s webinar. We’re excited to have Jessie here today to share her expertise and explore how you can use the Bloomerang Zapier app with Eventbrite to manage and track special event data. Hi, Jessie. Welcome.
Jessie: Hi, Diana. Thank you so much. And hello everyone who’s on the webinar today. It’s great to be here. Now, before we actually dive into the content of today’s webinar, there may be a lot of questions about covering a webinar, on hosting events or managing events in Eventbrite. And with the current climate, many organizations are either canceling or rescheduling events or potentially even looking at hosting events virtually. So the concepts we’re going to talk about today, with regard to automating the flow of data from Eventbrite into Bloomerang, apply for virtual events as well.
So Eventbrite has a lot of great features for hosting virtual events. And so we just wanted to make sure we added that little plug in there about, you know, we understand the current climate and that the nature of your events might be changing, and the automations that we’re going to showcase today will work, whether you are using Eventbrite for in-person events or for virtual events.
So the goal of our webinar today is to show you how Bloomerang integrations and workflow automation with Eventbrite can streamline your processes, save you time, and reduce effort by automating the flow of event data into your Bloomerang database.
So we’re going to start off by talking about Bloomerang and Zapier, how they work together, and why Zapier integrations are a key feature of your Bloomerang system. We’re going to show you how to configure your Bloomerang database to track special event data, if you aren’t already doing this. And then we’re going to explore and demonstrate how you can use the Bloomerang Zapier app to create donations in Bloomerang for event payments and create interactions for event participation. Now we have demonstrations throughout the webinar today to show you how to set up these automations for your organizations. So don’t worry, we’re going to show you step by step how to set it up yourself.
And as Diana mentioned, feel free to submit any questions during the presentation. We have spaced a few different question and answer breaks throughout the presentation, and then we will open up for more questions at the end.
So let’s go ahead and dive on in. First, we want to start with a quick poll to see how many of you are using Zapier and how many of you are using Zapier with Bloomerang right now. Thank you for watching that poll, Diana. We’ll give a couple of minutes here.
Diana: Yes, thank you, Jessie. We have some responses coming in already. We’d like to know if people are already using Zapier and have Zaps running with Bloomerang or if you’re using Zapier, but not with Bloomerang yet. It looks like 53% have heard of Zapier before but haven’t used it yet. And we have 47% whose first time it is to hear of Zapier today or relatively recently. So it looks like so far we don’t have anyone using Zapier yet. So this is very exciting.
Jessie: Oh, fantastic. Well, that gives us a great place to start off at then and I’ll wait until we close that poll before we move on. Okay. So that feedback is really helpful because the first piece we want to touch on here is kind of a high level overview of what Zapier is and why we believe it’s a key feature of your Bloomerang system.
Now we have done a couple previous webinars on Bloomerang and Zapier for the Bloomerang Academy, so we recommend you going to watch those. There’s a general Bloomerang and Zapier overview that’s more in-depth and then there’s also one specific to Google Sheets as well. So that’s a great resource to look at.
So you might be wondering why we’re talking about Zapier when this presentation is about Bloomerang and Eventbrite. And that’s a fair question. Zapier is a software that enables Bloomerang and Eventbrite to integrate. It’s the middleware that sits between your Bloomerang database and Eventbrite, helping them talk to each other. So at its core, Zapier is automation software. It’s an integration designer that builds integrations with blocks called triggers and actions. And with Zapier, you can build one integration or many. So what this means is that you can automate hundreds of tasks around your Bloomerang system within a single platform.
So we often still get the question of, “Okay, so we understand Zapier now, why get excited about Bloomerang and Zapier integrations?” Well, there’s three main reasons. First and foremost, Zapier was designed for . . . Oh, sorry. First and foremost, Zapier connects to over 2,000 other applications. Any application in Zapier’s directory can be connected to Bloomerang. So Zapier’s directory. Go ahead and get over here. Let me get to my . . . there we go.
So Zapier directory is a list of over 2,000 applications that could be connected with Bloomerang. So you can see it’s an extensive list that you can look through to see what other applications you’re using that you might be able to integrate with Bloomerang. And they have helpful categories over here on the left to help you find the apps that you’re using or that you might want to use. And so this list of apps that’s available on the Zapier platform includes Eventbrite. And so that’s why we are able to integrate that easily with your Bloomerang system.
So the second reason why we’re excited about the Bloomerang Zapier app is because Zapier was designed for anyone to build integrations. You don’t need to know how to code to build Zaps. Anyone can build and maintain a Zap and we’re going to walk through some builds today so that you can get a feel for what that looks like.
And then last, Zapier enables custom integrations, meaning that you aren’t limited to one size fits all workflows, mapping or formatting. You truly can build the integration that is perfect for your organization and your workflows. Now, when it comes to any type of automation, flexibility is especially important because for events, in particular, they come in different formats and approaches. We’re going to show you how you can leverage Zapier’s flexibility to automate an integration between Bloomerang and Eventbrite.
Now before we dive into the specifics for setting up Eventbrite automations, we need to make sure our Bloomerang database is configured to track special event data. So we’re going to launch another quick poll to see how many of you are already tracking special event data in Bloomerang. So if you can respond to the poll and let us know whether you’re tracking special event data on the constituent profile, if you’re using donations or interaction records, or maybe you aren’t tracking special event data yet, so give us a good understanding of where your organization is at right now.
Diana: Thanks, Jessie. We have some respond responses coming in. So far, it looks like 48% are using donations and/or interaction records to track special event data. But we have 37% who aren’t tracking event data in Bloomerang custom fields yet at all. We also have 11% who are not sure where they’re tracking it, but they are tracking it and 4% who are tracking it on the constituent profile only.
Jessie: Perfect. Okay. So that’s really helpful for us to understand. And that feedback’s really useful. Now, we do have a few of you that aren’t tracking special event data in Bloomerang right now, so we’re going to spend a couple of minutes showing how you can configure Bloomerang to track this information. Now, for those of you who are already tracking special event data in Bloomerang, this may, you know, prompt you to maybe make a couple of tweaks to how you’re tracking data, or you may find ways that you can adjust the workflows that we’re going to demonstrate later to match the custom fields that you have set up for your event information right now.
So integrating Eventbrite with Bloomerang starts in your Bloomerang database. Even if you plan to use Eventbrite exclusively for all event-related actions, such as inviting constituents, registering and accepting event payments, communicating with your registrants and tracking their attendance, you will still likely want to add this data into Bloomerang.
So when we’re thinking about how the data should flow between Eventbrite and Bloomerang, we recommend that you kind of think of it in this way. Bloomerang should remain your primary constituent relationship management system and you can still use Eventbrite exclusively for the process of event management. Now, kind of using each of these best in class tools, it does require a transfer of event payments and participation data from Eventbrite to Bloomerang.
So you have that engagement record in your constituent relationship management system. So to do this, we need fields in Bloomerang to track event payments and participation. If you’re capturing ticket purchases or donations with event registrations in Eventbrite, these transactions should be added to Bloomerang as donations.
And so when we talk about categorizing event payments in Bloomerang, there’s a few ways that we’ve identified over the years that works best for logging these event payments. First is that you should have a campaign value name for each unique event. Then set up separate appeals to identify different event-related transaction categories, such as tickets, sponsorships, auction items, perhaps general donations or if you have a paddle raise or a fund-a-need, you know, being able to track those different types of event related transactions can increase your reporting capabilities for your events.
And then you’ll likely want to create custom fields to classify and categorize event payments, as your reporting needs dictate. So perhaps you have different event types or you want to track the order ID from Eventbrite, in order to have that linking reference, that type of information will be logged in those custom fields.
So let’s actually go over to Bloomerang and show what this would look like. So in our sandbox here in Bloomerang, I’m going to go ahead and open a constituent account. And I’m going to add a donation. And this is just so we can highlight the fields on here that we’ve set up for tracking our events.
So as I mentioned, one of the best practices we recommend is having a separate campaign for each of your events. So you can see here that we have a campaign for annual celebration breakfast, for our gala. And then we did a virtual wine tasting. So we have a campaign for each of our separate events so that we can segment on that when we’re creating reports.
Now, in our appeal field, this is where we’re going to track, as I mentioned, those different transaction categories. So we have our auction, general donations, our paddle raise, sponsorships, and then tickets for our event as well. And again, this just allows us to have more segmented reporting if we need to report out on a certain type of transaction from our events.
Now the custom fields that we’ve set up in our sandbox here and that we’re going to demonstrate in the workflows here in a minute, are event type. So our organization or a test organization has three different types of events. So we’ve added this as a custom field to categorize these payments for a specific type of event. And then we have a text field where we can log the Eventbrite order ID. So we have that linking reference between the two systems.
Now let’s talk about how we can track event participation in Bloomerang. So event participation is best tracked on interactions in the constituent’s timeline in Bloomerang. When we’re thinking about logging event participation, there are really three questions that we like to keep in mind.
First is what type of events do you offer? Again, are you doing fundraising events? Do you provide education and training? Do you co-host community events?
We also want to think about if we need to track this specific event that the interaction is for. So do we need to know that someone registered for our annual celebration breakfast or are we, you know, happy with just being able to track that they registered for an event? So identifying whether we also want to track that specific event in that interaction record.
And then we also want to think about which participation statuses do we want to track? Do we want to track if someone was invited, if they registered, if they attended. if they were a no-show? So these questions really identify what type of custom fields we’re going to want to set up on our interactions in Bloomerang to be able to be able to report on that data once we start logging that participation.
So if we go back to Bloomerang, I’m actually going to create an interaction. And you can see that we have set up some custom fields in the event management category. So we’ve set up our participation statuses to track the status of the individual’s participation and what this specific interaction record is for. We have an event name field to select the specific event that the record is for. And then similar to what we had on the transaction or donation record, we have an event type and then a field to track the Eventbrite event order.
So now that we’ve talked about how we could set up our Bloomerang system to track different event payments and event participation. Let’s talk about how we can actually start syncing this information from Eventbrite to Bloomerang. So before we dive into talking about event payments, we want to know what types of events your organization offers. Do you host free events, paid events, or both? Thank you, Diana, for launching that poll.
Diana: Thanks, Jessie. We have a couple responses coming in already. It looks like so far we have 79% are doing a combination of both free and paid events, 12% are doing free events, and 8% of our respondents are conducting paid events.
Jessie: Perfect. Okay. So this next section that we’re going to transition into for those of you that are hosting free events only, bear with us as we’ll get to logging event participation soon. But this first piece that we’re going to talk about is how we can sync event payments from Eventbrite to Bloomerang.
When it comes to getting Eventbrite payments into Bloomerang, each new paid order in Eventbrite, we’ll first find your creator constituent in Bloomerang for the purchaser, then we will use a Google Sheet lookup table to pull in custom coding for this specific event, before creating the donation on the constituent’s timeline for the payment.
Now, if you find the addition of a Google Sheet in this workflow to be a bit intimidating, you can accomplish the same workflow without the Google Sheet lookup step. To do this though, you would need to create a separate workflow for each event you host. And so if you want to design your integration in this more simplified manner of a single workflow for a single event, you can actually use one of Bloomerang’s templates in Zapier.
So if I go back to that Zapier app directory, and I look up Bloomerang, there are pre-built templates between Bloomerang and Eventbrite that you can click on to add to your Zapier account, and then make minor tweaks for the mapping that is specific to your organization. So you can see that we have a template here for creating donations in Bloomerang when new orders are created in Eventbrite. And the participation automations that we’re going to talk about here in a minute, there are templates for those as well. So again, if you want to go the more simplified route of a single workflow per event without the Google Sheet Lookup, using those templates is a great way to start.
Now we are demonstrating the Google Sheet Lookup step in this webinar, as it creates a workflow that is scalable, meaning that you can use a single workflow in Zapier for all of your events. So whether it’s a paid event, a free event, whatever that looks like, you can use the same workflow to log those payments and participation for every event. So you’re going to see that lookup step here when we’re automating the sync of payments as well as later when we talk about syncing participation as well.
Now before we dive into setting up our Zap in Zapier, we want to make sure that this lookup table is created in Google Sheets first. So I already have one set up. But the important thing to have set up when we are creating our lookup sheet is to have our column headers. So we’ve added column headers that represent the data we want to pull into our integration for each event. So for each event that’s creating an Eventbrite, these first two columns here, the event name and the event ID, we need to add these to our lookup table. And so this allows us to look up the specific event and then return the data in that row for that event. So columns A and B are Eventbrite data, and then we manually add in these other columns, and identify the coding that we would want to assign when we’re creating payments or logging participation in Bloomerang.
So this lookup table as I mentioned, is going to be used for syncing event payments and participation. So when we are creating donations in Bloomerang for payments, we’re going to be pulling on these four fields right here, the event type, fund, campaign, and appeal. Now for logging participation only, the fund campaign and a few fields won’t apply. So it’s really only these first two Bloomerang columns here.
So your Eventbrite Lookup or your event lookup table, if you’re using this for both payments and participation, may have certain rows where there isn’t data because it’s either a free event or you’re going to be logging participation only. So it’s important to really make sure you’re adding data in as it’s applicable for that event and for the type of workflows that you’ve set up with your Bloomerang system.
Now since we’ve set up our lookup table, let’s hop over to Zapier and let’s actually set up our Zap. So from our Zapier dashboard, we’re going to click Make a Zap. And we’re going to call this Eventbrite Orders to Bloomerang. Now the workflow in Zapier starts when a new order is submitted in Eventbrite. So that’s our trigger. Zaps start with a trigger, which is an event that happens in one application. And the trigger prompts the integration to run.
So we are going to use Eventbrite’s New Order trigger. So we’re going to select Eventbrite as our app and New Order as our trigger event. Now we need to customize our trigger by selecting our account and then we’re going to select our organization. And our events status, we’re going to set to all because we want order submitted for any of our events to push through this workflow.
Now if you’re designing your workflow to only apply for a single event and are not using the Google Sheet Lookup step, you want to select this specific event in the event drop-down menu. But since we are designing this as a scalable workflow that should work for all of our events, we’re going to leave this field blank so that our trigger will fire for an order from any event.
Now the next step is to test our trigger and generate sample data. This will return orders that were recently created. And so these are samples only and will not run through the integration because they were created before the integration is turned on. Zap triggers run in real time only, so this order that we’re pulling in right here to set up our mapping into tester integration won’t actually process as a live record that pushes through our workflow.
Now once we have our sample data, our next step is to add a filter. And the reason why we’re adding a filter is because orders are created in Eventbrite for both paid and free events. In this workflow, we’re trying to get payments only into Bloomerang as donations. Now, I’m pretty sure all of us would agree that we don’t want to create zero dollar donations in Bloomerang for free events. We only want to create donations for actually paid purchases for paid events. So I’m going to use the Filter by Zapier app. This is one of Zapier’s suite of apps that it makes available. And this allows us to use conditional logic for the workflow to continue or to end if a logic isn’t met.
So in this case, we’re going to pull in the order total, which in Eventbrite is called the Cost Gross Major Value. So we’re going to pull in our Order Total. And then we are going to set our logic operator to greater than, because we want to only continue in our workflow if the cost of the order was greater than zero. So there actually was a paid amount by the purchaser for that order. Now we can click Continue. And this is going to go ahead and test our filter and confirm that with the sample record that we selected that had a purchase amount greater than zero, it would have continued in our workflow, which is what we expected and what we hoped would happen.
Now after we’ve set up our filter, it’s time to add our first action step. And so our first action is going to be to find or create our constituent in Bloomerang. So I’m going to select Bloomerang as my app. And then my action event is actually Find Constituent and I’ll show you here in a minute how we also add on the creating constituent piece into this as well.
I’m going to select my Bloomerang account that’s linked to Zapier. And then the first thing I need to do is identify the type of constituent I’m looking for. So most of the time this is going to be individuals because Eventbrite requires you to enter a first and last name when purchasing a ticket or providing a registration. So we’re going to go ahead and map in from our Eventbrite order the first name of our purchaser and the last name of our purchaser. And so I’m pulling these fields from our trigger, from our new order in Eventbrite and from that sample record that we pulled. Now, depending on how you’ve set up your Eventbrite event, you may be also capturing address and phone number. For the event that we’ve set up for this demonstration, we aren’t capturing that information. So we will use email as the other field for our duplicate search.
So this step is now saying that we are going to search in Bloomerang for an individual with a first name of Roger, a last name of Gilchrist, and an email of jessie@sidekicksolutionsllc.com. Now, if we wanted or needed to use the constituent’s cumulative giving history or household information in a future step, we could choose to include those. For this workflow, this data is not needed. So we’ll leave these fields blank.
Now, you might be wondering what happens if a constituent isn’t found. So, if Roger submits an order in Eventbrite, but he doesn’t have an account in Bloomerang. So this is where the option to create a Bloomerang constituent comes in handy. So we’re going to check this box and it’s going to pull up all the fields for creating a new constituent Bloomerang. So if from the purchaser’s information on the order, we can’t find an existing constituent, the workflow then is going to create a new one.
So similar as we did in the Find field, we are going to map in the data for the purchaser to create a new constituent record if one is not found. So first name, last name. If I leave informal, formal name, envelope name, all blank in recognition, Bloomerang is actually going to automatically populate and generate those for me. So I’m going to go ahead and leave those blank.
But then I’m going to come down to the email field and I’m going to go ahead and map the email address in there so that if it creates a new constituent account for Roger, it’s going to ensure that not only do I have a name on there, but I also have at least one piece of contact information. Now again, if your event is set up to capture a phone number and address as well, you can map those into those fields.
So once we’ve gone ahead and map the fields for creating our constituent, we’re going to click Continue. And then we’re actually going to click Test & Review because we want to actually go and find or create this constituent because it will return a unique ID number for that constituent that we’ll need in a future step. So we’re going to click Test & Review. And this will also confirm that the action is configured appropriately. So you can see that’s showing us our test was successful, and that we found an existing constituent. So I’m done editing that step.
Next, we need to look up the custom coding for this event in our Google Sheet. So I’m going to select Google Sheets as my app. In the action we’re going to use is that we’re going to look up a spreadsheet row. I’m going to select my Google Sheets account. And the file that I’m going to use is located in my drive so I can leave the drive blank. If you have other drives at your organization, you would select the appropriate drive but I’m going to select the worksheet that my lookup table lives in. And then the worksheet within that spreadsheet where my lookup table is located. Like, it’s thinking here for a minute. Let’s try this again. It’s really wanting to think on me here today. Let me try this one more time. Okay. Select my sheet and my worksheet. There we go.
Now, the lookup column is the column in our lookup table that we want to look up by. So we are actually going to look up using the event ID from Eventbrite because this is unique to every event and it kind of future proofs our workflow in case we ever have two events that are named the same in Eventbrite. This ensures that we return the right one.
So I’m going to go ahead and set my lookup column to the Eventbrite event ID. And then from our new order in Eventbrite, from our trigger step, I’m going to come in here and I’m actually going to find my event ID. So in the Eventbrite event ID column, it’s going to look up that row using this event ID from that order. So if I click Continue, and I test this step, it’s going to pull in all the information. So this was for our annual celebration breakfast. And then these columns D through H, these are the columns that contain that custom coding we will want to use in Bloomerang for this specific event.
So now we’re ready to add our final action, which is to actually create the donation in Bloomerang for the event payment. So we’re going to select an action of creating a donation and click Continue. Now to make sure that we add the donation on the correct constituent’s timeline, in this constituent field, we are going to map that unique ID number I was talking about that gets returned from our find create constituent step. We’re going to map that into this constituent field so that it creates this donation on that specific constituent’s timeline.
Now from our trigger, we’re going to go ahead and add the date which in Eventbrite is called Created. That is the order date. So we’re going to add the date. Our method was a credit card payment. We’re going to pull in again our amount of our order and all this right now is pulling from our trigger, our New Order trigger.
But when we get down to Fund Campaign and Appeal, these are fields that we are pulling in from our event lookup table in Google Sheets. So when we’re choosing our value to map here, instead of choosing one of our funds from the drop-down menu, we’re actually going to select Custom. And from our lookup step, this is where we’re going to pull in that column for Fund. And then we’ll do the same thing for Campaign. We’ll choose Custom. And this creates a dynamic workflow that will automatically pull in the appropriate fund, campaign, and appeal for this event, based off of the event that was looked up in that prior step. So we’ll pull all of these in. Okay.
And then I’m going to scroll down to my two event custom fields that we have set up. So event type is similar to our fund, campaign, and appeal, where we’re identifying in our lookup table. So I’ll come to our lookup table step and select that appropriate field, and then our Eventbrite order ID. So this is one from our new order in Eventbrite, I’m going to go ahead and pull in the ID. And this right here is a unique ID number for Rogers’s order. So this creates that linking reference between our Bloomerang and our Eventbrite systems in case I ever need to reference one or the other. So now that we’re done editing, you can come down and click Continue, and we’d be ready to turn on our Zap.
Now, normally, in our webinars, this is the point where we would do a live demonstration, but we don’t want to charge a credit card or enter credit card information live during a webinar. So I actually pushed through a test order from Eventbrite before we started today.
So if I go to Rogers’s account and go to his timeline, we can open the donation right here that is for his event registration. So you can see that we have the amount of his order, the fund, campaign, and appeal were pulled in from our Google Sheet lookup table. It assigned a method of credit card. And then if we scroll down to our custom fields, you can see that our event type pulled in. And that that Eventbrite order ID mapped to this field right here as well. You can see how easy it is to have that data sync over and have all of those, you know, necessary fields populated so you can pull accurate reports.
So, before we move on to entering event participation and attendance from Eventbrite into Bloomerang, let’s take one or two questions. So, Diana, have you had some good questions come up while we’ve been going through here?
Diana: Thanks, Jessie. Everything looks good so far. We’ve been able to answer questions that have come in. So we don’t have any open questions right now. So I think we can continue. And if people have questions, we’ll continue to answer via chat.
Jessie: Perfect. That sounds great. Okay. So the next piece that we’re going to demonstrate is how we can add event registrations and attendance as interactions in Bloomerang. Now, if your organization does not currently use Eventbrite’s check-in feature, the attendance portion won’t apply to you, but logging event registration will likely still be of interest.
When it comes to getting Eventbrite participation into Bloomerang, each new attendee registered or checked in, in Eventbrite will first find or create a constituent in Bloomerang for the attendee. Then we’ll use the same lookup table to pull up custom coding based on a specific event before creating an interaction on the constituent’s timeline.
Now, you’ll likely see here in these workflow diagrams that the workflows for creating an interaction to log event registration and event attendance are nearly identical. So as we walk through how we can build a Zap in Zapier for logging registrations, I’m actually going to point out where variations would occur if you were creating the same workflow to log attendance.
So let’s go ahead and dive on into Zapier. Now, as I mentioned, since we’ve already set up our event or our Google Sheet Lookup table that was used for payments and is also being used for participation, we don’t have to set this up a second time. It’s just making sure that initial setup that the custom fields and custom coding we’d want to use for donations in Bloomerang and for interactions in Bloomerang are both reflected in this worksheet. Oops, go back to Zapier here. Now, I’m just going to click to make another Zap. And this one we’re going to call Eventbrite Registrations to Bloomerang.
Now, this workflow starts when a new attendee is registered in Eventbrite, so I’d select my New Attendee Registered trigger event. Now, if we were building the similar workflow to sync attendance, we’d use the New Attendee Checked-In trigger right here. So these are right next to each other. So for registration, we’re using New Attendee Register, and for attendance we’d use New Attendee Check-In.
Now, I’m going to click Continue. And then same as we did for logging event payments, we’re going to select our Eventbrite account, our organization. I’m going to set my event status to all so any registrations that come in will trigger my integration. And then I’m going to leave event blank as we want this to be a scalable workflow that will work for all of our events. Now again, if you’re making an event-specific workflow without the Google Sheet lookup step, you would simply select the event that your workflow is for in this drop-down menu.
Now I’m going to click Continue and same as what we did for the event payment and New Order trigger, we’re going to go ahead and test our trigger to pull in a sample record. And there we go. We have our sample attendee. And I’m going to click Continue now that we’ve got our sample record.
So the first action step in this workflow for logging registrations is to actually find or create that constituent in Bloomerang. And so this find or create constituent step is actually nearly identical to what we did for event payments. We’re going to select our type. We’re going to map our first name and our last name, and our email address for the registrant.
Now the only difference in this action versus the one we set up for event payments is that the fields that are returned in our New Attendee Registered trigger are for the individual registrant, whereas for the New Order trigger, it’s for the purchaser. So Eventbrite allows you to customize whether you’re capturing, you know, name details for the individuals you’re registering. And so if you’re capturing that data on the individual registrant basis, it’s going to create these interactions for participants or for participation on the timeline of that specific registered constituent, not of the purchaser. So this allows us to create those interactions on the appropriate timeline for this registrant.
Now, once again, we’re going to check the box to create a new constituent if one isn’t found. And we’re going to map the registrant’s first name and last name. And then we’ll scroll down to those email fields again and map that email. So again, if it creates a new account, then it will go ahead and ensure that we have not only a name but also at least one piece of contact information. Okay.
So now that we’ve gone ahead and set up our mapping for creating our constituent, now, you’ll likely notice here in the last step as well that there are a lot of custom fields in our sandbox. If you have other custom fields that your organization uses on the constituent profile and you want to flag registrants in a certain way, if a new account is created, you can go ahead and select those values when it’s creating that new constituent.
So I’m going to go ahead and click Continue. And same as we did when we were creating the step for event payments, we’re going to click Test & Review so that it returns that unique constituent ID number for the registrant that we’ll need here in a future step. Okay. Oops, going to go back to setup. So, now, that we’re triggering on our new attendee registered, we’re finding or creating a constituent.
Now once again, we’re going to look up our event in our Google Sheet. So we’re going to look up our spreadsheet row, select our Google Sheet account. We’re going to choose our spreadsheet, the worksheet within our spreadsheet. And then same as we did for event payments, once again, we’re going to use the event ID as our lookup column and the event ID as our lookup value. So we’re looking up the event by that unique ID number, in case we happen at some point to have multiple events with the same name. This ensures that we return the row for the appropriate event.
So I’m going to click Continue. And then I’m going to test this again to pull in those Bloomerang columns from our lookup table. So we test to make sure we can pull in the full row and all of these details for that record or for that specific event. So now we’ve found or created our constituent. We’ve looked up our custom coding. Now we’re going to create our interaction in Bloomerang for that constituent or for that registrant.
So instead of creating a donation, I’m going to create an interaction, select my Bloomerang account. And once again, instead of selecting a specific constituent from the drop-down menu, I’m going to click Custom. Go to my find or create constituent in Bloomerang step and pull in the ID number for that found or create a constituent. So it creates that dynamic workflow, where we can make sure we’re creating this interaction on the appropriate constituent’s timeline.
Now for the date, if we are doing registrations, the date we want to pull in is going to be created. Now there is a different date field if we are doing attendee check-in and it’s called changed. So if this is the workflow where we’re logging attendance, instead of registration, you’ll want to use changed instead of created. We’re going to go ahead and use created for right now because we are logging registration in this workflow.
Now we get to create a custom subject for the interactions that are created. Now at Sidekick Solutions, we like to start by saying registered and then actually pull from our New Attendee Registered in the Eventbrite trigger, we can pull in the full event name. So it creates a custom subject based off of the status this person has registered. And then it’s going to automatically update and create that interaction with the name of the specific event they registered for.
Now, this is also where a variation could be made if you’re creating an attendance workflow. So, if you’re triggering on New Attendee Checked-In, it may be that you want to set this subject to attended so that it reflects that unique attendance as opposed to a registration. But we’ll leave that again as registered because we are doing a registration workflow right now.
Now, purpose and channels are required fields. So you’ll want to select the values that align best for your organization. Purpose most often will be special event. And channel, your organization may want to choose between website or other. We’re going to choose other for this demonstration. And then another field the organization may want to flag is this initiated by constituent. We’re going to go ahead and set this to true because this initial or this constituent initiated the interaction by registering for our event.
So now that we’ve mapped to our system fields in Bloomerang on the interaction, now we want to map to our four custom fields that we’ve set up on the integration, oh sorry, on the interaction record. And the first one is participation status. And so this is where we want to select whether this workflow is for logging registrations or attendance. And the reason why we’re adding this registered value in a single select field versus only having it in the subject is that the single select field is going to make it much easier for us to report out on registration records for specific events.
Now, event name, this is where we are going to map the event name from our lookup table. So similar to how we did for fund, campaign, and appeal on the event payments workflow, we’re going to pull the event name that we want to use in Bloomerang. We’re going to pull that from our lookup table. We’re also going to pull the event type from our lookup table. So again, we’re selecting Custom, selecting the data that was returned in our test for our lookup spreadsheet row in Google Sheets, and selecting the appropriate column and value for that row. And then once again, we will map the order ID into an Eventbrite order ID field that again serves as that linking reference between our record in Bloomerang and the Eventbrite system. So once we’ve mapped our fields, we can click Continue. And our Zap is ready to turn on for logging registrations.
Now again, the primary differences you would see if you’re creating a workflow for logging attendance would be you’d have a separate trigger. And then you’d do some minor tweaks to the data that you’d enter when you’re creating the interaction. So I have a test event set up here and we’re actually going to register really quickly, and I will show you how that shows up in Bloomerang. So we’re just going to do a free event. And we’re going to go ahead and register here. We’re going to register Stormie Gilchrist with this email. Once I click Register, perfect, for the annual celebration breakfast.
We’re going to hop over to Bloomerang. And if I open Stormie’s account, and we go to her timeline, you can see right here we have our interaction that was created for the 2020 Annual Celebration Breakfast. We have our purpose and our channel. And under event management, we have our participation status of register, our event name, event type, and then the Eventbrite order ID.
Now, if we go back to that timeline, and we check Stormie into the event, I also have a workflow set up to log the event attendance as well that’s live. So I’m going to go to my events in Eventbrite, manage my attendees, and check-in an attendee. Okay. I’m going to find Stormie right here, and I’m going to go ahead and check her in. If we now go back to her account in Bloomerang and refresh her timeline, you can see now that we also have a separate interaction for her attendance. So same type of coding, minor tweak to our subject for logging attendance, and then a change in the participation status to identify that this is an attendance record.
Now the last piece to discuss when it comes to automating between Eventbrite and Bloomerang is how we can report on this data once it’s in Bloomerang. So there’s a long list of special event reports you can create in Bloomerang. But a few of our favorites are all payments for an event using the campaign for the event as our criteria. We could return a list of all ticket purchases for an event using a combination of the campaign and the appeal is that criteria to only pull transactions for those ticket-related purchases for that event. You could pull a list of all of that registrants to take to our event on a spreadsheet to track who attends and then use the check-in feature in Eventbrite post-event to create those attendance records in Bloomerang. And then the last one is constituents who registered for your event but didn’t attend. So this is a great report to see what attrition you may have had from registration to actual attendance.
And so because we can’t recommend this last report enough, I want to hop into Bloomerang real quick and show you how you could set up that report to see who registered but did not attend your event. So I’m going to go to my reports list and create a new constituent report from scratch. And for my inclusion filter, I’m going to want to include constituents who registered so they have a specific interaction. And that specific interaction based off the custom fields we set up has an event name of 2020 Annual Celebration Breakfast.
Not only is their interaction for this specific event, but it also has a participation status of registered. So this is going to pull in any constituent or all constituents who have an interaction with an event name of 2020 Annual Celebration Breakfast and a status of registered. So if I click OK, it’s going to bring my list up. And I have five constituents that meet that criteria.
Now to only show those who didn’t actually attend, I’m going to add an exclusion filter. And it’s going to look nearly identical. We’re going to exclude constituents that have a specific interaction. And that specific interaction that we want to exclude is that it has an event name of that 2020 Annual Community or Annual Celebration Breakfast. But instead of a status of registered, we want to do a status of attended. So our base is we’re going to say, “We want everyone who registered for our event, but we’re going to exclude anyone who actually attended it.” And so once I click OK, it’s going to update my list. And you can see that it leaves me with two constituents who registered for my event but didn’t actually attend it.
Now, we recommend targeting this group with a special communication, highlighting the success of your events, and providing them the opportunity to donate to your organization since they were unable to attend. So it’s a great way to do some post-events follow up and target those individuals who for one reason or another weren’t able to actually attend your events.
To wrap up today’s presentation, I’ll leave you with a few thoughts on the power of Bloomerang integrations with Zapier. We believe Bloomerang is your central system that integration supplement your Bloomerang database. Data entry reporting and automation should start from the lens that Bloomerang is core to your donor management and fundraising technology. Eventbrite supplements your Bloomerang database and extends it. It doesn’t replace it. By syncing the special event data into Bloomerang, you can run meaningful reports on key event metrics and see a constituent’s full engagement with your organization within Bloomerang.
And so the next step is really just getting started. So sign up for Zapier account, there is a discount for nonprofits and there’s a free trial as well as free plans up to certain limits. Once you connect Bloomerang and Eventbrite to Zapier, grab one of the Eventbrite templates and customize it to [match 00:53:49] your workflow and your mapping requirements that are specific to your organization. Then turn your Zap on. Watch it as your task queue and your task history as data flows from Eventbrite to Bloomerang. Resolve any errors and give yourself a big pat on the back for successes.
So thank you again for attending today. My name is Jessie Gilchrist, and my email is shown here on the screen for Sidekick Solutions. My door is always open and we’d be happy to assist you with any of your integration needs and with Eventbrite, especially. We love Eventbrite. It’s near and dear to our hearts. And being able to sync that data between the two systems and minimize double data entry is one of our ultimate goals in life. So, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
And if you’d like to work with for a consultant to set up workflows or develop a custom Bloomerang integration to address a unique use case, whether that be with Eventbrite or another app you’re using, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m going to go ahead and hand it off to Diana for a quick poll before we open up for more questions.
Diana: Thank you, Jessie. I’m going to launch a poll here. We’d like to know if you would like a follow up about consulting services to set up integrations with Bloomerang and Eventbrite. I love everything that we’ve shown here today, as someone who’s helped a lot of our customers set up event tracking, this looks beautiful to me. But if you have more customized needs, please let us know if you would like someone to reach out for consulting services. While we have that poll up, Jessie, can you speak a little bit again as to the benefit of tracking registration and attendance as separate interactions?
Jessie: Absolutely. And that’s a great question, and one we get often. So the real benefit and the real driver for logging separate interactions for registration and attendance is that having that kind of view of the full lifecycle of a constituent’s engagement for an event in the timeline helps you in your cultivation efforts. So you can see, you know, how many people registered but didn’t attend, how many people registered and did attend.
Getting some of those key metrics can help you hone in how you’re approaching your events, how you’re targeting constituents for your events, but then also your development team to be able to see if someone registered for an event but didn’t attend, that will help them in their conversations with prospects, with key constituents and stakeholders. So having that information in multiple interaction records, really, you know, utilizes the timeline in Bloomerang of being able to see the timeline of that engagement that that constituent has had with your organization. Not just a single record saying, “Here’s some participation they had at our event.” But actually seeing, “We invited them, they registered, they attended.” And seeing those separate records in the timeline of that really creates that history of engagement with that constituent.
Diana: Thank you so much, Jessie. Another question that we have is Zapier is, of course, a third-party app. So there’s Zapier, you have Bloomerang and Eventbrite, can you speak to the security of the information that’s getting passed between those apps?
Jessie: Yeah, that’s a great question. So when you are connecting your Bloomerang database or your Eventbrite database with Zapier and we can actually . . . I’ll pop over and show you what this looks like, when you are connecting one of your applications to Zapier . . . I’m actually going to log to one of my other ones here. You go first to the My Apps. So right over here, where we’re clicking Make a Zap, you can click My Apps. And you simply search for, you know, whatever your app is.
So let’s say Bloomerang. And there are authentication procedures specific to each app. So Bloomerang’s app, not only are you required to select which user account you’re logging in as and you’re linking to Zapier, you’re required to grant access. So there’s a different level of authentication for each application. Some use what’s called an API key that you get from your account settings in your app. And these are essentially all just different types of security protocols to ensure that you are linking your own event to Eventbrite, oh sorry, your own accounts to Zapier, that only your data is flowing through your Zapier account. And your Zapier account, as well as, you know, is password protected, has lots of different security protocols.
And Zapier has some great resources outlining the security that they offer on their end in terms of, you know, keeping your data safe, you know, the data flowing from Eventbrite to Zapier, and then from Zapier to Bloomerang. So let me actually . . . I think I can pull up Zapier security. See if I can pull it up here real quick. There we go, Security at Zapier.
So if you want to do some more reading on the different security protocols that Zapier has in place, just type in Zapier security, and it will take you right to a post that they did at the beginning of this year about the different data privacy and account security procedures they have in place, and compliance with different security rules and regulations. So that would be where . . . You know, there’s obviously a lot of information and a lot of different pieces when we’re talking about security. So I would definitely recommend looking at Zapier’s own internal, you know, resources on what their security offerings are.
Diana: Wonderful. Thank you. And if they’re using another event platform, they can or customers can pretty much follow a similar process connecting that event platform to Bloomerang with Zapier, correct?
Jessie: Yes, so as long as the other event platform has an app on Zapier. So if we go back to the Zapier apps directory, what I would recommend is looking up your event platform that you use, and if it does have an app in Zapier, then yes, you can follow relatively the same type of structure to create a workflow. Obviously, the triggers that are available in that event platform may be slightly different, in terms of it might not have exactly New Order, New Attendee Registered, New Attendee Checked-In but likely has its own triggers for you to then, you know, trigger off of those types of events in that app. But as long as it has an app in Zapier, you should be able to build similar workflows and follow the same type of logic.
Diana: Wonderful, thank you so much. So we’re using Eventbrite as a sample today. But as Jessie mentioned, you can search for other apps that you already use in Zapier, and if it’s in there, you could potentially connect that to your Bloomerang database. You don’t have to go through Eventbrite. And if you are using such apps, I’m sure Jessie and her team would be happy to help if you need more customization and need more guidance, in terms of setting all that up. Right, Jesse?
Jessie: Absolutely. We’re happy to help. We love apps. We love automation. We love the Bloomerang Zapier app. So any use case even, you know, some platforms, if they don’t have a Zapier app, sometimes there are other ways that we can automate them with Bloomerang. So, if there’s another app that you’re using that doesn’t show up in Zapier’s list, you can always reach out to us as well. You can reach out to me at jessie@sidekicksolutionsllc.com, and we can investigate if there are other ways we can automate the flow of that data into Bloomerang.
Diana: Thank you so much, Jessie. And thank you everyone for joining us today. We at Bloomerang are very excited for the Zapier integration. And we’re very excited to see where all of you take it. As I mentioned today, we talked about Eventbrite, but there’s over 2,000 different apps, and we’ve only just scratched the surface of what you can do with Bloomerang and Zapier. We hope that you can find a way to automate your processes and work better with Bloomerang using Zapier. So thank you again, everyone. Thank you, Jessie. Thank you, Jeff, for helping to answer a question. And I hope everyone has a wonderful day.
Jessie: Thank you, Diana. Thanks everyone for attending. It was great to talk with you all today and we hope to showcase more integrations in the future.
Diana: Thanks, bye.
Jessie: Bye.
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